2005 books

[peteryoung]

Jack London, Before Adam, 1907
In the absence of the Bison ‘Frontiers of the Imagination’ edition this handsome Hesperus edition came easily to hand, but it has little in the way of appended text with which a reader can put the story into context. When London wrote Before Adam the synthesis that is sociobiology was not to appear for another sixty years, yet he was able to make a credible attempt at imagining the earliest identifiably human societies, at the dawn of their use of tools and fire. London was an avid and well-read socialist so for him this was probably a natural extension of his beliefs into imaginative territory. Told as the continuous dream of an American boy who can tap into his racial memories, the story is, much like some of his characters, an atavism, a technique he engaged in liberally and which gave some of his stories the feel of SF.