Sebastian Faulks: ‘Homo sapiens is a very odd creature’

As a novelist, you write about what puzzles, inspires and keeps you awake at night. It feels like a one-off adventure and it’s only in retrospect, years later, that you can see a pattern or a link between different books.

My first half dozen novels look like an attempt to locate myself and my generation in history. I grew up in the 60s, when the world wobbled on the edge of mutually assured destruction, and as an adult, I was curious to know how we had come to that pass. After writing them, and in particular Birdsong (1993), I came to the conclusion that Homo sapiens is a very odd creature.

My next half dozen novels, I now think, were therefore concerned less with who we are  than what we are. In Human Traces (2005), I wrote about the early days of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, roughly from 1890 to 1920. The debate was between those who believe our mental frailties have a biological and/or genetic base and those who think they are shaped by the individual’s experience. This needed some research into genetics and the nature of human consciousness.

Then, in about 2010, it emerged that we had bred with Neanderthals. My own genome, according to a commercial spit test, is 3.7 per cent that of another species. Then new humans were discovered, on Flores and in a Denisovan cave. It was intriguing to picture these different versions of the human strolling round the Earth together, even if their numbers were small and widely scattered. What made them human in taxonomic or philosophical terms? Are there other, even more interesting or closely related, species waiting to be unearthed?

It seemed such a shame that this fascinating diversity had been reduced to a single surviving expression: us. Suppose natural selection had worked differently and that if there had to be only one survivor of the genus Homo, it had a different admixture of genes, was less fecund, less driven, less destructive and better attuned to the planet.

Now imagine that with sapiens extinct, this last surviving human, similar but different from us, had stumbled one day on a pure sapiens archaeological site. Smaller brains, they’d note, physically a bit weak, but ferocious breeders. And hang on, what’s this? A hecatomb of bodies, millions of them, but killed neither for ritual nor sustenance. Why? And what’s this? A bit of matter rescued from a dead star a billion light years away. Cleverer than we thought, then. And here… The tall spire of a building. Did they hope to somehow climb into the sky to see their ever-absent gods?

The novel that emerged from all this, The Seventh Son, is set a little way into the future, though the science it relies on is all practicable now. It’s a serious book about what sort of creatures we are; I had never expected it to be so insistently comic or to end almost like a thriller in a chase across the barren wilds.

The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, out now) is the latest pick for the New Scientist Book Club. Sign up and read along with us here