speculative zoology

Book review – A Dog’s World: Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World without Humans

7-minute read
keywords: ethology, evolutionary biology, zoology

At first blush, the question behind A Dog’s World could have been lifted straight from the pages of What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by xkcd creator Randall Munroe. What would happen to our dogs if we disappeared overnight? Far from being mere whimsy or idle academic speculation, A Dog’s World is a serious attempt to scientifically answer this thought experiment. There is also a strong ethical component to it as the authors apply their ideas to the here and now: how can we create better lives for dogs today?

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Book review – After Man: A Zoology of the Future

This is a review where I am going to show my age. The year was 1981, long before the Inquisitive Biologist thought of himself as the Inquisitive Biologist (I had probably not turned one yet), and Dougal Dixon’s book After Man was published. And with it, Dixon pretty much single-handedly created the concept of speculative zoology as far as I can tell. The book was re-issued in the US in 1998 but has been unavailable for over a decade. Now, the good folk at Breakdown Press have released a facsimile version of the 1981 first edition to make this gem available to a new generation. And you get a new author’s introduction to boot.

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