Interview on animal
who is on the verge of
extinction
Answers
Answer:
The mythological-looking creatures illustrated in the book seem to come out of a Tim Burton movie. There’s the rabbuck, a rabbit-like animal that has grown the size of a deer because it lives where there are no predators. Then, there’s the reedstilt — also called Harundopes virgatus — with a long, beaky snout and razor thin legs to snatch fish out of the water. And mountainous regions will be inhabited by the groath — also called Hebecephalus montanus — whose females have a pyramid-shaped horn on their heads to defend their young. Dixon clearly let his imagination ran wild, but also took the rules of evolution and adaptation into consideration when envisioning these new species.
Image: Breakdown Press
When it came out, After Man was often portrayed in the media as a book about the extinction of humanity, Dixon writes in the new introduction. But that was a faulty interpretation, he says. The disappearance of people was just an excuse to talk about evolution: let nature go wild without humans meddling with it, and see what happens. “It’s not about the extinction of man, it’s not a doom-laden thing,” Dixon tells The Verge. “It’s showing that life goes on and it doesn’t matter how much damage we do. The Earth will survive and will be repopulated. It’s a note of positivity rather than a note of gloom.”
No matter how it was received, After Man inspired the field of so-called speculative biology, where the principles of evolution fuel the creation of imaginary creatures and monsters. With the new edition out, The Verge spoke with Dixon about where he got the idea for After Man, how he created the animals in it, and whether the book would look any different if he wrote it today.
Image: Breakdown Press
The interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
How did you get the idea for After Man?
It’s been something that had been brewing in my head for a long, long time. It’s going back to the 1960s. I was watching a television program with my father. That’s when the conservationists’ cry was “Save the Tiger!” My father said, “Why the save the tiger? If the tiger becomes extinct, something will evolve to take its place. That’s how evolution works.” And I thought at the time, that’s a very unconstructive attitude. As time went, studying biology, I realized that was actually the case. Things become extinct, other things evolve to take their place. So I used to think about what animal life might be like in the future. As a child, I was doing comic strips of strange beasts and so on. But then it died away for a bit.
It wasn’t until the mid 1970s that I met up with a friend of mine that I hadn’t seen for a long time and he was wearing a “Save the Whale” button. That sparked it all over again. Save the Whale? Why save the whale? If the whale becomes extinct, what could evolve to take its place? I thought, I can make a book about this. This is something we can use to talk about other natural processes of evolution in a totally novel way. There were plenty of popular level books on evolution going around at the time, but they were mostly books that looked toward the past — the dinosaurs, the development of the horse, and all that. It seemed to suggest that evolution is something that happened in the past and then stopped. That’s not the case.