[In the following review of Darkness and the Deep, Sugrue observes that Fisher successfully employs the medium of fiction to popularize scientific theories about the evolution of humanity.]

Vardis Fisher has chosen for his very considerable literary talents a very considerable fictional task. He has decided to write a family saga encompassing the history of man, beginning with prehistoric nomads and ending with whatever is left of contemporary humanity after the present military engagement. He doesn't know whether he will have the time and energy to finish the epic, but he's going to go as far as he can. In this first volume he gets the earth created and cooled, brings life out of the sea, gets our ancestor down from the trees, and gives him a club.

It is his contention that the great discoveries which modern science has made concerning the origin and early experiences of man are locked away from the average citizen in text books and technical studies. Pondering this, he concluded that if such knowledge were put into the most popular form of literature, i.e., the novel, it would reach a general audience, and be absorbed into the national consciousness, where it might do some good by giving the voters in a democracy a better knowledge of themselves and their problems. Obviously, Mr. Fisher doesn't hope to accomplish all that by himself. What he hopes for is a trend, and if Darkness and the Deep is an example of what can be accomplished by putting the popularization of science into the hands of creative writers, that trend is something to be devoutly desired. The first forty-eight pages of the book, comprising a description of the birth of the world and the beginnings of life upon it, could with profit be inserted at the opening of all general science textbooks. It has style, compression, clarity, and a beauty of language which gives to its material what literature gives to anything it touches—subjective meaning for the reader.

That has been the poet's main function: he is a link between the intellectuals who lead the way through the labyrinth of evolution, and the masses who follow them at a safe distance. Thus Mr. Fisher, in his new project, follows a literary tradition.

He follows a scientific tradition in leaving God out of creation. This is not irreligious, or atheistic, or even skeptical. The most primary cause which science can discover is only the effect of another cause; no finite mind can follow the trail back to its origin. Therefore science remains objective, recording what it observes, and what it can safely deduce. When the earth was flung off from the sun it was a mere detail in the happenings of the infinite, and all the things that have transpired since on the small planet are only minutiae of this detail. From the beginnings of its life the earth contained within itself all of its destiny, Mr. Fisher says, and the seeds of all its forms of life and their histories. This is good enough to satisfy both the theologians and the scientists, and it affords an admirable foundation for the story the author intends to tell. As to an ultimate meaning:

If we are only the blind driven down to the seas, it would be a senseless pain to look back upon the dark and bloody trail which we have followed. If beyond our perishing in our present form, when our earth shall have finished its cycle, and shall have had its cold stone drawn back to the incandescent womb—if, then, all that was best in us shall become part of another world in another time, using not the pettiness of our personality but the stuff of our dreams, we can believe that nothing we have suffered has been in vain. If this is so, then a look backward upon our path becomes an adventure in self-discovery which the intelligence of man owes to his spirit, and the dark and brutal past becomes a searchlight that we can turn upon the future.

So the story begins, with a man named Wuh, who is a little frustrated, a little cowardly, and a little intelligent. He desires, and finally gets, a girl named Murah, who is also a little intelligent. When the tale opens they and their companion men and women have no language, do not know the use of weapons or fire, do not live in shelters, have no sense of right and wrong, and know nothing of the mysteries of life and death, old age, love, fellowship, mutual endeavor, or bathing. Wuh and Murah between them, and out of their necessities, learn to throw stones and wield clubs, build rude shelters, and speak half a dozen fundamental words. Wuh also, without realizing it, takes his first bath and absorbs the theory of mass attack on an enemy by observing the ants. As the book ends he feels the first vague stirrings of fellowship.

It is a tribute to Mr. Fisher's skill as a novelist that with these simple characters he has fashioned an absorbing narrative, putting into it an amazing amount of scientific knowledge without detracting in the slightest from the movement of the plot, which centers, as it does in all novels, around the emotional lives of the performers. This latter fact may cause some readers to feel sad, reflecting that they haven't advanced much since Wuh's time. Well, they haven't, so far as appetites are concerned, for these are basic things, but they have given to food and sex what poor dignity and rudimentary grace they can. Perhaps there will be more balm for the ego in the future volumes of the series, which are bound to be interesting and illuminating.