Simon Bradshaw

I didn't manage to get to any of the Speculative Biology items at Loncon 3 (usual excuse: too few hours in day plus other commitments) so I had to settle for reading this very good write-up in Scientific American. That led me to the work of Memo Kosemen, who has put a huge amount of effort into imagining the fauna of Snaiad, a world where animals have evolved into ecological niches familiar to us but on the basis of a very different fundamental body plan.

It turns out that Kosemen also wrote All Tomorrows, a work rather in the vein of Dougal Dixon's Man after Man, although of rather greater scope. With Koseman's permission it's been made available online (large PDF); if I had to give a quick summary, it would be "Stapledon's Last and First Men as rewritten by Stephen Baxter and illustrated by the hybrid offspring of Wayne Barlow and H.R. Giger." Far more imagination than in a dozen bumpy-forehead-alien TV series, and these are all meant to be descended from humans.