Speculative Evolution or Speculative Biology can be defined as a genre focused on hypothetical
scenarios in the evolution of life. Today, Speculative Evolution is everywhere — from
video games, to graphic novels, to any of the hundreds of amazing online projects that
explore worlds beyond our own. But… how did we get here? Interest in the biology of
fictional life wasn’t always so widespread. Monsters from ancient myth weren’t typically
of thought to be part of an ecosystem, they just kind of… existed. The origin and rise
of Speculative Evolution as we know it today is a fascinating tale — deeply intertwined
with scientific advancement, and full of unexpected twists. So, for this special entry into the
archive, I’ll give you the full tour of this genre’s incredible history, and reveal
the ‘evolution’ of Speculative Evolution… Let’s start by winding back the clock to…
1895. It’s been almost forty years since Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution
— this foundational idea that all species gradually change over time, and through the
process of natural selection become better suited to their environment. And by the turn
of the century, the scientific community and the majority of the educated public had accepted
evolution as a fact. At this time, in a small town in the English countryside, science-teacher-turned-author
H. G. Wells came up with an idea for a story. Called ‘The Time Machine,’ the novel follows
an intrepid English inventor on his journey into an imagined future. The novel represented
a lot of firsts for science fiction, and has been adapted into numerous films, most famously
in 1960. In both the novel and the film, upon arriving into the distant future using his
titular ‘time machine,’ the protagonist realizes that Darwinian evolution has changed
the English countryside beyond recognition. Not only is the world now populated with strange
plant life unfamiliar to the time traveler, but humans have evolved as well: having split
into a prey species — the uncanny, childlike Eloi, and a predator species — the secretive,
subterranean Morlocks. The 1960 film portrays the Morlocks as these weird, yeti-like things
— an effect that hasn’t aged particularly well. But their description in the novel is
more ominous, with the narrator likening their appearance to subterranean fish, their bodies
slick and bleached from millennia spent adapting to the caverns. Most of the ‘science’
in this section is now somewhat outdated, but the story doesn’t end here. While this
first section of the novel is the most popular, and the only one covered in film adaptations,
the truly groundbreaking chapters come after. The time traveler then journeys millions of
years forwards, and encounters a barren version of earth lit by a dying red sun. On a ruined
shoreline, the time traveler sees that giant crab-like creatures have evolved and now keep
a grim vigil over this dying land — a sight that nearly shatters his psyche. Pushing even
further into the future, he witnesses the final days of Earth, where upon a blood-red
sea, an indescribable mass of tentacles rises from the water — a visual so beyond his
19th century comprehension it causes his mind to collapse. Fitting for a novel about time
travel, this section feels impossibly ahead of its time. It doesn’t read like something
written over thirty years before the invention of sliced bread. By speculating on what life
might look like millions of years beyond his own time, Wells had inadvertently opened the
door to a whole new literary genre — the genre of Speculative Evolution. “The people
of Mars probably walk on their hind legs. Their barrel-chested bodies covered in a coating
of down. Their ample skulls would be crammed with intelligence. And their Trunk-like noses
indispensable for feats of engineering…” The next great frontier in Speculative Evolution
would emerge that same year, when astronomer Percival Lowell produced an account of what
he believed to be canals on the surface of Mars. What we now know to be an optical illusion
caused by streaks of dust was at the time believed by some to be evidence that there
was complex life on the next rock over from Earth. Inspired by these findings, H.G. Wells
would publish ‘The War of the Worlds,’ just two years after ‘The Time Machine’
— a novel notable for popularizing the alien invasion story. Wells’s tale about Martians
invading Earth is widely interpreted as a commentary on British Imperialism, yet ‘War
of the Worlds’ could also be considered another founding work of Speculative Evolution.
Before the book’s release, Wells published numerous articles speculating about what life
on Mars might look like — discussing his theories for how plant and animal life might
evolve. We now know Mars can’t support life for… a range of reasons, but at the time,
this was ‘reasonable’ scientific conjecture. It’s interesting to read these articles
because they really feel like someone gushing about a speculative world they’ve created.
And the early ideas for the Martians and their planet Wells outlines are almost unchanged
in ‘War of the Worlds’ -- which suggests this little project inspired the massively
influential follow up. One of the most important sci fi novels began with Wells dreaming about
speculative ecosystems… “Today a space-conscious public avidly consumes tons of story material
about life on other planets.” In the 20th century, The War of the Worlds would inspire
numerous other invasion stories, which tended to echo public perceptions of threat. Bolstered
by reports of supposed UFOs and a rising public interest in everything ‘space’ related,
science fiction stories based on threats from the stars became a common form of entertainment.
Yet with a few exceptions, these aliens weren’t quite ‘speculative’ in the way Wells’s
early work was — they were more things that went bump in the night. What ecosystems or
evolutionary path created these aliens was rarely at the forefront of these stories.
They were, essentially, fantasy monsters — with their speculative biology an afterthought
at best. In the 1950s especially, the aliens of Hollywood came to represent fears of communist
infiltration — with the paranoia that agents of the enemy were everywhere manifesting as
literal aliens in disguise. “Through the years, there have been frequent rumors that
Martians disguised as earthmen walk amongst us. These stories are perhaps strengthened
by thousands of reports of unidentified flying objects, passing in an endless procession
across our skies…” While the initial speculative intrigue that inspired Wells to write ‘The
War of the Worlds’ in the first place had largely been forgotten by the mid-point of
the 20th century, some lesser-known projects did emerge during this time. In 1957, animation
director Ward Kimball got funding from Walt Disney to create ‘Mars and Beyond,’ an
animated special most famous for depicting what the conditions on Mars might be like
given sufficient water. With advice from astronomer Dr. E. C. Slipher, Kimball and his team brought
to life an impressively ‘alien’ array of speculative lifeforms — like trilobite
creatures that can endure Martian dust storms, fast-growing carnivorous plant life, and a
slew of predators, including one that incapacitates prey with poisonous gas, and another that
stuns with ultrasonic waves. Perhaps most notable of all, one sequence also speculates
on life based on entirely new chemical patterns, imagining life based on silicon instead of
carbon — providing a range of surreal new forms. While ‘Mars and Beyond’ would be
largely forgotten over the following decades, the piece stands as remarkably innovative
by the standards of its time... Throughout the same period, running parallel to the wave
of aliens were stories which followed in the footsteps of ‘The Time Machine’ and explored
future and alternate evolution on Earth. In 1930, author Olaf Stapledon released the novel
‘Last and First Men,’ which chronicles a speculative future history of humanity across
two billion years and eighteen human species. The book is somewhat unwieldy, but it did
anticipate the invention of genetic engineering. The next major work that didn’t involve
aliens came in 1961, with the account of naturalist Harald Stümpke’s expedition to an island
chain in the south Pacific. The report describes in detail a previously unknown order of mammals
known as the Snouters. These mammals are distinguished by the nasarium — a structure derived from
their nose — that has been adapted for all sorts of purposes. Reportedly, some used their
noses for walking, others for ensnaring prey, and still others for rudimentary flight. If
all this sounds too fantastical to be real… that’s because it was a total fabrication.
Harald Stümpke wasn’t a real person, but the pseudonym of the real author Gerolf Steiner
— a zoologist who wrote and published his book on the Snouters to prank his colleagues.
Yet the Snouters mark several important firsts in the history of Speculative Evolution, containing
a detailed taxonomic tree and a surprising amount of thought put into the niches each
Snouter fills. In fact, the tone itself is so dry and scholarly that it successfully
mimics a scientific work, and has become something of a favorite prank among zoologists, with
several scientists and publishers having written about the Snouters since as if they were real
to keep the hoax alive. And when scientists actually discovered a new species of rodent
with a uniquely large nose in 2015, they officially named the animal a ‘Sulawesi Snouter’
in honor of Steiner’s fictious creatures. While the Snouters project was limited to
a single island archipelago, two decades later, in 1981, author Dougal Dixon would forever
change the genre with his book ‘After Man.’ Set 50 million years from now, ‘After Man’
explored the biology of speculative lifeforms that have evolved following a mass extinction.
To this day, ‘After Man’ is recognized as the first truly large-scale speculative
evolution project involving an entire world with a vast array of species. ‘After Man’
also marks the first time the terms ‘Speculative Evolution’ and ‘Speculative Biology’
were used in writing to describe a work. Some of my favorite creatures from this project
include the Rabbucks, which are rabbits that have evolved to fill the grazing niche of
deer. Or the leviathan sized Vortex, filter feeders evolved from penguins that fill the
role left behind by whales. Perhaps the most famous creature from “After Man’ is the
Night Stalker: a nightmarish, fully-terrestrial descendent of the humble bat. Dixon himself
has stated the final chapters of Wells’s ‘The Time Machine’ were his primary influence
in creating ‘After Man,’ and the book can be considered a rebirth of the genre.
The volume enjoyed widespread success across the globe, and was even made into a stop motion
animated adaptation in Japan — although the project was never translated. Following
up on ‘After Man’s success, Dixon would create ‘The New Dinosaurs’ — a book
that explored a hypothetical alternate Earth where the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction
event never occurred, leading non avian dinosaurs to evolve into the present day. ‘The New
Dinosaurs’ is one of the first entries in the ‘alternate timeline’ subgenre of speculative
evolution. Yet things became more complicated with Dixon’s third book — the bizarre
‘Man After Man,’ which explores the evolution of future humans. Various higher ups altered
the book heavily during development, and Dixon himself was reluctant to be involved in the
final version of the project due to its lack of scientific detail. It did give us this
famous image which has been turned into a meme, but following the book’s publication,
no projects like it were released for some time... In the early 90s, a different kind
of speculative work would arrive on the scene in the form of ‘Expedition.’ Created by
artist and writer Wayne Barlowe, ‘Expedition’ surveyed the alien ecosystem of the fictional
planet Darwin IV with the same level of detail that Dixon used when exploring future timelines.
The creatures of Darwin IV were designed to be "truly alien", with Barlowe having grown
dissatisfied with the common science fiction trope of alien life being similar to life
on Earth. At the time of the book’s publication, the kinds of aliens you’d see on TV were
mainly actors with things glued to their foreheads. Yet the organisms of Darwin IV felt authentically
like they’d emerged from a different evolutionary line, with none of them possessing eyes, hair
or external ears. And the most intelligent aliens of Darwin IV — the bizarre, floating
Eosapiens — break the trend of aliens with human-like intelligence needing to appear
humanoid. Following the success of ‘Expedition,’ the book was adapted in 2005 into a CGI TV
special for the Discovery Channel titled ‘Alien Planet.’ Barlowe served as the design consultant
and one of the executive producers of the adaptation. Throughout the early 2000s, computer
generated television specials became a surprising haven for speculative works, including Charley
Foley’s ‘Dragons: A Fantasy Made Real’ — which explored the hypothetical evolution
of a lost order of dragons. Joanna Adams’ ‘The Future is Wild’ also came out around
this time, which explores future ecosystems in a nature documentary format. Dougal Dixon
was actually one of the scientists who helped develop the project, and helped design many
of the lifeforms. ‘The Future is Wild’ is a speculative project that remains unparalleled
in terms of scale and ambition, and there’s never really been anything like it produced
since. During the later 2010s, Speculative Evolution had a significant, if often overlooked
impact on popular culture. Dixon’s ‘The New Dinosaurs’ heavily influenced the direction
of Peter Jackson’s ‘King Kong.’ Even James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’ — which remains
one of if not the most successful film of all time — owes heavy inspiration to art
Wayne Barlowe created for the movie... At the same time that speculative evolution was
influencing mainstream media, there was also an explosion of availability in online projects.
And leading the charge for early internet speculative works was one C. M. Kosemen. Born
in Turkey, the young artist and writer released the book ‘All Tomorrows’ onto the internet
in 2006. A fascinating and disturbing narrative exploring future human evolution — both
through genetic engineering and natural means — the book is something to behold, at once
both nihilistic and strangely hopeful. Taking inspiration from works like ‘Last and First
Men,’ ‘All Tomorrows’ steadily grew an online following. Around the same time,
Kosemen also released updates for a story called ‘Snaiad’ — a worldbuilding project
exploring the biology of aliens on a fictional exoplanet. Influenced by works like Barlowe’s
‘Expedition,’ the sheer number of invented creatures and lineages makes ‘Snaiad’
one of the most biologically diverse fictional worlds. A few years later, Kosemen would release
‘All Yesterdays’ with artist John Conway and paleontologist Darren Naish — a book
that speculated on how dinosaurs might have looked and behaved. This speculation actually
helped inspire projects like ‘Prehistoric Planet.’ The book also contained a section
titled ‘All Todays,’ which explored how aliens might reconstruct earth animals based
on the fossil record with no knowledge of their biology… Like species filling the
niches of a new environment, Speculative Evolution would become a bigger and more complicated
genre than ever thanks to online possibilities. The early works of artist Alex Ries also hit
the internet around this time, showcasing stunning depictions of alien life. In particular,
Alex Ries would explore the development of an intelligent hexapod species called the
Birrin — creating one of the most fascinating and believable alien cultures across fiction.
Leading up to the modern day, Speculative Evolution became more accessible than ever
before — with a growing community of people inspired by the genre able to connect over
vast distances.