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Evolution (stephen Baxter) (novel)




The protagonist in ''Evolution'' is evolution itself. The book follows the hero's course as it shapes surviving pre-humans into tree dwellers, remoulds a group that drifts from Africa to a (then much closer) New World on a raft formed out of debris, and confronting others with a terrible dead end as ice clamps down on Antarctica.

The stream of DNA runs on elsewhere, where ape-like creatures in North Africa are forced out of their diminishing forests to come across grasslands where their distant descendants will later run joyously. At one point, hominids become sentient, and go on to develop technology, including a Universal Constructor machine that goes to Mars and multiplies, and in an act of Global Ecophagy consumes Mars by converting the planet into its descendents.