TMW capitalism and communism won't matter once we all because deer people

Transhumanism would have been more plausible. But interesting to see that anthropology will still be a pseudoscience in the distant future.

has science gone too far?

The first changes were artificial. The first mutants were made in labs

I prefer Last and First Men.

mutation rate is still inexcusable

Do they at least half assedly justify with references to nuclear bombs or something?

not that I know of
educate me

it's a pretty fun read

any particularly good blurbs?

why is it so fucking expensive?

The author disowned it because he was shut out of the creative process so reprints probably don't happen too often

You can read it for free online though

Not even the best speculative evolution book desu

Pic related is

but i want a physical copy so i can traumatize my future children.
cant even fucking find this one, giving me some weird ass recommendations though.

The Gravitals did nothing wrong

Gravitals are literally space hitler

Is there a place where I can get some scans? These look pretty interesting, always was a fan of speculative biology.

The author made a monster

...

img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1378/75/1378755288872.pdf

looks like the speculative ramblings of a failed neckbeard sci-fi writer

cant paste the link to man after man cause Veeky Forums thinks it spam but all you have to do is google "man after man pdf"
thats honestly the best i could do and unless some user can find them for non stupid prices then good luck owning a physical copy.

> insert Soviet Union joke here

hehe, it's the meme

Ramjet's All Tomorrows is much better, imho. It actually had me on the verge of tears at some point.

youtube.com/watch?v=wTEsnhhrWUo

> Here we see yet another marvelous spectacle of nature- a pack of Homo sapiens normiens making the daily treacherous journey across the savannah in search of "tendies", the only substance that can meet their Alpha male's nutritional needs

It's the complete story of humanity across our entire series of species and until our extinction. It's an interesting take on the past's take on the universe and the future.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Last_and_First_Men.pdf

If that's too long just read the wikipedia page.

Doctor Who ripped this off.

A lot of this seems stupidly edgy.

> perfect meme material

Examples? You have my attention.

Man after man

sivatherium.narod DOT ru/library/Dixon_3/01_en.htm

I love these type of books, no matter how cheesy or non-factual they are.

I like this because it isn't stupidly edgy. It involves near extinction and evolution but doesn't force it and doesn't try to fit penises in everywhere like a edgy teenage nerd would.

I have. The creatures are pretty interesting desu

how can i enjoy this if theirs no memetastic pictures???

> creatures
Racist

this used to be a meme on >>Veeky Forums

The things in that picture were humans who were genetically modified into some horrible algae-like creature that carpets what was once their planet because they pissed off a vastly more powerful alien race by resisting their invasion forces.
If you want to give the book a read here's a link:
img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1378/75/1378755288872.pdf

>entire story is predicated on the Qu who's motives make zero sense
It's like the author came up with some stupidly edgy idea to shock the readers and filled in the gaps with actually entertaining speculative fiction. Get rid of the Qu and it's fine.

The Qu's motivation isn't exactly groundbreaking but I thought it was a fair justification for what they did. What about it doesn't make sense to you?

The entire premise of the speculative future is predicated on the Qu wiping out humanity and then playing around with human DNA for nothing other than shits and giggles. When this is brought up the book says "lol, who knows why they did it". It is painfully obvious the author had some twisted idea about all of humanity being engineered into bizarre forms to sate his biohorror fetish. Literally everything else about this story is just tacked on frame that singular reason for writing the book. Everything in the story makes sense except for the most important part to the story, and that's because the story is at its heart just for sake of biohorror.

Wasn't it meant to be their version of righteous punishment for resistance.

mfw I first learned about this book from playing deus ex

space hitler did nothing wrong

They stated that the Qu just go around reengineering life for shits and giggles. They never even said why they are "nomadic" despite sticking around in human space for millions of years. That's hardly nomadic.

Everything about the Qu is absurd and they are central to the story.

Anyway, my main point is just that the biohorror is main premise of the book, the Qu are a poorly thought out excuse for the biohorror, and I'm personally not a fan of biohorror. I think everything about the story is cool except for the the very reason it exists.

Really? How?

>humans
>becoming quadrupeds
Nope will never happen unless gravity forces us on our legs.

I think there's a copy of it in Smuggler's hideout or somebody mentions it in a conversation in Hong Kong or something.

Sounds like capitalist talk

What are those things?

> biohorror fetish
objectively one of the worst fetishes

Huh

What's the best work of theoretical biology and why is it expedition? Just look at these beauties.

KILL ALL GRAVITAL SCUM! JANUARY 5th 2300056333 BEST DAY OF MY LIFE

It's quite simple, user.

>The Qu are better than you
>The Qu decide how life progresses
>You wanna meddle, motherfucker?
>Fuck you, now you're a carpet

The Veeky Forums thread was glorious on these books.

Link?

It was quite some time ago.

It's great until the dude starts talking about fuckers.

It's like every person who tries to make aliens weird ends up obsessing over penises.

>Fuck you, now you're a carpet
Why is this not a movie/TV show?

Muh niggah!

The only good Qu is a dead Qu!

I remember watching some speculative documentary about aliens narrated by Jonathen Frakes (Riker from Star Trek) and I remember one of the aliens was a cute little thing hopping on one leg and I think it was called a pud.

One of the surviving distant branches of humanity went full transhumanism, promptly decided that all biologicals were non-life forms, and started genociding the remains of the other branches willy nilly.

Except for those big-brain gas bags living in deep space, cuz those fuckers were scary.

Eventually said big brains got tired of watching "Terminator: Bad End" reruns on every planet they were observing from a distance and decided to put a stop to it - and after beating them into submissions, proceed to install themselves as gods on every other planet in an effort to ensure no such genocide machine would ever be born again.

I think the Qu come back again, but they kinda gloss over it.

Look user jaws are objectively the best way to ingest matter so most aliens on land would have jaws like vertebrates or arthropods.

Yeeeeah... Maybe if his time machine was real, he could have - otherwise I rather think it's the other way around.

Granted, unlike the Daleks, the author of AT does take some pains to point out that the Gravitals aren't "evil" nor driven by hate - they just got to a point where biologicals were no different than interesting rocks to them. Within their own society, they had families, loved ones, dramas, culture, etc and were otherwise quite "human" in nature.

Not quite the "We are the superior beings: Exterminate!" motif of the Daleks who have had every emotion except hate bred out of them due to some pissy variant of Steven Hawking having odd wet dreams.

I'm not talking about the Daleks. I'm talking about the episode where an offshoot of humans were turned into machine spheres that then proceeded to genocide humanity. Doctor Who ripped it off.

>jaws are objectively the best way to ingest matter
explain

Correction, the big brained spacers only stepped in after the transhumanists had a civil war and then attacked the spacers in order to give themselves a common enemy.

Oh, the spheres at the end of the universe in nuwho...

That's over a decade old as well though - IDK when All Tomorrows was written... Same thing though - those bastards slapped together by The Master were just insane and evil, even tormenting and torturing folks as they went. Gravitals were just apathetic toward conventional life (and at least made war machines when they wanted to get shit done, instead of just swarming spheres).

Plus there was a human head inside each of those spheres. I think the Gravitals had given up their biological nature entirely.

I'm aware. You don't have to keep repeating yourself about the difference in motive as if it matters. You just had to acknowledge the absurd degree of similarity.

My bad, clearly I've been reading Astromorph propaganda.

Well, if every black sphere killer robot is a rip-off on All Tomorrows...

I mean, it's not exactly a unique motif.

That's totally different and if you aren't already aware you are rustling my jimmies.

*sigh* To end the "debate":

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sound_of_Drums
^ The Doctor Who episode involving killer floating black sphere robots aired in 2007.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Tomorrows
^ All Tomorrows released in 2008.

So if anything, All Tomorrows ripped off Doctor Who (barring time machines).

Really, the only thing the two have in common is that they are killer black robotic spheres. Which are kind of staple of science fiction, and have been since at least the 70's. Fairly certain neither actually ripped off the other here.

>Really, the only thing the two have in common is that they are killer black robotic spheres.
You know that's not true.

What else do they have in common?

Technically, they don't even have that incommon. One's a cyberborge race of angry hive-minded children gleefully murder hoboing with spinning blades and cutters sticking out of their heads come back from the end of time at the behest of everyone's favorite insane Time Lord, while the other is a completely mechanical race that's reasoning and demonstrates very little actual malice using war vessels from orbit under their own volition.

It's also hard to tell from the pictures, but I kinda got the impression that the Gravitals were a lot bigger than human heads.

So, I'm not seeing anything more incommon than "genocidal black sphere".

>an unknown offshoot of humans were turned into machine spheres that then proceeded to genocide humanity.

Offshoots of humans coming back to genocide humans is hardly unusual in sci-fi either. (Doctor Who alone does that at least ten times with the Cybermen, the Saurians, and the Elders.)

In this case, the Dr. Who critters are a bit scarier (or at least more depressing), as the Toclafane represent the final fate of mankind come back in time to kill itself - while at least the Gravitals are one of several offshoots. (And in this case, the Gravitals are just killing other offshoots, not invading the long-dead Earth.)

>humans coming back to genocide humans [as flying robot spheres]

Meh, the Gravitals aren't technically "coming back", but meh, fine, alright, "Formally human genocidal spheres", is a bit of a coincidence, yes, I'll relent... But these two came out too close to each other to be really apt to be actually ripping each other off. The timeline suggests it was All Tomorrows that did the ripping off, but I really think the fact that his distantly human-related genocidal robots take the form of giant black spheres is mere coincidence.

Well, if I had to come up with a genocidal race of gravity manipulating robots, I really couldn't imagine anything but a floating black sphere fitting the bill.

On the other hand, their ships are monoliths, for some odd reason. Way to rip off Ridley Scott!

I remember the book being about making expanding to the stars and then another intelligent species destroying us but keeping mutated survivors in different planets without tech so they start diverging biologically over millions of years. More or less.

Just read this all the way through after seeing it posted here. Would certainly recommend

>I think the Qu come back again, but they kinda gloss over it.
Yeah iirc after the descendants of humanity encounter the friendly alien snake dudes they also reencounter the Qu and "subjugate" them

any link to some pdf for this one ?