What is the point of speculating about evolution? Why spend time considering whether a monster is “plausible”? It’s for the same reason your eye is drawn to the image above. You are bound to find it interesting.
Consider, for example, the dry fact that flight requires powerful muscles, and heavy muscles require more muscles to lift their weight. It’s an interesting problem for a certain type of mind, but for the rest of us, it’s hard to see why we should care. We don’t fly that way.

But what if we did?
Speculative evolution teaches the reader something real by unreal example. Seeing our own form distorted, we feel the impulse to pay attention. Doing so, we come away with some knowledge worth having, but that’s only the first step. You can’t look at a winged man without asking where those wings came from. What processes changed him so much, and why? If it involves people, speculative evolution must become a story.
Dougal Dixon, the grandfather of speculative evolution, made an attempt to tell such a story. I would say, though, with less success than his other projects.

In this way, Kosemen sets the stage for real natural selection to start working. How can we expect these new "sub-humans" to evolve under natural selection? Most simply go extinct, but others produce interesting solutions to their problems. These examples make up my favorite part of the book, from Snake People to Modular People to flying Pterosapiens, most of whom are killed off in the third act by new villains, beginning the Sisyphean process all over again.
As you can’t talk about people without telling a story, you can’t tell a story without revealing your philosophy. In All Tomorrows, individuals struggle not only to overcome physical hardship, but to find meaning in their lives. You evolved from the victims of alien geneticists, and now your planet is under attack by cyborgs. Why go on at all? And, in an intergalactic narrative spanning billions of years, who are you in the first place?
The first character of All Tomorrows is humanity as a whole, illustrated by Kosemen's own portrait of himself as a Martian.

The final character is the narrator, who is revealed at the end to be not the godlike voice of the author but a far-future anthropologist. He’s an alien with no relation to us or our daughter-species, who has written this very personal and somewhat cockeyed interpretation of his findings. The narrator is a fun device, but his existence detracts from the book's nature as a series of portraits. Those models weren't real people after all, but invented by an imaginative anthropologist based on skull fragments and ancient tablets. That's a bit disappointing, but I understand why Kosemen included the narrator. He needed someone to tell us his book's theme:
"It is not the destination, but the trip, that matters…Love today, and seize all tomorrows!"
All right, so the narrator is an alien space-Buddhist. Looking back on the book after you've finished it, it's easy to see the chain of reincarnation: demon-ridden sufferer, lowly worm, beast, man, and enlightened soul, floating with folded limbs in its zero-G habitat.

Despite all the narrator's protestations about the amoral, goal-less groping of evolution, he draws clear meaning from his subjects. On a deeper level than the book's explicit theme, we are given to understand life is better than death, and intelligence is better than stupidity.
As to what is best in life, I’ll bow out with this example of example of the humanism of All Tomorrows.2

We don’t always get snow for Christmas in Sofia, but this year and this high up the Vitosha mountainside, we had a blanket a good foot thick. Crusty, too, and slightly damp. Once we’d gathered all the kids in my father-in-law’s house and gotten them over the distractions of presents and food, I took them outside for an epic snowball fight.

Of course, my own daughters love to throw snowballs at me. So does my father-in-law’s son by his second wife, whom I’ll call Anton. Anton is just a few months older than Maggie, and his and my relationship has been strained since I grabbed him when he was running around in a restaurant and told him to stop.

Today, I could have ignored him and told myself I was being gentle. Or, I could have been punctilious about distributing my snowballs equally across all the children. Instead, I let him have it. Anton would run, I would chase him. He would turn to fire a snowball at me, I’d aim for his center of mass. Several times I cocked my arm and he looked up at me, eyes wide, and said “uh oh!”

That’s not a Bulgarian phrase.1 He was repeating a line from an American movie, something he was replaying in his mind, in which I was the antagonist: mean old Uncle Dan. Anton hit me in the ear with a snowball, achieving catharsis, and that was the end of Act I.

In Act II, I was back with fearsome new threats. Two snowballs at once! And I lured the children under snow-laden trees before knocking the branches so they’d get showered. I pushed Ellie onto the ground and rolled her around. But another snowball in the ear! Curse those wretched children! It was time to unleash my most terrible weapon, yet.
When I reached for the shovel, I thought, This is the way I feel before things spin out of control and someone gets hurt. That is, I felt fun. Wild fun.

The snow flew from my shovel in an all-enveloping mass. My victim ran from me, screaming “chicho Dan!” and laughing. I scooped up another great wad and turned to the next child. Pavlina told me she and the other adults watched us through the living-room windows, and compared the experience to a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

I chased Ellie around the corner of the house to where Anton was hiding. He backed away and tripped. In a panic, he jumped back up and headbutted Ellie in the forehead.

And here it was. I could have fussed over her: how could you have made my daughter et cetera? I could have even stayed silent and let the rest of the family tell Anton all that. But I made sure everyone knew what had really happened.
The other kids went off to build their cities of blocks while I cuddled Ellie on the couch. I’m not the bad guy; I just think injuries are good. They’re what make a memory real.

In other news, after much time and a little prodding, I collected the poem I wrote for Wealthgiver into one place. Here’s “The Andrean Prophesy,” which Kori recites before she orders Andrei kidnapped and brought to her. People seem to like it, but nobody has asked me any questions about it. Doesn’t anyone want to know what Xēthópaniâ means?

And, I decided to start the free serialization of Wealthgiver early. You can find it on Royal Road, where, eventually, the whole book will become available for free. Paid subscribers on Substack and Patreon get to see each chapter 10 weeks earlier.

And I read some things.
Aspects of Faith by C. S. Lewis
More collected essays from my favorite apologist. “Miracles,” especially, gave me a way to think about the natural and supernatural that didn’t seem silly. And it resulted in a conversation over Christmas where I completely failed to make any sense at all. So that was fun.

Bloodline by Will Wight
After my second read, I stand by my first impression that this book marks the beginning of the decline of the Cradle series, and the quality of Wight’s books in general. The monsters, battles, and personal growth are all there, but don’t intertwine with each other nearly as much as they could. Lindon’s relationship with his family and homeland should be the heart of this book, but it’s like the author is afraid from digging into them. We don’t get a catharsis, and no number of giant beasts makes up for that.

Burmese Days by George Orwell.
When you begin a novel, you think, what interesting problems! However will the protagonist solve them? In Burmese Days, Orwell’s character shoots himself. That’s a betrayal of me, the reader. I have no patience for despair.
Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

(Recommended by Jane Psmith , whose taste is excellent). The first half was sweet and insightful, but the second half loses vitality until it trails off into nothing much. I think the reason for this is Lewis’s decision to center the book on “joy,” his word for an emotion that swept over him at times as a child, and which he used to pull himself back from disenchantment as a young man. All well and good, except that’s only the first two thirds of the story. After Lewis found religion, he got married. After his wife died, he mostly stopped writing. As for how his inner life evolved in the final third of his life, we’re left, tragically, to wonder.

Soldier of the Mist by Gene Wolfe
Sometimes I need to feel better, and I turn to Gene Wolfe. On this third read of Soldier of the Mist, I could figure out what was actually going on in the life of Latro and I could focus on the way he deals with it. Maybe because he is so vulnerable to betrayal, amnesiac Latro treats everyone he meets (and he meets them again every day) with unfailing openness, loyalty, and honor. Others feel compelled return the favor, and they become better for it.

The Wizard’s Butler by Nathan Lowell
I was hooked at the beginning, when an old wizard and an out-of-work veteran take a look at each other and fall self-consciously into the roles of Lord and Butler. It’s very sweet, and continues so as the characters set about to healing themselves. There are certainly flaws in this book - characters and plot lines that don’t fulfill their promise or fall away entirely - but the atmosphere makes up for it. And I’m genuinely interested in the day-to-day work that goes into running a mansion.

The Warrior Prophet by R. Scott Bakker
On my second read-through of this series, I can see some of the cracks. H. R. Geiger accompanies J. R. R. Tolkein on the Crusades, but it’s saved from being boring by the author’s honesty, and the fact that he has something to say. There’s a point at which Akamian, on a march through hell toward something worse, looks down at his broken sandal strap and just can’t deal with it. I’ve been there, man.

Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer
I first listened to this audiobook when I was eleven or twelve years old. It might have just been Frederick Davidson’s voice that did it for me. Listening to it again, I got more of what Mortimer was trying to do, showing us the parallels between the lives of the attorney and the criminals he defends. That’s why Rumpole believes so strongly in the presumption of innocence; he knows the line between good and evil cuts through his heart as well.

My alternate history novel Wealthgiver features two constructed languages. One (Bessian) is for daily use and will not concern us here, but the other is Ancient Thracian, used ritual purposes such as giving prophesies. One such prophesy sets the story going in chapter three.

One reader was curious about how Ancient Thracian1 is pronounced. He also asked for asked for a more accurate, less rhyming, English translation.
​
First, The Prophesy of Andrei in the original Ancient Thracian:
Kōgaió ió
Pódes xénai. Dymó
Dóubous tous me
Iérous phlēsté.
Porostreiýn iáes 5
Ápaes tḗs rhódaes
Pephlón iēn tóus
Sélkanthas se strátous.
Xēthópeti pós iá,
Stas zýn Xēthópaniâ. 10
Zēltón ze gríssma tón
No êan désyme xinón.
Pleistorós êrgetar.
Sarḗ ton désaitar!

The lines are each seven syllables long, with a beat of pause between each line and the next (except line 5, which has eight syllables long and has no pause). For example, the first line is chanted “ko-o-ga-i-O i-O (pause).”

Long vowels (for example ē) are always chanted as two syllables. Diphthongs (for example ai) are usually two syllables as well, but sometimes they are a single syllable. See the difference between iáes (i-A-es) and Xēthópaniâ (“kse-THO-pan-ya”). A circumflex over a vowel indicates an on-glide, such as â (“ya”) or ê (“ye”), but there is no spelling to differentiate an off-glide from a diphthong. Xénai is pronounced “KSE-na-i) but désaitar is “DE-sai-tar.” The reader is expected to know the difference. Accented vowels are stressed.

X is pronounced “ks.” TH, KH, and PH might once have been pronounced as aspirates (tʰ, kʰ, pʰ) or as fricatives (θ, x, ɸ), but are today pronounced as normal unvoiced stops: t, k, p.

Now, the rhyming translation:

On Holy Mountain foreign Feet.
You make Sacred Depths with smoke replete.
Rivers ruddy stream around [5]
The armies tugging at her gown.
With Master at hand, the Mistress will stand. [10]
If gold and debt with welcome's met.
Comes the Wealthgiver. May you him give her!

And the literal translation:

On the Holy One
Foreign Feet. With smoke
The Sacred Depths
You fill.
Stream [5]
The red waters
Around her peplos
(which is) tugged at (by) armies.
With the Guest-master behind,
Stands the Guest-mistress. [10]
If gold and the foreign debt
Ever are welcomed.
Wealth-giver comes.
May (the) Maiden welcome him!


If this translation has tickled your curiosity, why not…Leave a comment…and ask your own question?
Read the story for free on Royal Road.
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1 This is a fictional reconstruction of the real but poorly-attested Thracian language.