Credit @Aelkus On Twitter

“Congratulations son, you’ve reinvented Romulans.” (Actually I imagine most Romulans would find these guys incredibly tedious to be around.)

So @wyattsalazar, I was listening to the first part of the first episode of Book Hell and I couldn’t help but notice you guys trying to remember the name of a book that had weird human-monkey people from the future in it. As it so happens, I know exactly what you were talking about.

The book you were looking for was called Man After Man, by the British paleontologist and author Dougal Dixon. As it so happens, Man After Man is the last of three books he wrote playing with the concept of “speculative evolution.” The first (below) was After Man: A Zoology of the Future. Published in 1981, it was an overview of life all around the world 50 million years from now, long after our extinction. If memory serves, there were a whole lot of rabbit-deer and rat-wolves running around.

The second was 1988′s The New Dinosaurs: An Alternative Evolution. The premise for that was that the Cretaceous-Tertiary mass extinction of 65 million years ago never occurred, and the dinosaurs (and a whole bunch of other critters) were allowed to survive and evolve in peace to the present day. Personally, I think it’s the best book of the three, but then again I have a pro-dinosaur bias, so interpret that as you will.

Man After Man came out in 1990, and it’s something of the black sheep of the trilogy. According to Dixon, his original idea for the book was to write a sequel to After Man in which humans, using time travel to flee the dying Earth of the modern day, arrive in the new world of 50 million years hence, and proceed to rebuild civilization and muck the planet up all over again. For whatever reason the idea fell through (though it did get reused for a space-colonization story that was only ever published in Japan), and Dixon wrote Man After Man instead, despite having no real desire to do so. I don’t like the book myself, partially because I feel it it delves too deeply into stock sci-fi tropes, chief among them telepathy, for a “serious” work of biological extrapolation, but also because I find the idea of creatures who wear the faces of humans but have the minds of animals to be...deeply unsettling. Still, it did give us a few good memes.

I’m not going to say it again: #bertie wooster deserves to win first place.

My go-to source for the history of scientific romances is Brian Stableford’s 1985 book Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. (While long out of print, this book is worth its weight in gold.) In Stableford’s account, scientific romances are very much the products of the environment they evolved from. Before the 1890s, publishing in Britain was divided into two rigid categories. On the “respectable” side were the great triple-decker novels, conservative in both style and content, and physically inaccessible to anyone who wasn’t wealthy or who didn’t have access to a circulating library. On the less reputable side were, of course, the penny dreadfuls; cheap to make, quick to read, easy to forget, and not that well-written. Scientific romances (and to a certain extent modern sf) tend to work best in the range between short stories, novellas, and single novels; long enough to properly extrapolate from a central idea, but not so long as to wear out their welcome. It was only at the end of the 19th century, with the decline of the triple-decker, the rise of a literate middle class, publications that catered to them, and of writers that could comfortably support themselves writing for this new audience, that scientific romances had the space and opportunity to emerge. Naturally, this was a different class of writers with different influences that those who had written the gothic works from earlier in the century, so scientific romances evolved in both style and content in a much different direction. (As an example, scientists in 19th-century Britain had a unique tradition of penning essays to explain their theories and their significance to a more general audience, a tendency that was absorbed wholeheartedly into the scientific romance, to the point that both scientists and novelists tried their hands at both essays and stories every so often.)

I was thinking about the literature of 1897 and it got me thinking about the Scientific Romances and how they differ from the Gothic Romances or Gothic Horrors of the age. Clearly, there is some overlap and Frankenstein (much earlier but still relevant) crosses those borders many time without showing a passport for either but by the late 19th you couldn't really compare say 'The War of the Worlds' to 'Dracula'. Where did they diverge so wildly? Or did they?

That’s a really good point, and I’m sorry I took so long to get to this question!  Arguably, Frankenstein himself brings this up- he started out reading ancient mystic texts and moved to more scientific ones later- but I guess there started to be a clearer divide between what we’d call fantasy and what we’d call science fiction as science itself became better known.  You could probably write gothic science fiction in the mode of Asimov, where the science is there to set up philosophical and psychological issues- I’d certainly read about the drama between robot heirs to their creators’ estate and legacy- but the divide certainly feels there.  Returning to H. G. Welles, maybe The Invisible Man is the midpoint?  Or maybe it’s when “scientist” became a common enough profession to not seem mysterious?  Any followers with ideas on this subject, help me out here!

I still haven’t played the Mass Effect games yet, but these sound like the sort of things the Enterprise-D comes across in the middle of a normal planetary survey or supply run that turns into some delightful adventure about missing time, lizard aliens, and good old-fashioned space madness.

Mass Effect one is like, oddly surreal and full of little mysteries. Like you go on any planet with the mako, and you come across all sorts of stuff. Like debris from space ships, abandoned tents and rovers, and even dead bodies in the middle of nowhere??? Or a random beacon with the dog tags to some captain. Let’s not forget the mummified Salarian on some lifeless planet out in the middle of nothing remarkable space.

There’s a gas giant in a system in like Hades Gamma or Gemini Sigma or something with a moon notable for having the abandoned ship of a Turian general that served in the Krogan rebellions. All it says is that he was nowhere to be found, only a deliberately depowered ship was found. Like???? Or the gas giant with mysterious machines beneath the clouds that no one knows the origin or purpose behind.

Therum has a town of 13,000 on it for the mining, but we never see it?? The planet that’s 90% ocean also has a settlement and we don’t see that one either! In any of the games we never get to visit Elysium, even though it’s mentioned several times.

Another planet has some weird history and prothean ruins or something else super mysterious on it, and Earth universities want to study it but it’s stuck behind what could be decades worth or arguing with the council about it.

How did the Thresher Maws get scattered to so many random planets, and what they eat there??

And then there’s random outposts on these empty planets but we don’t know what they were researching?? The one planet where the mine is filled with husks, but we are never given any reason as to how they turned into husks in the mine. Or the occasional empty freighter ship orbiting a star that has some bizarre reason for it being abandoned and forgotten.

How did the pirates or scavengers get on these planets and appear in hideouts or trying to salvage some debris, but there’s no ship around? Did they get dropped off and someone was coming back to pick them up or what?? Where are the big pirate gangs based at? Some place akin to Omega or Illium or just a base on some empty planet?

Some of this confusion with logic, but most of these are like, so mysterious and I want to know all the answers.

You’ve hit the nail on the head. While I have a conservative temperament, I don’t agree with a lot of traditional North American conservatism. And yet I’ve loyally read the works of a few conservative writers for years now, because they shared the qualities you listed. They’re able to articulate their beliefs so you can understand where they’re coming from, they try not to caricature their opponents and give credit where credit is due (sometimes), and they have a lively awareness of themselves and their blind spots. (Having a sense of humor about all of this is also a big help.)

I don’t think the solution is to follow a bunch of people from across the political spectrum to ensure that you’re not ensconcing yourself in an echo chamber, but to follow smart people. Period. People who aren’t afraid to criticize their own tribe. People who don’t speak entirely in buzzwords. People who’ve given some indication that there’s a brain in there, not just a collection of ideological talking points.

There was also the Tox Uthat, the MacGuffin from the third-season episode “Captain’s Holiday”, that could perform the same trick. No explanation is ever given as to how the device works, beyond the Treknobabble description of “quantum phase inhibitor”, so beyond “piece of alien technology from three centuries after TNG that works by Trek science rules”, there isn’t much room to speculate as to how it shuts down stellar fusion reactions.

In Star Trek Generations, the bad guys had a substance which could stop the fusion inside a star, making it collapse and produce a solar-system-obliterating shockwave. This is actually somewhat feasible compared to your average Star Trek science: for various reasons I don't think it could actually exist in the way it does in the movie, but you could conceive of a substance that acted as "fusion poison", producing more of itself when it collided with energetic hydrogen but was not itself able to be fused further. Even the bit about the shockwave was really plausible: it's pretty much exactly what happens in an actual core collapse supernova.

The one really unfeasible part was that it couldn't happen instantaneously like it did in the movie. Even in the core of starts, most hydrogen atom collisions don't result in fusion - they can't overcome the Coulomb barrier. If you introduced a self-replicating fusion poison into the core of the Sun, it would grow only very slowly, at least at first. You could imagine a fusion poison produced almost no notable effects for centuries or millennia, then maybe a one-lifetime period of noticeable effects, then the Sun went out and everyone died.

Which I actually think would be a better story. Suppose you knew that there was a fusion poison, but not exactly when the Sun would collapse, since astrophysical time scales are immense and imprecise. It's going to be in the next 10,000 years, but beyond that you're not certain. Would people try to escape the Solar System? What would life be look in an era of certain doom but highly-uncertain timing?

I’m a touch surprised you didn’t know about the Red Army in BF1. When DICE released the “In the Name of the Tsar” DLC, they added “Tsaritsyn” and “Volga River” as maps explicitly set during the Russian Civil War. Kinda wish we could have done some fighting along the Trans-Siberian railroad line, but I suppose it would be harder to justify the inclusion of armored vehicles en masse.

i didnt know battlefield 1 had the red army in it so i was pleasantly surprised when i quickmatched into tsaritsyn on the red army side. i took a horse from the camp and ran around a tank and threw grenades at it until it exploded, then got caught in level geometry and watched a dude leisurely deploy a mortar and turn me and my horse into gravy. on my next spawn i threw gas grenades into a house and choked out 4 dudes, and got into a shooting match across a hill with my extremely comically bad fedorov-degtyarev against a sniper. good game.

And yes @dumnhpy​, that is indeed Charles Napier, who returned to Trek with the DS9 episode “Little Green Men” as Lt. Gen. Rex Denning.

What a difference twenty six (or negative twenty-two) years makes.

TOS costume design really said “men in thigh highs with tits out”

I’m both disgusted and entertained. Of course, as both a Simpsons fan and a sadist, I have a challenge for you: * Cloves * Tom Collins mix * Frozen pie crust

Dooooooooooooooo it.

Finally. The great taste of Worcester Sauce in a soft drink!

(and I know. It’s pronounced “Woostah”)