Evolution (Stephen Baxter) (novel)

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Evolution is a science fiction book by author Stephen Baxter. The book follows 565 million years of human evolution, from shrewlike mammals 65 million years in the past to the ultimate fate of humanity (and its descendants, both biological and non-biological) 500 million years in the future.

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.Template:Sf-book-stub