"James P. Hogan - Giants 4 - Entoverse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hogan James P)

Entoverse -- James P. Hogan

(Version 2002.07.25 -- Done)


To Elenor Wood, whose idea it was -- and because a good agent deserves to be
mentioned in the final product.


PROLOGUE

It had taken until the fourth decade of the twenty-first century for humanity
to get its act together and learn to resolve or live with its differences, and
begin the migration outward as one species toward the stars. In the process,
many of the prejudices and irrationalities that had underlain the strife of
ages at last withered or were swept away. The core of beliefs that survived
would form a solid foundation for the continuing expansion of human knowledge
-- for surely with the wealth of modern observational data and the
sophistication of experimental method, the universe had little left to offer
in the way of further reserves of facts to seriously challenge them.
Or so, for a short, comforting while, it seemed.
And then a series of unforeseen and utterly unprecedented events not
only added a new dimension to the history of the Solar System, but forced a
complete rewriting of the origins of humankind itself.
When Man, under the thrust of the revitalized, international space
program that arose from redirection of defense industries after the fading of
the Soviet empire, finally reached the regions of the outer planets, he
discovered that others had been there before him and had surpassed all that he
had achieved. Twenty-five million years in the past, a civilization of eight-
foot-tall, benevolently disposed giants -- called the Ganymeans, after the
first traces of them came to light on Ganymede, largest of the Jovian moons --
had flourished on a planet Minerva, occupying the position between Mars and
Jupiter.
And more astonishing still, while generations of work by
anthropologists, geneticists, comparative anatomists, and others had correctly
reconstructed the abrupt transformation responsible for the emergence of Homo
sapiens from an arena of early-hominid contenders, it turned out that --
understandably, in the circumstances -- they had assigned the event to the
wrong place. Modern Man hadn't evolved on Earth at all!
Despite Minerva's greater distance from the Sun, an effective natural
greenhouse mechanism had maintained generally cool but Earth-like conditions
there. But by the time the Ganymean civilization reached its advanced stage,
the climate was altering in a direction that their constitution would have
been unable to tolerate. As was to be expected, their own voyages of discovery
across the early Solar System brought them to Earth, and from there they
transported back to Minerva numerous plant and animal forms representative of
life on late-Oligocene, early-Miocene Earth in connection with large-scale
bioengineering researches aimed at combating the problem. These efforts were
in vain, however, and the Ganymeans migrated to what later came to be called
the Giants' Star, some twenty light-years from Earth in the direction of the