I Read Books: Manifold: Origin

Origin

Reid Malenfant, a new version of him, has just got the news that he’s being grounded as an astronaut. He and his wife Emma Stoney are on a goodwill tour in Africa; he flies the two of them in a T-38 supersonic trainer jet to their next stop. On the way they get reports of UFOs; diverting to observe them they find strange blue rings in the sky, with people falling out. Caught in turbulence, Malenfant ejects; Stoney ejecting a second later is swept into the ring. And now the moon has changed, become huge and red, the tides causing the seas to wreck coastal lands. Yet there’s more; this new red moon has an atmosphere and life.

On the Red Moon Stoney and other survivors fall in with a group of hominids, Runners as they are called, people equivalent to homo erectus. Amongst them is Fire, a viewpoint character, so called as he is the one who carries fire from place to place. In his narration sometimes his hands and his mouth and his legs do things. And sometimes he has to make them do things. His consciousness is clearly different, in many ways more limited compared to homo sapiens. His memories and problem solving weak; his instincts strong. They use English words, but their language is barely that, questions and answers and explanations not part of their lives.

On Earth Malenfant lobbies to explore the Red Moon, to fly in space again. There’s opposition, mostly bureaucratic, with resources being used to try and deal with the floods and destruction. He’s advised and helped by new versions of characters from the previous two books, most notably a young Japanese astronaut Nemoto. Amongst other things DNA evidence of the bodies that fell from the blue rings reveal they are extinct hominids. He and Nemoto are sent, one of the things that’s used to make the mission possible is Malenfant’s lost wife, the romantic story giving people something to believe in.

Stoney discovers there are other hominids on the Red Moon, as well as the Runners on the plains. In the forests are Elves, Australopithecus, and in the green heart the nutcracker men (possibly Gigantopithecus or similar). Life for her changes when she comes across Hams, neanderthals (also called Bar-Bars by another character). Unlike the silent version in Manifold: Space, these ones talk, or chatter, mostly about their social lives. They don’t do abstract thought. Their best toolmaker, Joshua (they all have biblical names) does do some abstract thought; he sees things that aren’t there, putting back together a broken stone, seeing faces and animals in pictures and decoration.

Malenfant and Nemoto have some disasters when they land, attacked by hominids. They meet up with McCann, who is English, one of the two groups of homo sapiens in the region. He comes from another Earth, one where the moon was larger and the seas difficult to cross. Not until the age of iron ships did they discover the new world, where they encountered hominids like the Hams. They were enslaved, used as a labour force. At first it seems that they have repeated this pattern in their compound. It turns out to be more symbiotic than that, the Hams labouring and humouring the English dress and manners in shifts, in return for processed food and beer.

There are another homo sapiens group, from a somewhat more primitive period than Malenfant or the English, known as the Zealots. They are aggressive and their expansion, under the leadership of Praisegod, is about to be accelerated.

This acceleration is in the form of yet another hominid species. The Red Moon shifts universes again, and finds itself in orbit around the Banded Earth. This is inhabited by a highly advanced species, briefly noted as homo superior*, the colloquial name given them by the Zealots is the Daemons. Big, gorilla-like and with a mastery of matter and non-matter, their world is thrown into chaos by the arrival of the Red Moon, destroying the Farms of several lineages. The Banded Earth had no moon at all, a constant wind and constant cloud cover. Constant cloud cover – how do they understand the universe?

When Manekoto was two years old she had been shut in a room with a number of other children, and a handful of objects; a grain of sand, a rock crystal, a bowl of water, a bellows, a leaf, other things. And the children were told to deduce the nature of the universe from the contents of the room.

There is a higher concentration of oxygen on the Banded Earth; the Daemons think quickly, speak efficiently, and live about thirty years. Still, seems cruel.

Of course the results of such trials varied… But most children, working by native logic, quickly converged on a universe of planets and stars and galaxies. Even though they had never seen a single star.

Stars were trivial mechanisms, after all, compared to the simplest bacterium.

The Daemons think and understand in a manner superhuman to homo sapiens. Yet they have their limits too; one, who gives up her name in mourning for the lost farm, allies with the Zealots to build empire, something foreign to the Daemons who are content to stay at home and maximise the use of their Farms.

Manekoto comes to a different conclusion, though she too has to change. At a couple of points Nemoto and Stoney talk about hominids as half-evolved and inferior and Manekoto disagrees. The Nutcrackers are no more half-evolved than any of the others for their niche. And though that’s unstable (the World Engine is winding down and the Red Moon itself changing) that was true of all of them as well. Not superior or inferior, but different.

I regret to say that I am again putting off a summing up, in this case for the short story collection of related stories to this series. So let me just say that after near future space adventures in Time and near-to-far-future space adventures in Space, there’s much less space adventure. On the surface this is a planetary romance, with our hapless yet resourceful heroes learning about and trying to survive on the Red Moon. The speculation though is in how other viewpoints – Joshua the Ham, Fire the Runner, Shadow the Elf, Manekoto the Daemon – react to this world. How their very different consciousness and ways of existing in the world are portrayed. Somewhat flawed, yet interesting in their own way.

Read This: Hominid adventures and some answers as to what the Manifold of the title might actually be
Don’t Read This: Spends a lot of time hanging out with ape-men only to be brought to an abrupt end by superior ape-men

* See later in the review for the difficulties this name covers up