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Mandrill
Across the bottomless chasm of time, they gazed hypnotically at each other - the captive mandrill, last wild species of baboon on earth, and the fanatic scientists at the controls of his monstrous 1990s computer. Out of some deathless memory, could the mandrill reveal the macabre truth of man's origins?
Then, from the computer's voice unit issued a stream of flat, fitted-together words.
And from the mists of prehistory, the mandrill began to speak!
Then, from the computer's voice unit issued a stream of flat, fitted-together words.
And from the mists of prehistory, the mandrill began to speak!
- GenresScience Fiction
208 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published July 1, 1975
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 20, 2026
The Mandrill just isn’t good, folks. Not worth any kind of substantial review. The first act had enough intrigue to grab my attention, but by the final chapters I was reading this almost entirely out of spite.
July 6, 2012
This book was alright, but there really wasn't enough here to be really entranced with. I read it in an afternoon, and probably would have forgotten it totally if I didn't write down everything I read. But I did read it in a single afternoon, so it wasn't boring, there just wasn't anything that really stuck with me.
March 3, 2013
On the cover it reads "The compulsive fascination of Chariots of the Gods! A chilling novel of man's space-born origins" and that is exactly what the reader gets with Mandrill -- ancient aliens straight from Von Danikan. Sadly, this 1975 book has not aged well.
The initial premise is actually pretty compelling. A group of scientists have been working with primates in a sort-of post-catastrophe Earth, though what happened between the 70s and 90s to cause such great problems on Earth while still supporting a robust space program is not explained. In this future, primates are able to be programmed like robots into "primadrones", which is a big industry. Our main characters work in a research facility that develops new primadrone technology, and the main character, Tai-Po, is a talented technician fresh out of school working for a visionary named Luther. They have been working on models that will allow interpretation and translation of primate facial movements into English, so that we might converse with them. They have in their possession possibly the last troop of mandrills caught from Africa, and are close to a breakthrough.
The first half of the book is an interesting tale of politics, as some people want to split up the troop so they can use the mandrills for their own research. Luther and Tai-Po are making great progress with their program, and they both have their own unique struggles against their superiors and the mysterious woman, Silver. But then, as the translations become clearer, Luther starts getting obsessed with the project, spending days in an isolation chamber 'speaking' with the Alpha male mandrill. This is where the book starts to go downhill, up until this point I considered it a solid 3-3.5 star tale.
I believe part of what the author was attempting to show was Luther's descent into madness as he took his work too seriously, and honestly, when done well I do like seeing a character fall apart and crack under pressure. However, instead of being an excellent demonstration of madness, the scenes near the end where Luther was sharing his ideas in front of the board and in front of Silver were just silly. Luther is supposed to be a behavioral biologist, and there are easily 20 pages or so of creationist/intelligent design arguments made by him.
The fact is that even if their Ancient Aliens premise is true and humanity was the result of alien intervention, it wouldn't "make a monkey out of Darwin." Almost all the arguments Luther makes have been horrifically torn to pieces, many of them were invalid even in 1975. However, it's really hard to tell from a current perspective which claims are products of their time -- we've found Ida and dozens of other primate relative-ancestors, we've learned that Neanderthals and other prehistoric ancestors weren't just 'hairy ape men' and had culture, we've mapped the genome, as well as that of dozens of other organisms to determine with relative certainty that all mapped organisms so far have been related. We also know that chimpanzees are closest to humans of the modern primates, so why Mandrill would focus on the title creatures for "race memory" rather than a more closely related primate is a little confusing. It's actually stated several times in the book that Mandrills are the closest relation. Reading the pages and pages of outdated information and arguments was mind numbing, and at around page 200 the book had one star from me. Even if we forgive some of this as coming from a time before the Personal Genome Project and Evo-Devo, Luther just takes everything the mandrill says at face value right from the start. He's skeptical for about five seconds before basically saying "Ok the mandrill says he remembers a time when animals all existed together in their current state with dinosaurs and that the Cambrian period didn't happen. It's definitely 100% true." Of course we have to accept that he was crazy, but unfortunately he was also a bad scientist.
To clarify, I don't have a problem with a story that takes an Ancient Astronauts theme. It's a common trope we've seen in some pretty interesting work such as the recent movie Prometheus. However there are certainly ways to pull off the concept and integrating it with our knowledge of evolution is one of them. Ancient Astronauts is not a dichotomy equivalent with creationism -- either God Created Heaven And Earth As Is or all life evolved gradually over time with natural selection -- but can be used in conjunction with evolution to craft a synthesis of the two ideas that is at least remotely plausible within the realm of science fiction. Mandrill fails to accomplish this and prefers to set the problem into an evolution / creation dichotomy.
Despite this, there were two redeeming qualities by the end. One was the common theme of a spaceship on the radio. Throughout the book, characters would turn on the radio and hear the updated progress of the ship. At the end we find out that they found on the planet they landed on, and while fortunately it doesn't directly prove the Ancient Aliens theory, it sets up a bit of irony that is satisfying .
The other was Tai-Po as her careful planning and foresight redeemed the plot a little bit and tied up all the events from the first half. But I'm going to pretend the last couple paragraphs don't exist.
The initial premise is actually pretty compelling. A group of scientists have been working with primates in a sort-of post-catastrophe Earth, though what happened between the 70s and 90s to cause such great problems on Earth while still supporting a robust space program is not explained. In this future, primates are able to be programmed like robots into "primadrones", which is a big industry. Our main characters work in a research facility that develops new primadrone technology, and the main character, Tai-Po, is a talented technician fresh out of school working for a visionary named Luther. They have been working on models that will allow interpretation and translation of primate facial movements into English, so that we might converse with them. They have in their possession possibly the last troop of mandrills caught from Africa, and are close to a breakthrough.
The first half of the book is an interesting tale of politics, as some people want to split up the troop so they can use the mandrills for their own research. Luther and Tai-Po are making great progress with their program, and they both have their own unique struggles against their superiors and the mysterious woman, Silver. But then, as the translations become clearer, Luther starts getting obsessed with the project, spending days in an isolation chamber 'speaking' with the Alpha male mandrill. This is where the book starts to go downhill, up until this point I considered it a solid 3-3.5 star tale.
I believe part of what the author was attempting to show was Luther's descent into madness as he took his work too seriously, and honestly, when done well I do like seeing a character fall apart and crack under pressure. However, instead of being an excellent demonstration of madness, the scenes near the end where Luther was sharing his ideas in front of the board and in front of Silver were just silly. Luther is supposed to be a behavioral biologist, and there are easily 20 pages or so of creationist/intelligent design arguments made by him.
The fact is that even if their Ancient Aliens premise is true and humanity was the result of alien intervention, it wouldn't "make a monkey out of Darwin." Almost all the arguments Luther makes have been horrifically torn to pieces, many of them were invalid even in 1975. However, it's really hard to tell from a current perspective which claims are products of their time -- we've found Ida and dozens of other primate relative-ancestors, we've learned that Neanderthals and other prehistoric ancestors weren't just 'hairy ape men' and had culture, we've mapped the genome, as well as that of dozens of other organisms to determine with relative certainty that all mapped organisms so far have been related. We also know that chimpanzees are closest to humans of the modern primates, so why Mandrill would focus on the title creatures for "race memory" rather than a more closely related primate is a little confusing. It's actually stated several times in the book that Mandrills are the closest relation. Reading the pages and pages of outdated information and arguments was mind numbing, and at around page 200 the book had one star from me. Even if we forgive some of this as coming from a time before the Personal Genome Project and Evo-Devo, Luther just takes everything the mandrill says at face value right from the start. He's skeptical for about five seconds before basically saying "Ok the mandrill says he remembers a time when animals all existed together in their current state with dinosaurs and that the Cambrian period didn't happen. It's definitely 100% true." Of course we have to accept that he was crazy, but unfortunately he was also a bad scientist.
To clarify, I don't have a problem with a story that takes an Ancient Astronauts theme. It's a common trope we've seen in some pretty interesting work such as the recent movie Prometheus. However there are certainly ways to pull off the concept and integrating it with our knowledge of evolution is one of them. Ancient Astronauts is not a dichotomy equivalent with creationism -- either God Created Heaven And Earth As Is or all life evolved gradually over time with natural selection -- but can be used in conjunction with evolution to craft a synthesis of the two ideas that is at least remotely plausible within the realm of science fiction. Mandrill fails to accomplish this and prefers to set the problem into an evolution / creation dichotomy.
Despite this, there were two redeeming qualities by the end. One was the common theme of a spaceship on the radio. Throughout the book, characters would turn on the radio and hear the updated progress of the ship. At the end we find out that they found on the planet they landed on, and while fortunately it doesn't directly prove the Ancient Aliens theory, it sets up a bit of irony that is satisfying .
The other was Tai-Po as her careful planning and foresight redeemed the plot a little bit and tied up all the events from the first half. But I'm going to pretend the last couple paragraphs don't exist.
November 28, 2016
Just....bad.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews