Books in Review 
Striger, Striger, Burning Dim 
by Matt Cartmill 
After Man: A Zoology of the Fu- 
ture, by Dougal Dixon. St. Martin's 
Press, $14.95; 124 pp., illus. 
The animal I wanted 
Couldn’t get into the world . . . 
I can hear it crying 
When I sit like this apart from life. 
Kenneth Patchen 
Dougal Dixon wants lots of animals 
that never made it into the world. Giant 
killer rats with incisors like interlocking 
sickles. Naked pink sea lion things that 
swim through desert sand like dusty 
sharks. Big spotted bunny rabbits with 
the long necks and dainty hooves of 
gazelles. Rodent ostriches, feathered 
whales, blind wingless bats the size of 
Volkswagens: he dreams about them, 
draws them, sculpts them, makes up 
classifications and pedigrees for them. 
In this amusing and disturbing book, he 
marshals his imaginary zoo for its first 
parade in public. 
After Man has a certain obsessive 
quality to it, which is one of the things 
that make it disturbing. God only knows 
what a psychoanalytic reviewer would 
make of it, although a few choice Freud- 
ian symbols are obvious to anyone (for 
example, the recurrent image of a yawn- 
ing, toothy mouth set in an eyeless face). 
But although some of Dixon’s creatures 
are frankly nightmarish, and the book’s 
format and illustrations seem to be 
aimed at the people who buy those cof- 
fee-table books on the natural history of 
trolls, After Man is not just another 
dreary exercise in fantasy-world con- 
struction. It aspires to be both an imagi- 
native entertainment and a textbook of 
sorts on the principles of evolutionary 
biology. 
Dixon, a former paleontology student 
turned animator and pop-science writer, 
offers us a minutely detailed vision of 
what the world might look like fifty 
million years from now. He makes three 
basic assumptions. The first and sim- 
plest is that the continents are going to 
keep on drifting along their present 
courses, producing a new world map 
with differently arranged habitats. The 
second is that Homo sapiens is going to 
become extinct in the near future, when 
shortages of food, land, and raw materi- 
als demolish the fragile industrial econo- 
my that we all depend on (he says) for 
survival. The third is that most of to- 
day’s large mammals — whales, ele- 
phants, cats, dogs, horses — will either 
be wiped out by our death throes or 
sucked down to oblivion along with us 
and our pet-food canneries. This third 
assumption is the critical one, because it 
leaves lots of empty niches waiting to be 
filled by the rats and rabbits and reptiles 
that creep out to stare at our ruins. 
The book’s first thirty-two pages are 
devoted to reality. Dixon gives us a 
survey of the ground rules of his evolu- 
tionary game — genetics, ecology, ethol- 
ogy, convergence, mimicry, Bergmann’s 
rule, and so on — and a 6,000-word syn- 
opsis of The Story Thus Far, from the 
Precambrian up through the history of 
Bats that have taken up a terrestrial 
life are the flooer, an insect-eater, 
and the night stalker, which devours 
mammals and reptiles indiscriminately. 
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