The book skips around to various ecosystems–jungle, desert, plains–and shows artist renderings of what the animals there have adapted into, with captions explaining why.įor instance, rabbits have grown to fill in the niche deer left in their extinction and rats have grown to fill the wolf niche.Īnd here’s a cuddly hell-spawn called a night stalker: Those that survived kept evolving, and now we’re visiting them 50 million years after the Age of Man. We blew it and died and took a lot of animals with us.īut not all the animals. The end wasn’t dramatic or sudden or particularly sad, it was just the culmination of humanity’s long-brewing bad habits. Far more ambitious is «Greenworld», which uses Dixon's original concept for Man After Man (which had been considerably modified by his publishers) and has so far appeared only in Japanese as Gurīn wārudo (coll of linked stories 2010 2vols): this explores a imagined Earth-like exoplanet's complex biosphere and how it is brought to ruin over the course of a thousand years by the impact of human colonists from a Generation Starship who replay all Earth's Ecological Disasters.A couple of the more exciting book stumbles I’ve enjoyed recently are Geologist Dougal Dixon’s “zoology of the future,” After Man (1981), and its “anthropology of the future” sequel, Man After Man (1990).Īfter Man is a credible paleontology/speculative fiction bonanza that runs on the sober premise that our era is over. Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future ( 1990) similarly considers various future options for the human form, not excluding Devolution but featuring such Posthuman possibilities as a Cyborg-cum- Genetic Engineering adaptation to function in vacuum and zero- Gravity.ĭixon's expertise was also deployed in a Time-Travel framework, far less taxing in its assumptions, in the Byron Preiss tie, Time Machine #7: Ice Age Explorer ( 1985), an Interactive-Fiction "adventure gamebook".
The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution ( 1988) imagines possible evolutionary paths for Dinosaurs had they not become extinct. (1947- ) UK geologist, palaeontologist and author whose After Man: A Zoology of the Future ( 1981) provides a quasifactual view of a Far-Future Earth in which Homo sapiens, having exhausted the planet and become extinct, gives way (in a fashion reminiscent of the work of Olaf Stapledon) to succeeding forms of life adapted by Evolution to new-found ecological niches: bats, for example, become highly diversified, including flightless land-walking species.
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