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Speculative future is in my opinion the easiest category to get a foundational understanding of how speculative biology works. It’s very straightforward. A lot of projects do this in increments: what will Earth flora and fauna look like 5 million years from now? 15? 100? Gives you a lot of wiggle room while still having a solid foundation to build on, since we already have a lot of appearances and behaviors to explore, so it’s easier to extrapolate behaviors and anatomy of descendants. In a warm wet future, might alligators become the top predators in North America, spreading into Canada as rising sea levels turn much of our continent into brackish wetlands? If most predators die out in the same extinction event that takes out humanity, might we see a clade of predatory lagomorphs descended from hares establish themselves as the new apex predators? Feral cats seem more likely but stranger things have happened. I imagine any surviving domesticated species would have a population advantage in at least some human extinction scenarios. This can be a wide open playground built from a solid base, and is a prompt I recommend to anyone wanting to start exploring speculative biology.

After Man by Dougal Dixon is not only a foundational text of speculative evolution, it is a perfect example of the speculative future category. The illustrations in this one are highly evocative and many have become icons of speculative biology, including filter feeding penguins, lagomorphs analogous to deer, and a bat turned auditory apex predator that influenced the concept of Primeval’s future predator, the aliens from A Quiet Place, and the Makers of Silence in Kaishel.

Description
Speculative future is in my opinion the easiest category to get a foundational understanding of how speculative biology works. It’s very straightforward. A lot of projects do this in increments: what will Earth flora and fauna look like 5 million years from now? 15? 100? Gives you a lot of wiggle room while still having a solid foundation to build on, since we already have a lot of appearances and behaviors to explore, so it’s easier to extrapolate behaviors and anatomy of descendants. In a warm wet future, might alligators become the top predators in North America, spreading into Canada as rising sea levels turn much of our continent into brackish wetlands? If most predators die out in the same extinction event that takes out humanity, might we see a clade of predatory lagomorphs descended from hares establish themselves as the new apex predators? Feral cats seem more likely but stranger things have happened. I imagine any surviving domesticated species would have a population advantage in at least some human extinction scenarios. This can be a wide open playground built from a solid base, and is a prompt I recommend to anyone wanting to start exploring speculative biology.

After Man by Dougal Dixon is not only a foundational text of speculative evolution, it is a perfect example of the speculative future category. The illustrations in this one are highly evocative and many have become icons of speculative biology, including filter feeding penguins, lagomorphs analogous to deer, and a bat turned auditory apex predator that influenced the concept of Primeval’s future predator, the aliens from A Quiet Place, and the Makers of Silence in Kaishel.