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in this section is now somewhat outdated, but the story doesn’t end here.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.