History Literature / AllTomorrows

** The Bug Facer World was invaded by an unknown alien race, making them an isolationist species. It worked in their favor when the Gravital decided to keep them around.

** The Gravitals believed themselves the sole inheritors of the Star People ad while they didn't hate other posthumans outright their extinction was righteous from their perspective.

* LookOnMyWorksYeMightyAndDespair: Played with. At the end of the book, it is revealed that humans have been extinct. Despite this, enough of their works have survived that an alien archaeologist can piece together their history a billion years later.

* TheEmpire: The Machine Empire run by the Gravital, who see themselves as the only "true" descendants of humanity and see everyone else as beneath them. True to this trope, they began a campaign of conquest and genocide against anyone they considered inferior.

* JustForFun/AbusingTheKardashevScaleForFunAndProfit: The first galactic empire was a borderline type II civilization, possibly even type II itself: They had a mass arsenal of weapons capable of blowing up stars and had started colonizing the entire galaxy. The Qu, meanwhile, had almost a billion of years of experience, and with a few thousands of years they easily crushed humanity even with above weapons, putting them into Solid Type III, with the text mentioning that they were capable of "traveling from one spiral arm to another", with their civilization possibly spanning multiple galaxies.

* AnAesop: It is not your ultimate destination in life, but what you do along the way, that matters.
** Living for abstract goals about the future and grand narratives about the past, rather than enjoying the present, are so often what leads to atrocities.

* ArtisticLicenseBiology: Pterosapiens are short lived allegedly because flight and sapience cannot be balanced. But in real life highly intelligent birds like corvids and parrots have lifespans comparable to humans, and birds and bats generally live longer on average than similar sized flightless mammals, likely due to metabolic quirks precisely because they need extra juice to fly. A more plasuible justification could possibly be the "square-cube law", where their bodies grow faster than their mass.

* BeliefMakesYouStupid: Some of the Terrestrials stunted the growth of the Newborn races to be treated as Gods.

* FormerlySapientSpecies: After the Qu conquer humanity, they transform the surviving humans into beasts as a grotesque punishment for their perceived crimes. The results are tremendously varied, including titanic elephant-like creatures, bat- and pterosaur-like fliers, various aquatic strains, ferocious predators and tick-like parasites. Many died out after the departure of the Qu, but others survived to form complex ecologies. Some of these post-humans eventually re-evolve sapience and rebuild a new galactic civilization, but others do not:

* NoEnding: All Tomorrows is a brief overview of the grand history of humanity. All the species and their histories, the achievements and failures, the brotherhood and and the arrogance between peers, the scouring and building of entire worlds, the great revolving cycle of empires after empires. And at some point, human history just appears to cease altogether. The archeologist writing the record admits that they're looking, but the answer just isn't there. Humanity might have gone elsewhere, transfigured to something or someplace else, or humanity might have gone into the long night through conflict, or possibly simply fracturing and leaving each of its disparate strands to face their own private extinction. Ultimately, its just not known, there's just no clear ending point to human history, and in many ways, it didn't need one.

* OldShame: InUniverse example. After the War with the Asteromorphs, the Machine race completely accepted their role as the despised lower class. [[BlackAndGreyMorality They were ''that'' bad]].

** The Narrator seems to believe this, and the book follows this theme heavily, as he states near the end that having a strong conviction in an abstract, intangible destiny for you to fulfill can only do you a disservice, because the nature of the universe is that everything is finite and that, even if you reach that ill-defined goal, [[KarmaHoudiniWarranty it could easily be taken from you by the forces of nature itself, just like it does to the people you step over on your way there.]] The Qu were so obsessed with being the sole masters of organic life that they never considered the mutated humans would evolve past what they had wanted them to be, and [[spoiler: eventually died off like the countless specieses they mutilated, and, given that humanity had died out billions of years ago by the time the Narrator wrote the book, the Qu ultimately had no lasting impact on the universe.]] The Gravitals were under the impression that they should be the sole inheritors of humanity, and were driven to galactic genocide as a result when they could have easily reached out to other planets peacefully, and [[spoiler: eventually die off in a war like the dozens of human strains they killed off, and since humanity is long gone by the end of the story, their goals of inheriting the universe were AllForNothing.]]

''All Tomorrows: A Billion Year Chronicle of the Myriad Species and Mixed Fortunes of Man'' is a 2006 science-fiction book by [[Creator/CMKosemen C. M. Kosemen]] (a.k.a. Nemo Ramjet), with a heavy focus on [[SpeculativeBiology speculative evolution]]. The story begins in the near future, as burgeoning population pressures force humanity to terraform and colonize Mars. After a [[TheWarOfEarthlyAggression brief but violent civil war between the two planets]], the genetically engineered survivors begin a new wave of colonization, spreading across the galaxy. Everything is looking up for the human race... until the colonies encounter the [[ScaryDogmaticAliens Qu]], technologically advanced aliens on a religious mission to remake the universe. Although humans fight valiantly, the Qu easily overpowered humanity; as punishment, these aliens decide to genetically modify the survivors, turning most of them into mindless, animalistic creatures before departing.

* PteroSoarer: The Sail People bear a strange resemblance to ''Pteranodon'', although they do not fly. The Pterosapiens are a more straight example, as they look the part and ''can'' fly.