Manifold: Origin
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Third volume of the Manifold trilogy, Origin has been published in 2002 by Stephen Baxter.
The moon has been mysteriously replaced with another one, much larger, red and covered with water, land and a breathable atmosphere. At the same time, a blue ring has appeared in the sky in front of Malenfant and Emma's jet plane. Emma is sucked into the ring just after ejecting and is transported to the surface of the Red Moon. She encounters strange hominids, Homo Erectus called the Runners, and Homo Neanderthal called the Hams who both speak some English, if only single words for the Runners (there are also other, more primitive hominids called the Elves and the Nutcracker). Life is hard but she manages to survive. Meanwhile on Earth, Malenfant manages to convince NASA to send him and Nemoto to the Red Moon in a rocket. After landing, they meet an Englishman from a parallel Earth who has been there for years, living with some of his friends and Hams. All hope of going back to the Earth disappears when the Red Moon shifts again from one parallel universe to another. But from this new Earth comes a group of Homo Superior (later nicknamed Deamons) who want to understant who is behind the Red Moon's travel, and what is its purpose. Nemoto meets them first, after splitting with Malenfant who wanted to find his wife. In the meantime, Malenfant has met another group of Homo Sapiens called the Zealots who have organized around a religious fanatic who wants to expand and conquer the whole Moon and use Hams and Runners as slaves. Malenfant is prisoner of the Zealots and has been tortured to death when Emma finally goes to his rescue with the help of her Ham friends, but he dies soon after. With Nemoto and the Deamons they enter the crater of the giant volcano, obviously artificial, and they learn that the Red Moon has been made by humans from the future who have forced the creation of mutiple universes. In every universe where there was no intelligent species, they have used the moon to take samples of homonids from one universe and move them to another one.