C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.