Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

This book was very fanciful. I can see how the author may have developed some of the ideas, but the majority seemed incredibly far fetched, essentially an extreme devolution of what was left of humanity...back to the trees and primordial slime...I spent half my time rolling my eyes, especially considering the small time frame for such changes...200 years, 300 years by which stage we will be swimming in the ocean, unable to breathe air but circulate water around our mouths and pectoral gills to gather oxygen. Of course these skills were given a helping hand by civilisation when it still existed by way of genetic engineering. All I can say is Dixon has an incredible imagination.

I've had this on my list for awhile, seemed intriguing. Seemed less appealing when I picked it up, so I had my son 'guinea pig' it for me. He reports, from a thorough scan but not an every word read, that it's only mildly interesting and that the Hood and Dixon did not always agree on details.... I see a lot of genetic engineering in the first half of the book, and that is not what I'm interested in.... But I'm scanning it some more....

OK. I wanted more about how we'd naturally evolve, if we could adapt to Climate Change (not fast enough, of course, but still...) and if we'd get the big brain & feeble limb form that is popular among older SF writers.... But the forms shown aren't like that, and most seem entirely implausible to me: the show more massive sloth, for example, feeds its bulk on leaves in a temperate climate - but we all know leaves are low-calorie, so how do these folks survive winter?

Most significantly, none of these 'men' after an apocalypse are civilized. I sincerely doubt that an apocalypse that doesn't destroy life on earth down to the ants will be so harsh that man can't recover technology faster than the pace of evolution. In other words, we'll be making an assortment of weapons long before we can evolve claws as effective as daggers.

I trust that everything described is possible. I don't think any of it is likely.
Even if I were to read an SF treatment of these 'characters' I'd dismiss it as implausible, probably silly. show less

Although somewhat fanciful and largely conjecture, this "anthropology of the future" is also based on science and what we know of evolutionary history up until now. Some of these future humans are hard to swallow, but nature has already created bizarre variations that surprise us. It’s good lunchtime entertainment, and although the book was written nearly 20 years ago, we are still experiencing many of the same social and environmental concerns today that are mentioned in the book.