Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future

by Dougal Dixon

Book Overview

Man After Man is an ambitious attempt to view the future as far distant from us as those ramapithecine creatures whose fragmentary remains turn up in African fossil beds. What is our future? Will the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312035608
• ISBN13: 9780312035600
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 2.20 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Creeping us out

I'll grant that this fabulation projects a filthy vision for homo sapiens and the Earth, in fact the Universe, as this dirty animal's destructiveness reaches further and further. Some reviewers seem to be offended by the book, for some reason, if I understand them rightly, thinking, demanding to think, that Man will go prancing majestically into some sort of Better World, something that religionists and Communists have pretended to believe, and now the Consumer Junk Technologists tell you they believe this stuff. Just recently we've heard of not one, but several wanton murders of Iraqi civilians by American Marines, with the leaders of the Greatest Nation in History lying and stonewalling and promising to hire someone to teach courses in ethics, with the President of the United States standing in front of a camera, blinking and gulping stupidly, changing the subject to outlawing Gay Marriage. You can live in a country like this, and STILL think that Dixon's vision of the future is too pessimistic?

I love it.

Being a lover of history, Man After Man, really is something I enjoyed. It is about the changing face of mankind and future history, something I enjoy very much. Many people complain that timeline and stories seemed confusing and that the artwork is not that great. First off, I didn't find them at all confusing and the artwork was there to help the reader picture the beings that mankind have become NOT to win any awards or prizes. Don't compare the book to others, just enjoy it. It is NOT a serious piece of work.I do wish it had been longer and had touched a little more on the changes to the other animals and the plantlife. It would of padded out the book more. I wanted more details!

Outstandingly Orginial

In Dougal Dixon's latest "what if" book of hypothetical evolution, he explores the future of humanity when our current species is extinct and new, genetically engineered forms flurish and evolve. Although it isn't by any means a novel, this book is different from his others in the fact that Dixon tells us short annecdotes from the future through the eyes of characters. The illustrations are execellent, outlandish, and on exactly the right note. The entire premise of the book manages to be eerie as well as captivating. It is a vision, not of what our future might be, but what it is becomming.

An excellent display of Dougal Dixon's beautiful imagination

This has been my favorite book since I was 14 years old. I have read it countless times, and still continue to this day. I have never read another science-fantasy book that has captured my interest as this book. It is very hard to find since it is out of print, but searching for it is well worth it.

Inventive, original and evolutionary believable.

This book is a perfect marriage of art and science. It isn't like a typical 'textbook' science book at all. It's about how Man, using accelerated genetical engineering, could evolve in the future. We follow such specimens as 'The Hitek' who live in mechanical cradles because their bodies cannot withstand the elements of future Earth, to the Plain Dwellers, Aquamorphs, Vacumorphs etc. We follow our trails from genetically altered humans 50 years into the future all the way to the resulting generations as far as 50 million years ahead. An incredibly visually stimulating book, {the illustrations are wonderful} it also makes you wonder seriously what could lie in the future of 'Man' as a humanoid species, long after we, ourselves are gone. It took me forever to find this book because it's now out of print. If you're interested in the idea of future rather than traditional anthropolgy and you do happen to come across this book, Buy it!