John Sawyer's Hominids. Unfortunately, it didn't STAY damn good. It had a really promising premise--parallel world where Neanderthals evolved to be the sapient human species, which collides with our world and Hijinks Ensue.
I liked his worldbuilding an awful lot, and forgave his obvious wish to make the Neanderthal world a utopia (I can't argue--I have a shameless utopia world too), but the characters fell a little flat. The woman (from our world) who got to start out the book on such an upbeat note was a scientist with weird religious reservations pastede on yey, like a bad version of Mary Malone from His Dark Materials, and Sawyer didn't seem to think she could grapple with moral and societal issues unless they had affected her personally. So her story wound up kinda cobbled together.
I'm not sure if I'll bother reading the rest of the trilogy at this point. He should have published this book as one of those oversize popup ethnologues that seem to have suddenly gotten popular after Dragonology.
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I liked his worldbuilding an awful lot, and forgave his obvious wish to make the Neanderthal world a utopia (I can't argue--I have a shameless utopia world too), but the characters fell a little flat. The woman (from our world) who got to start out the book on such an upbeat note was a scientist with weird religious reservations pastede on yey, like a bad version of Mary Malone from His Dark Materials, and Sawyer didn't seem to think she could grapple with moral and societal issues unless they had affected her personally. So her story wound up kinda cobbled together.
I'm not sure if I'll bother reading the rest of the trilogy at this point. He should have published this book as one of those oversize popup ethnologues that seem to have suddenly gotten popular after Dragonology.