Wipeout

One of my favourite authors is Stephen Baxter. He writes excellent big-scale hard science fiction. He does however seem to have two obsessions:

1. Destroying the Earth and/or the Human Race
2. Monkeys

Most of his books seem to feature one or both of these themes. Perhaps his crowning achievement on this front was Evolution which not only featured more monkeys than you could shake a banana at, it also documented the eventual extinction of all monkeys, humans and ultimately all life itself.

I think he maybe needs a hug.

I've just read Titan which was written about ten years ago. At the time, it was science fiction. Now, the first half is strictly alternate history, though with some uncanny parallels with actual history such as a second Shuttle disaster on re-entry. The second half of the book is still set in the future (for now). It's a tale of a last ditch attempt to get a mission to Saturn's moon, Titan, to keep the space dream alive and to also investigate evidence from the Cassini probe that there could have been ammonia-based life out there.

Even in this story of human hardship and survival (it's a six year, one way trip to Titan) Baxter can't resist just casually extincting the whole human race (apart from the few guys in space). One page there are billions of humans happily getting on with their lives. The next, Bam, all gone. Just because he can, and because he likes doing it. And possibly because he hadn't managed to shoehorn any monkeys into the book.

If anyone knows of an author who's committed human-race-icide more times than Baxter, I'd love to know.