Baxter? I hardly...wait, that doesn't make any sense...

Okay, back to the main business. Stephen Baxter's latest, Transcendent. Back a few years ago, when he was writing the Manifold series, I described Baxter as a talented writer of Nihilist Science Fiction. Which does hold, although more for that series and some of his earlier-but-non-Xeelee work than for this series. My current view of Baxter is that he is excellent at turning extremely stupid ideas into good science fiction.

In Manifold one of those ideas is in fact one of the canonical 'so silly you need to be extremely well-educated to believe it'; that of the Carter Catastrophe. In his latest cycle of books (All three Destiny's Children Books so far; Coalescent, Exultant, and Transcendent, and also the stand-alone before that, Evolution), the idea is that human populations are likely to, under certain fairly likely evolutionary pressures in evolution-friendly timescales, lose their big brains and linguistic intelligences that go with it.

(The problem with said idea is that even if one does accept arguendo that the community or species would be better off without making the metabolic investment in big, intelligent brains, you still can't get there because the individuals are the unit on which evolution is going to happen, and brains are just too darn useful in intra-species competition to give up on that scale. The arms race between the capacity to lie and the capacity to detect lies is pretty muhc irrevocable locked-in, and so human breeds are more likely to die off under the weight of their antler-like brains than to back down. At least when Vonnegut used the same concept he had a plausible bottleneck event to let it happen...)

Still, good science fiction, though.