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Inktober 2017 - 17

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by CyberCornEntropic

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P is for Pfrit. One of the dinkiest of mammals, the pfrit, Aquambulus hirsutus, can walk on water thanks to its light weight and whiskery paws and feet. A terror to mosquito descendents when it stabs its mouth into their larva to suck them dry, it's a boon to wetlands of Eurasia-America 50 million years in the future.

Perhaps inspired by the artists on DeviantArt who speculate on what future animals might look like, I bring you the pfrit, originally dreamed up by Dougal Dixon in his 1981 book After Man.

Art © 10/2017 Marvin E. Fuller

Keywords

mammal 59,153, water 17,142, ambiguous gender 8,720, inktober 8,267, insect 6,929, knife 3,530, bib 585, inktober 2017 290, fork 229, mosquito 111, larvae 44, utensil 3, pfrit 1

Details

Type: Picture/Pinup

Published: 7 years, 6 months ago

Rating: General

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fluffball

7 years, 6 months ago

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Oh, this is amazing.

It took me a few seconds to fully comprehend such an entity, but yes, this is quite interesting.
Nice work.

CyberCornEntropic

7 years, 6 months ago

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@ fluffball

Thank you. :) If you really want to be amazed, according to the book, an adult pfrit is around two inches long. :o Presumably, that doesn't include its tail.

EmmetEarwax

7 years, 6 months ago

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AFTER MAN. I have that book.
The author made a few errors: One species,the purrip bat,he said was called that because of its call. So called by who ?
Remember that Dougal Dixon is describing lifeforms 50 million years after the death of the last human being ! (I am going by a review in the NATURAL HISTORY magazine. Some other errors were more technical.)

He paints a pessimist view of man's future, extinction from running out of resourses, so plagues ,famine, etc., exterminate the human race and rats, foraging in the ruins of his cities, evolve into whole orders of mammals. So, intelligence was just a brief fad, a mistake by nature, and no further experiments in sentience take place...

Lovecraft had the same vision. We are only a brief phase in cosmic history. There were intelligences on earth before man, and there will be other, utterly nonhuman, peoples after man's extinction. (A beetle race after man, and an ararchnid civilization later yet,before earth dies.). No evidence actually exists of prehuman civilizations, tho, and some visionaries wonder if the lack of responses to signals to other worlds is due to there being NO other aliens, that we are the first !

Also Olaf Stapledon wrote two shattering novels, LAST AND FIRST MEN and its sequel LAST MEN IN LONDON, as well as a staggering vision of cosmic history, STAR MAKER.

CyberCornEntropic

7 years, 6 months ago

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Edited 7 years, 6 months ago by Owner

@ EmmetEarwax

Dougal Dixon wrote three speculative field guides of animals that I know of: After Man which looks at Earth in 50 million years in the future, Man After Man which looks at humans evolving to fill various ecological niches, and The New Dinosaurs which looks at today's Earth from a timeline in which the mass extinction of 65 million years ago didn't happen.  Of the three, I own the first and last.

Presumably the purrip bats were so called by aliens, time travelers, or even human descendants?  He basically only said that humans, as in Homo sapiens, went extinct, but that doesn't necessarily mean humanity went extinct.  After all, Homo habilis is extinct after evolving into Homo erectus which is also now extinct by having evolved into Homo sapiens.

I agree he falls into the trap of ecoguilt, which is most obvious in Man After Man.  For all its speculation on how humans might evolve to fit different ecological niches, it really his least appealing book to me for all its negativity.  Also, while he does illustrate the point that sapience is not an end goal of evolution (which has no goals), he seems to prefer to avoid dealing that it is a valid evolutionary possibility anyway, especially as there are a number of animals currently existing that could easily develop in that direction if humans weren't in the way, including parrots, dolphins, and rats.  I was certainly disappointed that he didn't try for an emergent sapient dinosaur, but his speculations also reflect the scientific knowledge of the late 70s and early 80s.

There used to be a website called "The Speculative Dinosaur Project" that proceeded along the same lines as The New Dinosaurs, but also reflected advancements in scientific knowledge since then.  They also seemed to disdain some aspects of Dixon's work.  Unfortunately, it's defunct now, the victim of a few server moves and a tendency to take things too seriously creeping in over time.

EmmetEarwax

7 years, 6 months ago

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Edited 7 years, 6 months ago by Owner

The pfrit using tools is your touch of whimsy.

CyberCornEntropic

7 years, 6 months ago

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@ EmmetEarwax

Indeed! :p The picture seemed to call for more than a pfrit staring blankly at a mosquito larva.

EmmetEarwax

7 years, 6 months ago

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Doug Dixon also wrote 2 other books, one where man does not become extinct, but evolves into nightmarish shapes. Maybe he wrote the one where after man migrates to the stars, remaining humans on earth gradually de-volve into slime.
Also he wrote a book where reptiles continue to dominate earth because the asteroid missed the earth. Again weird lifeforms.

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