 First Edition cover. The cover depicts "Jimez Smoot's descendant", a spacefaring human descendant living five million years in the future. | |
| Author | Dougal Dixon |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Speculative evolution Science fiction |
| Publisher | Blandford Press (UK) St. Martin's Press (US) |
Publication date | 1990 |
| Publication place | United Kingdom |
| Media type | Print (hardback and paperback) |
| Pages | 128 |
| ISBN | 978-0713720716 |
Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future is a 1990 speculative evolution and science fiction book written by Scottish geologist and palaeontologist Dougal Dixon and illustrated by Philip Hood. The book also features a foreword by Brian Aldiss. Man After Man explores a hypothetical future path of human evolution set from 200 years in the future to 5 million years in the future, with several future human species evolving through genetic engineering and natural means through the course of the book.[1]
Man After Man is Dixon's third work on speculative evolution, following After Man (1981) and The New Dinosaurs (1988). Unlike the previous two books, which were written much like field guides, the focus of Man After Man lies much on the individual perspectives of future human individuals of various species. Man After Man, like its predecessors, uses its fictional setting to explore and explain real natural processes, in this case climate change through the eyes of the various human descendants in the book, who have been engineered specifically to adapt to it.
Reviews of Man After Man were generally positive, but more mixed than the previous books and criticised its scientific basis to a greater extent than that of its predecessors. Dixon himself is not fond of the book, having referred to it as a "disaster of a project". During writing, the book had changed considerably from its initial concept, which Dixon instead repurposed for his later book Greenworld (2010).
- ^ Dixon, Dougal (1990). Man After Man. Blandford Press. ISBN 978-0713720716.