West of Eden: you can judge a book by its cover [015W]

I have found that one could do far worse than perusing the r/CoolSciFiCovers subreddit and picking things to read at random. This week I chose West of Eden based on its outstanding cover art, and it turned out to be a very enjoyable read.

The premise is that the impact causing the mass extinction of non-avian dinosaurs never occurred, and neolithic Man unknowingly shares the Earth with a very advanced and highly stratified female-dominated race of intelligent lizards whose males have two penises (don’t ask me why! apparently this is common in nature). When climate change threatens both the human and lizard civilisations, they are forced to migrate and, in doing so, discover each other’s presence and clash violently.

Some aspects of the story are a little old-fashioned—I barely need to discuss the instinctive disgust and “racial hatred” felt by the humans and the lizards for each other, but the narrative ultimately challenges this feeling by revealing each culture to be civilised in its own terms, if not in terms that would lead to a cooperative multi-species stewardship of the Earth.

The initial inability of the intelligent lizards to fathom that the “filthy ustuzou”—the lizard phrase for humans and other mammalian creatures—may be sentient and even conscious entities of moral force is challenged by their experience, and by a religious extremist trend within their society that recognises the intrinsic value of all forms of conscious life. In a time where current science continues to reveal, bit by bit, the overconfident ignorance and moral wickedness of those who have insisted that the “lower forms of life” on our own Earth are without sentience, value, moral force (the octopus, the elephant, etc.), it is hard to read this without thinking about our own “filthy ustuzou” and the future consequences of our vicious behaviour toward them.