Using Human Evolution in Fantasy/Sci-Fi World-Building (Part II)
How can human evolution help us world-build better fantasy and science fiction? From alternative history to epic fantasy to cyberpunk to space opera, the possibilities are as limitless as your own imagination!
Last time, we talked about a number of exciting new discoveries in human evolution, and explored the concept of using those discoveries of prehistoric species of humans to world-build better, more realistic science fiction and fantasy “races”.
(Let me also repeat what I said last time: when we talk about fantasy and sci-fi “races”, what we typically mean is species).
Within the past decade or so, a raft of new discoveries have profoundly changed our understanding of the number of human species that once roamed this earth — and we’ve even discovered that different groups of our own species interbred with some of them.
Although in many cases we still have a long way to go to understand key aspects of the behavior and capabilities of our vanished relatives, what we know or can plausibly guess about is more than enough fuel for the imagination if you’re looking to world-build better fantasy/sci-fi races.
With all of this in mind, let’s let our imaginations soar as we explore a few possibilities.
Possibility 1): Alternative History/Prehistory
Let’s imagine prehistory working out a bit different: instead of Homo sapiens having the planet to ourselves, one or more other ancient species of humans survive to the present.
If you’re familiar with alternate history, this would be an extreme form. Instead of speculating about Constantinople falling to the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate in 717–718, or Napoleon Bonaparte triumphing, or the Confederacy winning the American Civil War, we’d be re-writing tens if not hundreds of thousands of years of prehistory.
One really wonderful version of this is Harry Turtledove’s book A Different Flesh, which tells the tale of a world in which Homo erectus colonized the Americas and survived until the present. Homo sapiens, our own species, prevailed in the Eastern Hemisphere, and history seems to have unfolded there in much the same fashion until the discovery of the Americas.
Once the Europeans arrive in the New World, they start to variously displace the so-called “sims” and enslave them. This has many consequences for the course of American history, and I don’t want to spoil them all for you, but suffice it to say that they include some interesting moral, ethical, and intellectual changes from our timeline.
Let’s try to think of a few more possibilities. What if Homo sapiens had failed to expand out of Africa, leaving Neanderthals, Denisovans, and others to survive and thrive in Eurasia — and possibly free to people Australia and the Americas as well?
Would Neanderthal societies in the Fertile Crescent have domesticated crops at some point? Would Denisovans in China have domesticated other crops?
How would great civilizations, trade networks, and religious changes play out in a Eurasia and Northern Africa inhabited by three, possibly four or five, different human species?
Possibility 2): Science Fiction
If alternate history/prehistory offer interesting possibilities for world-building using human evolution, imagine what we can do with science fiction.
But if science fiction is usually about the future, how do we get prehistoric human species from the past into the future?
One option, of course, is simply to propose that history worked out differently as per the last possibility: take our world of several different human species above, and suppose that at some point one or more of them has an industrial revolution and ultimately creates high-tech, futuristic societies.
That’s not a bad option per se, but it’s far from our only option.
In his novel Blindsight, author Peter Watts tells a story of alien contact, intelligence, and consciousness, and one of the more interesting plot points is the existence of “vampires”. In the world of the novel, vampires were a short-lived subspecies of our own species (Homo sapiens vampiris), one which split off about 700,000 years ago (to be clear, we now know this is farther back than Homo sapiens existed).
The vampires of Blindsight have a number of very cool features, including an extremely scientific reason they need to drink our blood. However, they went extinct shortly after the rise of civilization, because a curious “glitch” in their neurological wiring made them have seizures whenever they saw intersecting right angles — such as those produced by Euclidean architecture (think doors, windows).
That would be cool enough, but of course Blindsight is a novel of alien contact and thus set in the future — when the vampires have been brought back by the authorities, who want to use their highly logical mental abilities to help suppress an insurgency.
The vampires are also an important part of the thought experiment that forms the basis of the novel, a theory about consciousness and intelligence. I don’t want to give too much away, but Watts uses them to speak to his theme in a way that is simply masterful.
Last time, I also mentioned the Neoanders from Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, a genetically-resurrected strain of humans based on Neanderthals. They’re essentially a modern/futuristic genetic reconstruction — similar “de-extinction” proposals have been made for the extinct passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) — although they only appear in the last third or so of the novel.
Genetic engineering may be the intuitive way to go if you want prehistoric humans (real or imagined) in your science fiction and don’t want an alternate history/prehistory scenario as well. You could also imagine a species of humans evolving from our own, perhaps from some population of colonists sent to a planet around a distant star.
Possibility 3): Fantasy
What can we do with human evolution and fantasy? Answer: practically anything we want!
As far as I’m concerned, fantasy is the most speculative of genres. Many fantasy worlds have a medieval feel, but there’s absolutely no reason you couldn’t create a fantasy world based on the Paleolithic, or the 18th and 19th centuries, or even a fantasy world with starships.
At the time of this writing, I’m unaware of any high fantasy that makes use of Neanderthals or any other prehistoric human species. From the world of pulp and adventure fiction (arguably fantasy) I’ll mention Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Land That Time Forgot and sequels.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the Parshmen and Parshendi of Brandon Sanderson’s The Stormlight Archive series, the first book of which is The Way of Kings: while they don’t read as a prehistoric human species, they are human-like but with some interesting differences, including magic and biology. They certainly constitute some of the most original world-building I’ve seen in fantasy.
An entire universe of possibilities exists here, but let’s consider a few ideas about how to use human evolution in fantasy world-building:
· A fantasy world in which evolution occurred along similar lines to the real world, with one or more other human species evolving along with ours and surviving to the story present.
· A fantasy world in which gods created two or more species of humans.
· Different human species may have different magics.
· Different human species may have the same magics.
Conclusion & Caution
New discoveries that affect our understanding of human evolution can lead us to more original world-building of fantasy and sci-fi “races”. Whether you’re looking to write alternate history, sci-fi, fantasy, or some combination, an incredible range of possibilities awaits you.
With this said, let’s discuss a few gentle cautions, starting with the most important: be careful about essentializing.
If all Neanderthals are thuggish brutes, or all Denisovans are cultured and like rosewater baths, you’ve committed the sin of bad and lazy world-building.
Real-world societies are complex, not monolithic, and essentializing all members of this, that, or the other group is uncomfortable territory for many fans, and with good reason — it comes off as creepy and prejudicial, not realistic and human.
Also, be careful of coding, i.e. building fantasy/science-fiction “races” that read as this, that, or the other real-world ethnic/religious/etc. group. This is about more than people’s sensibilities (although it’s about those, too): it’s another example of bad and lazy world-building.
As this excellent video explains, bad world-building creates fictional groups with heavy-handed, on-the-nose similarities with (stereotyped) ideas about real-world groups. A smarter approach is to world-build original groups that are in their own original situations, even if some real-world parallels do exist.
In general, try to go beyond pure biological differences to more complex cultural and social processes. To give one example, Neanderthals were more robust than Homo sapiens, but that doesn’t mean that they would have stayed that way, particularly in the warming world of the Holocene, and it certainly doesn’t mean they wouldn’t have ultimately discovered agriculture and created advanced civilizations with sophisticated high cultures.
We’ve only touched on a few ideas here, a handful of glimmering possibilities. Who knows what else you could create?
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