A Portrait of the Future
A review of All Tomorrows
Full disclosure: the author of this book is a friend, and he asked me to write the following review. Whether he regrets this decision or not is his business.
What is the point of speculating about evolution? Why spend time considering whether a monster is “plausible”? It’s for the same reason your eye is drawn to the image above. You are bound to find it interesting.
Consider, for example, the dry fact that flight requires powerful muscles, and heavy muscles require more muscles to lift their weight. It’s an interesting problem for a certain type of mind, but for the rest of us, it’s hard to see why we should care. We don’t fly that way.
But what if we did?
Speculative evolution teaches the reader something real by unreal example. Seeing our own form distorted, we feel the impulse to pay attention. Doing so, we come away with some knowledge worth having, but that’s only the first step. You can’t look at a winged man without asking where those wings came from. What processes changed him so much, and why? If it involves people, speculative evolution must become a story.
Dougal Dixon, the grandfather of speculative evolution, made an attempt to tell such a story. I would say, though, with less success than his other projects.
I’m glad, therefore, that C.M. Kosemen found ways to push this project further in All Tomorrows. And I’m glad he has finally published his work in a book I can hold in my hands. Let’s see how much farther he went than those before him.
There is a problem in speculative evolution when it comes to sapient people. Predict how a bear might take to the sea and evolve into a whale? Darwin could do it, no problem.1 But turn your knowledge of natural selection to people, and the selection cannot be natural. People hunting plankton in the sea will not evolve into giants who strain water through their mustaches; they'll invent boats and nets. Worse, you, the speculator, are a human yourself. You will almost certainly fail to maintain your objectivity as you consider the reproductive habits of your neighbors. Many writers and artists have attempted to predict human evolution under natural selection, but their best work has still been more political commentary than speculative physical anthropology.
The solution of both Dixon and Kosemen was to use genetic engineering and remove sapience. In the case of All Tomorrows, both are part of the same program of cruel torment.
Kosemen spends about a third of the book describing the subjugation of humanity by the alien Qu. They create humans-as-pets, humans-as-tools, humans-as-art, and humans-as-victims of hellish and whimsical punishment.
In this way, Kosemen sets the stage for real natural selection to start working. How can we expect these new "sub-humans" to evolve under natural selection? Most simply go extinct, but others produce interesting solutions to their problems. These examples make up my favorite part of the book, from Snake People to Modular People to flying Pterosapiens, most of whom are killed off in the third act by new villains, beginning the Sisyphean process all over again.
As you can’t talk about people without telling a story, you can’t tell a story without revealing your philosophy. In All Tomorrows, individuals struggle not only to overcome physical hardship, but to find meaning in their lives. You evolved from the victims of alien geneticists, and now your planet is under attack by cyborgs. Why go on at all? And, in an intergalactic narrative spanning billions of years, who are you in the first place?
The first character of All Tomorrows is humanity as a whole, illustrated by Kosemen's own portrait of himself as a Martian.
Our species rises out of the infancy of hunter-gatherers into the dangerous adolescent years of technological progress, war, and pollution before settling down into a global society of mature social democrats. The Qu shatter this unity into a cast of new character-species, who each try, fail, and try again to achieve sapience before fighting with each other in a climactic battle. Aesthetic failings aside, it's this story that elevates All Tomorrows above Dixon’s Man After Man.
The art also gives us another window into character, as the illustrations are not merely of typical specimens of their species, but people who posed for a photograph. A Blind Folk toddler pees in fear at the photographer's approach. A Pterosapien shows off her wing-tattoos at a beach resort on the only vacation of her short life. In the book's most enduring sentence: "An Asymmetric nobleman poses nude to reveal his bizarre anatomy." If Man After Man was "an anthropology of the future," All Tomorrows is the future's portrait.
The final character is the narrator, who is revealed at the end to be not the godlike voice of the author but a far-future anthropologist. He’s an alien with no relation to us or our daughter-species, who has written this very personal and somewhat cockeyed interpretation of his findings. The narrator is a fun device, but his existence detracts from the book's nature as a series of portraits. Those models weren't real people after all, but invented by an imaginative anthropologist based on skull fragments and ancient tablets. That's a bit disappointing, but I understand why Kosemen included the narrator. He needed someone to tell us his book's theme:
"It is not the destination, but the trip, that matters…Love today, and seize all tomorrows!"
All right, so the narrator is an alien space-Buddhist. Looking back on the book after you've finished it, it's easy to see the chain of reincarnation: demon-ridden sufferer, lowly worm, beast, man, and enlightened soul, floating with folded limbs in its zero-G habitat.
Despite all the narrator's protestations about the amoral, goal-less groping of evolution, he draws clear meaning from his subjects. On a deeper level than the book's explicit theme, we are given to understand life is better than death, and intelligence is better than stupidity.
As to what is best in life, I’ll bow out with this example of example of the humanism of All Tomorrows.2
Literally brought low by the Qu, who transported his ancestors to a high-gravity super-earth, this Lopsider slides along the ground like a flounder or a starfish. It’s painful just to look at him, and yet he feeds his pets. They aren't prey animals. They don't help him survive. They make him happy, at least for a little while.
1 Except public ridicule
2 I would like to thank Daniel Justice Snow for sharing his thoughts on the Lopsider.
Cool that you know the author. I thought this was a brilliant speculative work, and really enjoyed it. It's starting to make the rounds on YouTube now, too, as it's a brilliantly imaginative setting.
I wrote a response
https://substack.com/home/post/p-156257120