Bernard Werber is one of the most famous author in Korea. How much? He is even more famous in Korea than France, his home country. And I can't believe that I'd not known this great author for 16 years.
The title is "3rd Humanity", and I'd finished volume one during this winter break. After I started reading, I literally swallowed this book in 3 hours because I just couldn't stop reading The whole plot can be explained with three sentences. 1. We are not the first mankind. 2. There was mankind before us. 3. There will be after us, in totally different form. The story begins with an archeologist discovering a giant human bone buried underneath the Antartica. He believes that there was a mankind that was different from us in size, and they were 10 times larger than us. The first mankind lived in a island, and they constructed a highly-evolved society, and they made a miniature version of them, which is us, the current version of mankind. Eventually, the giant humans get extinct because of a gigantic tsunami after a collision of an astroid, and only the miniature version mankind survives because they were expelled from the island for being rebellious to the first mankind. Now, the second mankind are all over the Earth, and their world is rapidly developing and ruining the Earth at the same time. They even succeed in making a new mankind that is one tenth a size of them. At the same time, Earth is preparing for another sweep on mankind.
The authors' imagination is beyond any expectation. It is ridiculous of thinking there would be another mankind before us, but by the authors' plausible explanation and tightly written plot, all seems to make perfect sense. This book is definitely one of my favorites and I really want to read the next volume as soon as possible. I liked the way sentences were written, but because this is a translated version, I would say I like the translator's way of writing. So, it might be hard to recommend English readers this book because of the author's writing techniques. Maybe this is the reason why Bernard Werber is strangely popular in Korea. Nevertheless, I would recommend this book to all my friends and teachers for the author shows his unlimited imagination that would surprise you.