Man After Man
The sequel to the speculative evolution book "After Man", Man After Man is a book by Dougal Dixon, also author of "The New Dinosaurs", a book about what would have happened and what sort of beings would have evolved if dinosaurs never went extinct. Much like its spiritual successor All Tomorrows, Man After Man serves as excellent inspiration for a GM in inspiring Abhuman or Mutant breeds for Warhammer 40,000 or other science-fiction RPGs. It takes place over the eons after humanity starts an exodus to the stars due to dying Earth, leaving behind various genetically-engineered Abhuman races, including the survivors, forgetting all about them. The humans and post-human engineers' tenuous civilizations collapse in a polarity shift, leaving Earth to be populated by human-derived animals engineered to fill the ecosystem since many large mammals died out. And yes, they evolve into carnivore and herbivore variants and start predating each other, "evolving" until indescribably retarded and unscientific variants...
...until the humans who left for Alpha Centauri suddenly return five...million...years later returning to stripmine the planet and harvest the biomass before leaving again, using the surviving creatures as mindless, tortured cattle and lobotomized slaves and blasting off into space. While forgetting Earth was the human civilization's cradle.
Also much like its successor, the illustrations of Man After Man spawned many Internet Memes.
However, if you have any interests in biology or the bare basics of speculative evolution, Dixon's books are notorious for how...grotesquely wrong he gets on simple biology. While his After Man book had some interesting ideas, and Man After Man is honestly just Dixon's excuse to delve in his Dark Eldar self-indulgence drug-fic, his most criticized book remained to be New Dinosaurs, for his utter disregard for paleontology, which is ironic since his CV states that he is a paleontologist, which begs the question on what drugs he was taking when he came up with these 'dinosaurs' (Dinosaur in the loosest sense of the term). Granted, his books came out in the 1980s, but to say they aged poorly is an understatement. But most of you know him because he was the creature designer for the Future is Wild series of the 2000s. Whilst the series itself is not immune to genuine criticisms that are honest-to-god baffling, the creature design parts by themselves are okay since there were other folks reigning in on Dixon's excesses to make these creatures less fugly beyond belief.
With regards to Man After Man. Well, as we already said, it is just a Cronenberg picture book than a genuine interesting book on speculative human evolution. There is a reason why this page earns the WTF template. All of his abhumans looks fucking ugly as sin or abominations that should be purged with fire, to speak of nothing about the incredibly senseless evolutionary morphology, to evolve for extremely specific reasons that would be absolutely impossible to achieve for a large mammal in an uncontrolled ecosphere(except the first Aquatics and Spaceborn, but they were artifical), plus quasi-magical bullshit such as psychic connections and over specific single limb mutations a la Lego Genetics.
For what it's worth, Dixon isn't very fond of "that disaster of a project" either; he had very different plans for sequels where humans voip to the future to fuck up paradise.
List of Man After Man Abhumans[edit | edit source]
Antmen
Aquamorph
Aquatic
Cave-Dweller
Desert-Runner
Fish-Eater
Hitek
Host
Hunter Symbiont
Islander
Memory People
Parasite
Plains-Dweller
Slothmen
Socials
Spiketooth
Symbiont Carrier
Temperate Woodland-Dweller
Travelers of the stars
Tree-Dweller
Tropical Forest-Dweller
Tundra-Dweller
Vacuumorph
Water-Seeker