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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

After Man

All Acting Regiment

18:48 / 22.04.06

It's an unusual book but I'm sure there's a fair chance that some of you'll have read this: it's essentially speculative biology, it charts and illustrates with lovely pictures some possible routes for today's animals to evolve (after the conditional extinction of man).

So the baboon that becomes a plains creature- however, because it has a tail, instead of evolving into a human-like form it becomes something like a tyranosaurus rex. There are sea birds swollen to the size of whales, and an isolated island where everything is some form of bat, from the flying insectivores to the large terrestrial predators. There are also the adorable rabbucks, who tend to fall prey to the rapacious, er, weasel thingies.

You can get it for about £13 from Amazon.

I'm interested to know if anyone's read it, what they thought of it, and to what extent they agreed/disagreed with it. Even if you still disagree are books like this useful ot get people thinking? Would you give it to your kids the same way you would a book based on fossils?

21:09 / 23.04.06

I love this book. Not so much his follow-up MAN AFTER MAN, which posits a variety of future humans. If I ever acheive Gatesian levels of income and wealth, I will commission the genengineering (and release into the suburbs) of the Striger:

This is a book I'd enthusiastically recommend to anyone whose kids are even vaguely interested in science or zoology. Or genetic engineering. Hint.

All Acting Regiment

09:15 / 24.04.06

Absolutely. Just out of interest, is that a scanned picture?

14:21 / 24.04.06

This was one of my favourite books when I was young - I first saw some models of the creatures on Animal Magic when I was tiny and then spent years trying to find out what the book was and get hold of a copy. (It was out of print for a while.) Much of the charm is in the artwork, which are so vivid that it's easy to imagine that the animals are real, or really will be. Hard to pick a favourite, but perhaps the giant penguin-whale. Or the rabbucks.

All of Dixon's painstaking explanations took a bit of a second place to the illustrations, but it still taught me a lot about the various directions that speciation can take, and about ecological niches. In that respect, it was particularly useful to be able to relate his future animals to today's species - I think that's why the follow-ups (as well as Man After Man there was one called The New Dinosaurs, which postulated that the Permian extinction never happened) are less compelling. The artwork also got successively worse, which didn't help.

Have you seen The Future Is Wild? It covering the same sorts of themes and Dixon was a consultant on it; the TV show is okay but the material's a bit stretched. The book's a bit too much of a tie-in and the CGI illustrations look cheap and nasty.

19:02 / 24.04.06

I googled 'Striger' and was pleased to have found one.

All Acting Regiment

19:49 / 24.04.06

I've seen the "future is wild" stuff, some of it was interesting. I liked the little rodents- the few remaining mammals- who were being herded by hyper sapient arachnids.

When you say that New Dinosaurs postulates that the Permian Extinction never happened, don't you mean the Creataceous extinction? I mean, maybe you don't, I just thought the permian one was before dinosaurs (well, okay, before dinosaurs began to deserve their title anyhow, obviously the archosaur survival was a key point for them to exist anyway, but look, this is too long a sentence for parenthesis).

Of those who remember the book, d'you reckon the amazon price is a decent one to buy it? It's not directly related to my course, but I get £5 off. Or does the fact that I can't afford a coffee table invalidate me from buying coffee table books...

Phex: Dorset Doom

22:46 / 24.04.06

Panic- so am I to take it that the Striger is a possible future human, as in, something we'll evolve into? If so I'm never using any form of birth control again, I want lots of descendants turning into evil catmonkeys.
I always thought it's more likely we'll end up looking like those Grey aliens- black eyes to filter sunlight after ozone layer depletion, totally white skin to reflect sunlight, long fingers to operate advanced machines and a big head to store and process all our knowlege.
What are the conditions Dixon posits for the evolution of evilcatmonkeys?

23:03 / 24.04.06

Yes, I should have typed the Cretacean extinction, not the Permian. If you can get After Man for eight quid, I'd say it was well worth it.

The striger is from After Man (rather than Man After Man) and according to the text "developed from the last of the true cats about 30 million years ago and spread throughout the rainforests of Africa and Asia, its success hinging on the fact that it was as well adapted to life in the trees as its prey. It even evolved the bodily shape of the monkeys on which it fed ..." Most of that bit is actually about how its emergence rapidly disrupted the arboreal ecosystem, leading to the development of armoured lemurs and hive monkeys ...

Phex: Dorset Doom

23:51 / 24.04.06

(armor+lemurs)+(monkeys+hivemind)=Phexjoygasm

Please, tell me more...

Hydra vs Leviathan

21:39 / 28.04.06

Bloody hell, i remember this... thought it would have fallen into obscurity long ago...

I loved that book as a (very, very odd) child... don't remember too much about it in detail, but it stimulated my imagination in a massive way (i was obsessed as a child with animals and evolution and utterly fascinated with how things changed from other things into their present forms... after reading "After Man", i went thru a huge phase of inventing/imagining creatures that could possibly evolve from other creatures, especially by convergent evolution (it looks like a dog! but actually it's a marsupial! etc), and still occasionally idly think up "possible beasts"... it's probably what led me to my interest in cryptozoology, and then to other "Fortean" phenomena, and "wierd shit" generally...)...

The creature i most clearly remember was that nightmarish land-bat thing - about the size of a human and an apex predator, its wings had basically re-evolved back into legs, so that it walked on its "arms", and had grasping hands on its "feet"...

Also had and loved his "The New Dinosaurs" - anyone who is interested in which, should check out this unfeasibly huge collaborative web project...

Don't think i ever saw "Man After Man", but if it's in the same sort of format as the others, i'd imagine it to be a truly creepy and quite brilliant (and probably unavoidably, if unintentionally, satirical) gallery of speculative post-humans (probably far better than all those sub-The Time Machine "underground/nuclear-desert mutants" of sci-fi cliche) - anyone got any pics?

I imagine if i'd seen that as a child i'd have been really warped tho...

All Acting Regiment

03:19 / 29.04.06

Man After Man has some interesting stuff in it. Big lumbering yeti type chaps who enter into symbiotic relationships with little clever telepathic chaps who control their hunting (giving them the prowess of a small nimble hunter with the big body mass of a big fucking yeti). The little men snuggle up in the big-un's fur for warmth.

Then there are the sloth men, evolved to fill the giant ground sloth's niche. Then there are the underwater men who come up on land in a bubble of excreted fat and suck creatures into it and drown them, and uh, yeah it's quite scary.

21:07 / 02.06.06

Another book in this vein worth reading is Future Evolution, with illustrations by the incredible Alexis Rockman.