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Ugly Little Boy, The (1992)
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Fiction Review by The Gravedigger
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01.01.06
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Authors: Isaac Asimov & Robert SilverbergIn the near future a company called Stasis Technologies has figured out how to bring objects back in time to the present day. They've brought back a small, chicken-looking dinosaur, and now plan to bring back a human from 40,000 years ago-a Neanderthal child.Miss Fellowes, the nurse who is hired to care for the child, names him Timmie and quickly develops an attachment to this strange-looking kid. His head is shaped differently, he's developing those classic Neanderthal brow-ridges over his eyes, and he's very compactly/squattly built. Because of the physics involved in transporting someone from the past to the present, the Neanderthal boy has to stay within a type of temporal bubble, which contains his living quarters. Even the dirt and plants that were transported with him have to stay in the rooms. If he leaves them the energy expenditure would be so great as to drain all the nearby cities of power for at least a day. The novel goes back and forth between the displaced child to his Neanderthal tribe, which is searching for a new home on the Ice-Age tundra they inhabit. 'The Others' (Modern humans) are encroaching on their land and they soon find they have nowhere to go. The two stories eventually merge when Miss Fellowes decides to go back in time with Timmie, as after several years of his captivity he's is psychologically a modern human and would be unable to survive by himself. She could not bear to leave him to this fate.THE UGLY LITTLE BOY is a good time-travel novel, sort of a cross between the movie ICE MAN and the novel CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR. Recommended.
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Rating: nan out of 10.0 - votes cast total
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