A Note on the Sources of Eva

The extrapolations of science fiction must be firmly grounded in reality if the genre is to maintain its integrity, and Peter Dickinson’s Eva is no exception. For those readers who find difficulty in acknowledging that animals can reason, use language, experience emotion, and transmit learned behavior to future generations, the behavior and capabilities of the chimpanzees in Eva may seem as fantastic as the animal household of Doctor Dolittle, and Dickinson’s suggestion that chimps might ultimately replace humans a distasteful absurdity. In fact Dickinson invented much less than they might suppose.

Baby chimpanzees and gorillas have often been “adopted” by human parents and raised as though they were human children, even dressed in human clothing; as they reach maturity, however, these primates invariably become too violent, too rebellious, and too strong physically for their “parents” to control. ¹ In parallel fashion, Eva, who begins her new life in a state of infantile dependence, finally asserts her identity as a chimp, publicly ripping from her strong, dark, hairy body the child’s overalls her mother has made for her.

Most human-raised apes have ended their lives in zoos. Eva not only integrates herself into a chimpanzee family, but leads her family to freedom and independence in the wild. While this happy outcome might seem like wishful thinking on Dickinson’s part, it too has its real-life counterpart. In The Chimps of Mount Asserik, conservationist Stella Brewer describes the reserve she created in The Gambia for a group of human-raised and captive chimpanzees. With her initial guidance, the chimps learned to hunt for food, and became a fully independent wild colony. Later, a similar group overseen by Brewer was joined by Lucy, a human-raised female chimpanzee who had grown up using American Sign Language with her “parents” and clearly thought of herself as human. Though at first Lucy refused to associate with other chimpanzees, she was gradually assimilated and even became the dominant female in her group (Hahn 122). ² Eva, who has also grown up human and able to communicate with humans in their own language, similarly achieves not only assimilation but leadership as the matriarch of her colony.

Eva’s special means of communication is a computer keyboard that translates written symbols into the sounds of her former human voice. This, clearly, is less cumbersome than having her and her parents learn sign language; in addition, as Millicent Lenz points out, the device helps underline the ambiguous value of technology that is one of Dickinson’s themes in Eva. But in making Eva the only “talking” chimp, Dickinson sidesteps the whole question of language capacity in apes, which as an area of research has provided some of the most spectacular evidence for near-human intelligence. Both chimpanzees and gorillas have demonstrated the ability to communicate with humans in sign language. ³ And at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, chimpanzees have learned a computer language called “Yerkish,” which enables them to compose and correct their own sentences (Sagan 119–20). Eva’s ability to communicate by computer is thus only one step—though a large one in terms of language complexity—beyond what real-life chimps can do.

Dickinson describes in detail Eva’s introduction to her chimp family, her evolving relationship with them, and the struggle for dominance between two high-ranking male chimpanzees, Tatters and Geronimo. His authentic portrayal of male-female roles in chimpanzee society, male battles for status, close mother-daughter relationships, and the gestures of friendship, dominance, and submission draws on the long-term studies of chimpanzee social behavior begun by Jane Goodall in 1960 and described by her in 1971 in In the Shadow of Man. Goodall shocked more orthodox ethologists by assigning her animal subjects names instead of numbers (Through 14). Dickinson, too, depicts his chimp characters as distinct personalities, able to feel, to reason, and to learn. Not surprisingly, Eva is dedicated to the woman scientist who first discovered that chimpanzees make tools and hunt for meat, first unraveled the complexities of chimpanzee society, and first speculated that “If the chimpanzee is allowed...