Book Reviews: Re-Created Extinct Hominids

 The Ice Ghost, by Kathleen O'Neal Gear (DAW)

The Ice Orphan, by Kathleen O'Neal Gear (DAW)

I previously reviewed the first of the “Rewilding Reports” novels (The Ice Lion) and I liked it (The Ice Lion, by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, DAW). The set-up is appealing: In the far future, an attempt to halt the Earth’s runaway warming resulted in a new, apocalyptic Ice Age with glaciers three miles high and a poisonous slime, “zyme” covering the oceans. As the planet descended into this frigid nightmare, the last scientists recreated species that had survived earlier Ice Ages: dire wolves, helmeted musk oxen, cave lions, and extinct, archaic human species like the Denisovans, Neanderthals, and Homo erectus. Remnants of the previous civilization persist in myths (about the godlike Jemen = G-men), an enigmatic scientist with an artificially extended lifespan, and a quantum computer spiraling into loss of function.

Some of the things I liked best about the first volume are here in the subsequent books. Foremost is the humanity, culture, and sensitivity, and poetic imagery of the pre-human characters. We moderns tend to regard our ancestors as dim-witted and lacking in social graces, although recent discoveries reveal such markers of cooperative culture as care for the injured and burial of the dead long before H. sapiens came along. Gear’s characters, although having much smaller brains, are nonetheless resourceful, compassionate, and thoughtful. The Dog Soldiers (H. erectus) may have had small, sloping skulls, but their understanding of ethical issues, not to mention their literacy and reverence for books, marks them as anything but “primitive.” In fact, the most advanced of the three species, the Rust People Neanderthals, are the most violent.

The Ice Ghost and The Ice Orphan continue the adventures of Sealion People (Denisovan) Lynx and Quiller, and members of Quiller’s family, as they struggle against an increasingly hostile terrain and new enemies. Legends mix uneasily with prophecies and dreams, as none of the pre-human species draws precise differences between poorly understood history, inspiration, and the visions born of mental illness or hallucinogens. The disintegrating quantum computer, called “Quancee,” is undoubtedly real, as is the reanimated Jemen general bent on destroying the computer’s autonomy and changing it into a weapon, and the brutal Rust People (Neandertal) shaman whose visions drive him to invade the Jemen stronghold and reawaken the ancient ruler. Who, of course, has an agenda of her own.

These next two volumes have many of the strengths of the first, including smooth prose, sympathetic characters, innovative world-building, and wonderful physical descriptions. The characters are portrayed through their experiences so that only occasionally are their physical appearances important. What matters is the quality of their characters, their courage, compassion, leadership, and honesty.

Each of the three books centers on a different but related quest, and therein lies not only the charm of the series and the independence of each installment, but a flaw in the latter two. The first volume of a series has a lot of work to do, establishing not only viewpoint characters, their goals and conflicts, but the world itself. In this case, the world’s history is critical to the story. To her credit, Gear does not bash us over the head with pages of exposition and backstory. History is gleaned from hints here and there, and the understanding of the characters. In this, Gear does a great job, even when historical facts have become distorted or even erased with time and the demands of survival in an increasingly perilous
environment.

The problem I experienced was that, compared with the first volume (The Ice Lion), what comes next felt lightweight. They seemed more like novellas in the scope of the plot, stories fleshed out with too many repetitive descriptions and inconsequential or trivial events.

My second problem arose from the conflation of imaginary and real events. In books of this type, there’s an expectation that mysterious elements will be revealed (as opposed to fantasy, where magic need not have any relationship to the laws of physics), that the reader will be able to put together the pieces and figure out what the age-warped technology, historical events, and so forth really are. And how much were real technology, events, and so forth, versus how much the imaginative, often superstitious interpretation. Gear’s characters treat superstition as just as real as tangible physical articles, but we the readers lack the clues to distinguish them. Perhaps those clues will be revealed in a future volume. Alas, I for one found two novels too long to be befuddled. This was made worse by hand-waving technology, such as near-immortality antiaging tech, a way for the genetically modified prehumans to receive telepathic communications from a computer, and the dream quest of Quiller’s adolescent son, which left me wondering if he was spiritually “transformed” or actually dead.

I continue to recommend the first volume of this series for all the reasons cited above. As for the rest, other readers may find the same delight in them. The series looks to be continuing. As they say, “YMMV.”

Romancing De-Extinction

I was – note the past tense – going to write a post about re-entry after Covid-19 vaccination and how awesome it was to give my younger daughter a hug after over a year, but then I saw this story from Science magazine and could not resist.

Did you ever wish you could see a living dinosaur? I sure did! (I still do…but from a safe

distance.) As a child I loved movies with stop-action animation of dinosaurs, like the original King Kong or the Ray Harryhausen movie, The Valley of Gwangi. In high school I wrote a short novel about two teenagers and their horses who discover a hidden valley where dinosaurs still roam. Jurassic Park and its sequels blew me away, the movies even more so than the novels. The novels were longer on explanation, the movies far more powerful in vividness. The moment when Alan Grant, upon learning that Professor Hammond has created a T. rex and almost faints, that’s how I would have felt. Great acting and directing aside, these books and films spoke to a universal or near-universal human longing to see amazing charismatic animals from the distant past.

The earlier stories, at least the ones I read and watched, made no effort at a scientific basis for the present-day existence of prehistoric animals. It was all “Land That Time Forgot” hand-waving. Crichton took a different tack: dinosaurs did not persist in some undiscovered corner of or beneath the Earth: humans re-created them using DNA preserved in amber. We’ve been able to recover DNA from Pleistocene mammals, but never anything as old as 65 million years. Many scientists doubt that DNA could survive that long, no matter how preserved. When an animal dies, its DNA begins to decay. A 2012 study on moa bones showed that genetic material deteriorates at such a rate that it halves itself every 521 years. This speed would mean paleontologists can only hope to recover recognizable DNA sequences the past 6.8 million years. In 2020, Chinese Academy of Sciences paleontologist Alida Bailleul and her colleagues proposed they had found a chemical signature suggestive of DNA in a 70 million year old baby hadrosaur fossil. If confirmed, this material would be so degraded into components, not sequences. It’s also possible the chemical signature was that of bacteria, not the dinosaur itself.

The Siberian permafrost that has yielded mammoth DNA is about 2.6 million years old, but freezing turns out to be a pretty good preservative of DNA. Scientists have now been able to sequence DNA from extinct mammoths 1.2 million years ago. That’s a world record. The previous record, in 2013, was from a 750,000-year-old horse. The new study includes DNA from three species of mammoth from three time periods (1.2 million, 1 million, and 700,000 years ago) and there are all kinds of reasons to be excited about it, not just the age but the evolutionary relationships and a previously unknown type.

Which brings us to the question we’re all asking: Once we’ve sequenced this DNA, whether from mammoths, saber-toothed cats, ground sloths, or whatever – what do we do with it? What we can do now is better understand the evolution and relationships of these amazing animals. What popular media want, however, is to use the material to create living extinct species. The process of de-extinction can proceed either by cloning – taking material from a recently extinct species and replicating it – or by using ancient, fragmentary DNA. We’ve got a long way to go with either technique. Many extinct species lack contemporary surrogates to carry the artificially created embryos to term. For others, suitable habitat no longer exists (really? Where would you turn a giant ground sloth loose? A saber-toothed cat? Or would these animals exist only in the unnatural environment of zoos?) Back in 2009, Spanish scientists cloned a newly extinct Pyrenean ibex, although the clone died within a few hours of birth.

There are, however, a few good candidates for which possibly viable DNA sources exist. Species like the passenger pigeon and Carolina parakeet might fare well, given the human responsibility for their disappearance, although they might turn out to be temporally invasive species.