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Pre-Invasion Humans
Humans
The original humans of Earth.
- Colonized Solar System: Terraformed and colonized Mars to resolve Earth's Overpopulation Crisis.
- The Ghost: We are never shown a photograph of a human. Justified, since they most likely look exactly like us.
- Small Role, Big Impact: While humanity as we know it is only really mentioned in the prologue, their colonization of (and subsequent war with) Mars is what kickstarts a chain of events leading to their descendants achieving dominion over the galaxy and drawing the Qu's attention.
- Terraform: Slowly generated a breathable atmosphere, oceans, and an ecosystem on Mars before colonizing it.
Martians
- Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: They developed genetic engineering to adapt themselves to Mars' conditions.
- Human Aliens: Downplayed, while they are not aliens, of course, they have a mostly human appearance, weirdly-shaped face and and lanky body aside.
- The War of Earthly Aggression: The Martian colonists had an animosity towards their Earthly overlords practically from the start, leading to an embargo that became a centuries-long shooting war. This war was eventually halted by an armistice, but only after it had led to eight billion deaths on both sides and the near extinction of both human races, leading both to band together to create the first Star People.
Star People
- Advanced Ancient Humans: The Star People are this to the later posthuman species.
- All for Nothing: After discovering evidence of alien lifeforms, The Star People started developing a stockpile of weapons that could push back against any alien invader. These weapons are said to be capable of obliterating stars and wrecking solar systems, but these preparations would all prove to be futile.
- Alien Invasion: Their civilization was devastated by the Qu, who altered them against their will.
- Benevolent Precursors: Only ever intended to explore the galaxy, create their own colonies on terraformed planets and meet new extraterrestrial wildlife. They never fought against each other and only invented star-killing weapons to combat aliens like the Qu.
- Colonized Solar System: One-upped their predecessors by colonizing Venus, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
- Designer Babies: The Star People are the result of artificial interbreeding between surviving Earthlings and Martians. Their purpose, as their names suggested, was to explore the greater galaxy and populate other Earth-like planets.
- Generation Ships: Comprised the Star People's first attempts to colonize the galaxy, but the ships would fail due to technical difficulties or onboard anarchy long before reaching their destination.
- My Brain Is Big: Their heads are noticeably larger than those of their predecessors.
- Not So Extinct: A few members of this race managed to survive the Qu invasion and evolved into the Spacers.
- Robosexual: After the generation ships proved to be a failure, they began colonizing other systems by sending out automated ships which would create and raise the first generation of colonists after arriving. Nearly half of all colonies failed because the first generation would form an Oedipus complex towards the machines that raised them and reject their fellow humans.
- Terraform: Terraformed Venus, and eventually other planets throughout the galaxy.
Sapient Posthumans
Titans
- Diabolus ex Machina: They were quickly advancing as a species after regaining their intelligence — until an ice age unexpectedly wiped them out.
- Gentle Giant: Described as such by the Author. These guys were absolutely huge, but they were actually a kind and intelligent species whose lives were tragically cut short by an ice age.
- Honorable Elephant: The Titan species strongly resembled elephants and were described as one of the best candidates for the reemergence of civilization. Sadly, they were wiped out by an ice age before that could happen.
- Kaiju: Adult Titans measured 40 meters long, making them even bigger than Blue Whales.
- Multipurpose Tongue: The Titans were a variant with multi-purpose lower lips, which hung down like elephant trunks and were dexterous enough to manipulate objects.
Mantelopes
- And I Must Scream: The Mantelopes were transformed into quadrupeds but were left with human minds, used as singers and scribes by the Qu. When the Qu left, the Mantelopes were unable to control their environment in any way. They built a culture of pain around their impotence and ennui before devolving into dumb animals.
- Blessed with Suck: They retained their sapience... with bodies that were unable to take advantage of it. The only thing their intelect was capable of doing was making them realize the helpless state they were put in.
- Despair Event Horizon: A species-wide example, their inability to control the environment led them to simply giving up on trying to do anything and their culture was entirely based upon this pain and suffering, leading them to losing their sapience eventually.
- Mercy Kill: A non-fatal example, the author ponders that their lost sapience might have been a merciful fate for them given their helpless state and inability to do anything with their intellect.
- Uncertain Doom: It's unclear whether they evolved into some new sentient species or if they simply went extinct after losing their sapience.
Bone Crushers
- Excrement Statement: Inverted: In their culture, defecating on someone was an expression of endearment.
- Medieval Stasis: Discussed in the case of the Bone Crushers: their dependence on carrion as a primary food source severely limited their population, and as a result they couldn't progress past a medieval level of society before their civilization collapsed.
- Posthuman Nudism: They rarely wore clothes unless it was cold.
- Scary Teeth: Their teeth fused into beaks. The Qu originally altered their ancestors to be small and birdlike pets.
- Scavengers Are Scum: Zigzagged with the Bone Crushers: they're ugly, ogre-like post-humans who smell bad, eat nothing but carrion, and express their affection by defecating on others, but the narration notes that they were also one of the first groups of posthumans to redevelop sentience and that their strange habits only seem disgusting to us because of our prejudices.
Colonials
- And I Must Scream: The ancestors of the Colonials put up particularly stiff resistance against the Qu, and were given an extremely cruel punishment as a result, being transformed into limbless, boneless slabs of flesh to act as living filtration systems for the waste of Qu civilization, reproducing both sexually and asexually and spreading like mats of cancer cells. The most sadistic part of the punishment was that the Colonials' eyes and minds were left intact, leaving them perfectly able to understand what was happening to them but unable to do anything about it. Unlike the Mantelopes, they at least managed to adapt and re-develop into prosperity after the Qu left.
- Body Horror: The premier example in the whole book, and that’s saying something. They have no limbs, bones or anything other than eyes or brains. The Colonials are basically living mats of skin, made to live miserable lives by the Qu.
- Mercy Kill: Many of them hoped for a quick extinction after the Qu left. Given the inherent misery of their lives, it's hard to blame them.
- Sins of Our Fathers: For a given measure of "sins". The reason why they're forced to live cruel fates and filter waste everyday is because their ancestors resisted against the Qu, driving them back two consecutive times before being overrun.
Lopsiders
- Heavyworlder: The Lopsiders were an... unusual take on this trope, having been adapted for high gravity by being made flat and flounder-like, crawling along on paddle-like limbs and with their sensory organs crowded on one side of their face.
Spacers
- Absurdly Huge Population: The Spacers are described as "painfully rare", at a population of "only" 100 billion in several dozen arks spread across the galaxy after the Qu invasion. Keep in mind that beforehand, the population of humans in the galaxy numbered in the trillions.
- Batman Can Breathe in Space: The Spacers can't breathe in space, but their pressurized circulatory and digestive systems make them able to navigate through the void with jets of air from their anuses.
- Creepy Long Fingers: The Spacers develop long, spindly fingers that gradually evolve into the multiple thin, versatile limbs of the Asteromorphs.
- Crippling Overspecialization: The Spacers (and by proxy, their Asteromorph descendants) were so adapted to life in the void of space that it would be impossible for them to return to the planets without dying. Not that they didn't mind returning home, that is.
- Humans Are Survivors: Unlike other human species, who fell to the Qu and had to re-evolve sapience and rebuild their civilization, the ancestors of the Spacers successfully evaded the Qu and never got changed into beasts. They did divert significantly from the human form later on, but it was done out of willing genetic-engineering rather than forced modification.
- Life in Zero G: They heavily adapted themselves for their new home in giant, zero-G air-filled bubbles, developing extremely spindly limbs and digits as well as pressurized guts and circulatory systems (which allowed them to develop a form of jet propulsion in the bargain).
- Space People: The Spacers never set foot planetside again after hiding away in their asteroids, even after the Qu left the galaxy.
- You Can't Go Home Again: It's impossible for them to return to their home planets thanks to their adaptation to the void of space. They can technically go back, but they'll die due to their genetic biology.
Ruin Haunters
- From Nobody to Nightmare: They started out as a normal posthuman species, albeit one that advanced quickly technologically thanks to leftovers from the Star People. And yet, they eventually became The Gravitals.
- Low Culture, High Tech: The Ruin Haunters built up their civilization by re-creating the Qu's and Star People's technology, but they rarely had any idea how any of it worked.
- Names to Run Away from Really Fast: A xenophobic posthuman species with access to nuclear weapons that just so happen to be known as the Ruin Haunters.
- Nuke 'em: Are said to have used various thermonuclear weapons in two of their planet-spanning wars. This "hardened and awakened" them.
- World War Whatever: Before evolving into the Gravitals, the Ruin Haunters had five consecutive world wars, two of which were fought with thermonuclear weapons.
Snake People
- Prehensile Tail: They have a hand in place of a common snake tail, which they could use to grab, interact and pick up objects, as the image of their species shows then doing with what is presumably an smoking pipe. It evolved from the Worms' hind feet.
- Snake People: They're humans who, through a combination of genetic manipulation and natural evolution, developed elongated, armless bodies.
Killer Folk
- Cat Folk: The Killer Folk have muzzle-like jaws, saber teeth, pointed ears, yellow eyes, spotted body hair, and possibly paw-like feet that make them resemble these. Their ancestors looked like a goblin crossed with a serval.
- Creepy Long Fingers: They are a very downplayed example compared to their ancestors: their thumb is slight larger than the other fingers of their hands and presents a bigger, fish hook-like format compared to their almost completely human fingers present in their hands.
- Pointy Ears: The image of the Killer Folk shows that they have pointy ears similar to that of cats on the sides of their heads.
- Proud Warrior Race Guy: Violence and martial prowess played a big part in their society, and at least one of their planets required a direct invasion from the Gravital in order to be subdued.
Tool Breeders
- The Beastmaster: To the point where they even have a creature counterpart for every human product and appliance.
- Bio Punk: The Tool Breeders live underwater, so they could never invent fire. Instead, they began selectively breeding and genetically engineering other life forms into tools and weapons.
- Good Counterpart: To the Qu. Much like the Qu, the Tool Breeders are master genetic engineers, but what sets them apart from the Qu is that unlike the Qu who were motivated by a religious dogma to remake the universe in their images and see other alien races like the Star People as primitives, the Tool Breeders use genetic engineering only to benefit themselves rather than actively remake all life (For them, becoming master genetic engineers was what ultimately got them back on track of becoming sapient) and they saw the other posthumans as equals rather than primitives.
- Our Mermaids Are Different: They are definitely one of the Star People's descendants evolved to live underwater, but they look more like a cross between a dolphin and fish than traditional mermaids.
- Organic Technology: Being unable to develop metallurgy underwater, the Tool Breeders instead domesticated other creatures and selectively bred them into useful technology, ranging from organic rifles to spacecraft.
Modular People
- Anthropomorphized Anatomy: The Modular People are a version of this-they're an entire race of sentient, hyper-specialized "organs" that perform one specific function. Individual Modulars pile themselves together to form a single mobile entity, which can swap individual organs with any other Modular to fulfill a specific task or function.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Played with. Their hyper-specialization puts them in a situation which more-or-less forces each of them to partake in a peaceful, efficient society in order to survive. Thus they avoid the evils of conflict, poverty—and individualism or ambition.
- No Poverty: Their society is said to be a fully equal one, where no one lacks for anything.
- Starfish Aliens: The Modular People are walking colonies of smaller organisms, all of which carry out a specific task.
Pterosapiens
- Bat People: They resemble bats, but notably also have some pterosauroid features as well.
- Bird People: Appear to have beaks as well as thin, bird-like legs. They are also stated to be descended from a "wading, stork-like predator."
- Cast from Lifespan: The Pterosapiens get to enjoy the benefits of flight and intelligence, but the stress of having to power their flight muscles and big brains means that the average Pterosapien lifespan is less than thirty years.
- Winged Humanoid
Asymmetric People
- Body Horror: They were Lopsiders that genetically altered themselves to survive outside their homeworld. They're vastly different to their progenitors.
- History Repeats: Like their Martian ancestors, the Asymmetric People rebelled against their predecessors.
- The War of Earthly Aggression: Created by the Lopsiders to colonize the planets in their solar system which didn't have comically high gravity, the Asymmetric People eventually went to war with the Lopsiders just as the Martians went to war with Earth. Unlike the Martians, however, the Asymmetric People completely exterminated their creators..
Symbiotes
- Horse of a Different Color: The Symbiotes evolved this kind of relationship with the larger post-humans who inhabited their planet back during their parasitic days, though by the time they redeveloped civilization their mounts had largely become Meat Puppets.
- Puppeteer Parasite: Evolving slowly from simple hormonal manipulation to hijacking nervous systems.
- Slave Race: The Hosts are little more than vehicles for the Symbiotes.
Sail People
- Bat People: While they don't fly their sail-wing-thingies and fearsome facial features are invocative of both bats and pterosaurs.
- Bizarre Alien Locomotion: The Sail People used wing-like arms to catch the wind as they drifted across the water.
- The Grand Hunt: Once they finally settled down and stopped with the warfare, they still had to deal with their race's violent urges. Therefore they would regularly organize broad hunts of the local sea life.
- Multipurpose Tongue: The Sail People used forked tongues instead of hands, their arms having been re-shaped into wing-like forms.
- Space Orcs: Marine edition. While they are not evil outright they are noted as inherently oriented towards extreme violence and their history is marked by constant warfare.
Satyriacs
- The Hedonist: They're just as decadent as their ancestors, with festivals, concerts, and orgies at the end of every workweek.
Bug Facers
- Anime Hair: Their hair resembled a paintbrush.
- Alien Invasion: Fended off an invasion by an unknown alien race, which caused them to develop a xenophobia that dissuaded them from joining the Second Empire at first. Later they were invaded (more successfully) by the Gravitals.
- Servant Race: While they survived, the Gravitals warped them beyond recognition.
- Sole Survivor: They were the only Second Empire race that survived the Gravital genocide.
Asteromorphs
Their first, more "human" form. Click to see them defeating the Gravital
The descendants of the Spacers, free of any Qu tampering.
- Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: The Author considers this to be one potential reason as to why the Asteromorphs eventually disappeared following the subjugation of the Qu.
- Benevolent Precursors: After defeating the Gravitals, they became this to the Subjects and their descendants. They also spared their Gravital enemies and gave them a new chance at life. They also protected the worlds of humanity to keep another genocide from happening again.
- Creating Life: They created the Terrestials as their stewards, and morphed the Gravitals into the New Machines as punishment for their imperialism.
- Deity of Human Origin: A species of creatures so unfathomably intelligent other races considered them gods, born from the humans that were lucky enough to escape the Qu.
- Dyson Sphere: Built these around their stars during their post-war empire, multiplying their inhabitable zones by a billion-fold.
- Irony: The only humans to escape the Qu's nightmarish alterations evolved to become creatures even less recognisable as descendants of humanity.
- Life in Zero G: They became even further adapted for life in permanent freefall than their ancestors, evolving their legs into paddle-like fins used for steering in the air and taking advantage of the lack of weight to grow huge and otherwise unwieldy braincases.
- My Brain Is Big: As life in Zero-G rendered the Asteromorphs' other biological needs null, their brains evolved to become the largest parts of their bodies and became massive in size. By the end of their war with the Gravitals, their bodies were almost completely discarded as their brains developed into a wing-like shape that could allow the Asteromorphs to freely fly through space without the need for the pressurised propulsion systems of their ancestors.
- Space People: Even more so than their ancestors, to the point that living on natural planets became impossible to them.
- Super-Intelligence: Their massive, extremely complex brains could think in ideas and concepts incomprehensible to rest of posthumanity, allowing them to build technology with capabilities surpassing that of the Gravitals.
- Transhuman Abomination: Viewed as godlike, incomprehensible forces of nature by both themselves and the Second Empire.
Gravital
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: As mentioned by the Author, their society was pretty much like any other. They had people they loved and hated, jobs, families, all that. But unlike the post-humans of the Second Empire, the vast majority of them were simply incapable of seeing other post-human life as valid.
- Brain Uploading: To survive their sun rapidly expanding, The Ruin Haunters transplanted their brains into cybernetic shells able to survive their homeworld's now lethal environment, later digitising their minds entirely through "quantum computing" technology.
- Cybernetics Eat Your Soul: Subverted. Their atrocities certainly escalated after they became fully synthetic, but their evil was a product of societal pressure and many displayed a capacity for empathy and cross-species friendship.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: A faction of Gravitals grew to love their subjects, instead of mistreating and trying to kill them. This ultimately lead to a painful schism among the Gravitals between the Tolerant Machines and the rest of their people.
- Evil Counterpart: To, surprisingly, the Qu. The Qu may have been dogmatists who toppled human civilization and then genetically modified the survivors into nigh-unrecognizable forms out of pure spite, but as the Author notes, at least they respected them as some form of life. The Gravitals slaughtered untold billions of people, eradicating entire civilizations, all because they were culturally unable to accept sapient non-Gravitals existing. (Except for the Subjects)
- Genghis Gambit: Desperate to stop their civil war and in an attempt to reunite their people, the leaders of the Gravitals declared war on the Asteromorphs. It ended badly.
- Gravity Master: Every type of physical shell the Gravitals used came equipped with a gravity-manipulation device that allowed propel themselves and manipulate their environment without requiring any appendages.
- Mechanical Abomination: Eerie metal spheres that could manipulate gravity and wiped out the majority of posthuman life.
- Omnicidal Maniac: They try to destroy all organic sapient species.
- Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Gravital saw themselves as the only true heirs to humanity, and so wiped out most of the descendants from other planets. They kept the Bug Facers alive, to serve as livestock and pets.
- Sinister Geometry: The Gravital are most often depicted as metal spheres with holes in the front, and their warships are city-sized floating rectangles.
Subjects
Descendants of the Bug Facers, ruled by the Gravital and later freed by the Asteromorphs.
- And I Must Scream: The Narrator mentions that some Subjects were transformed into living art pieces, their throats being forced to play one particular tune forever, amongst other twisted transformations that made the Qu's modifications look tame. Given that they still retained their sapience, the situation of the Subjects who suffered from that can only be classified as this. And they endured this for millions of years.
- Human Sacrifice: Some types of Subjects, such as a variant with polydactyl hands and enlarged phalluses, were bred to serve as blood sacrifices during Gravital religious ceremonies.
- Servant Race: Were this for a long time to the Gravital, often doing manual labor, serving as test subjects for their biological technology or even being transformed into living appliances out of curiosity and entertainment.
Terrestrials
Genetically altered Asteromorphs, given bodies able to withstand gravity so they could rule and protect their empire's new vassal planets after the Asteromorph-Gravital war.
- Bizarre Alien Locomotion: As their Asteromorph ancestors had long since lost their legs in their zero-G environment, the Terrestrials were created to instead use their elongated fingers as walking limbs.
- God Guise: They were instructed not to pose as divinities to their Subjects, but many did anyways. It's noted to have actually improved the stability of the Asteromorph Empire.
- Super-Intelligence: Implied to be to a slightly lesser extent then their parent species, but still far greater then any organism could achieve naturally.
- My Brain Is Big: The Terrestrials, created by the Asteromorphs to govern their Bug Facer-derived subjects, have brains as big as is possible in gravity.
New Machines
Post-Asteromorph-Gravital war descendants of the Gravital, altered by the Asteromorphs to be less dangerous.
- Discard and Draw: The first thing the Asteromorphs did after defeating the Gravital was permanently take away the gravity-manipulation abilities which had made said race unstoppable. However, they were given the ability to change themselves with Nanotechnology instead.
- Nanotechnology: Their bodies are made up of nanomachines, and they are capable of re-engineering themselves into any shape they see fit, including forming complex machinery like hyperdrives. The one the image is noted to have assumed a form based on "fashion trends" that were popular at the time.
- Servant Race: Started out as this for the Asteromorphs. Eventually, they gained equal rights to their peers, though they were still treated with scorn by society due to their actions in the past.
- Sins of Our Fathers: As mentioned, they're generally looked down upon owing to the enormity of their ancestors' crimes.
- Shipless Faster-Than-Light Travel: The New Machines were able to holiday on distant planets by growing hyperdrives out of their own bodies.
Non-Sapient Posthumans
Worms
- Big Eater: Eating was pretty much the only thing they did for much of their non-sentient period. They even ate each other.
- Pitiful Worms: Their "punishment" was being forcibly turned into something resembling a cross between an inchworm and a naked mole rat.
Predators
Prey
Swimmers
- Sweet Seal: While not, of course — an actual seal, the swimmers had the appearance of a seal the most out of all aquatic creatures in Earh. As for the "sweet" part, they were also smart enough to speak with each other (though they were unable to actually understand their own language), form bonds and evolve into the Tool Breeders.
Lizard Herders
A lizard herder scans the world with blank eyes as his stock grow stronger and smarter. The future does not seem to belong to him.
"Lucky" posthumans that distantly resemble apes, but who have been specifically modified by the Qu so that they would never regain sentience again.- Horse of a Different Color: They eventually evolved into the Saurosapients' mounts, with bulkier hairless bodies.
- It Can Think: Averted. The Qu specifically altered their brains to keep them from ever developing sentience again, something they didn't do to any other posthuman.
Temptors
- Bee People: The Temptors are a race of giant, immobile females who command hordes of small, obedient males.
- Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Temptor males are beaked, brainless little imps, while their females are intelligent, immobile and two meters tall.
- Diabolus ex Machina: Much like the Titans, the Temptors were slowly on their way to rebuilding society, only to be obliterated by a stray comet.
- Exotic Equipment: The female Temptors have long, pit-like vaginas that the much smaller males descend into to breed.
- Tiny Guy, Huge Girl
Flyers
- Bat People: They had pterosaur-like wings.
Hand Flappers
- Crippling Overspecialization: Their wings are used solely for attracting mates, and are useless for flying, manipulating, and fighting. This prevented them from developing technology and slowly led them to extinction.
Blind Folk
- Creepy Long Fingers: The Blind Folk, living underground where sound and touch are more useful than sight, evolved Creepily Long Arms and fingers to sense their surroundings.
- Crippling Overspecialization: Ultimately they were wiped out by tectonic shifts very gradually shrinking their available living space.
- Eyeless Face: The Blind Folk spend their entire lives in continent-sized caves, so they lost the need for sight.
- Rat Men: They have some similarities to the classic idea of one — if the "Rat Men" lacked eyes, were pretty lanky and thin and had pretty long whiskers to go with their bodies. Funnily enough, they seem to be based more on moles than actual rats in spite of their appearance when it comes to their behavior.
Striders
- Lightworlder: The Striders were genetically modified by the Qu for life on a moon with one-fifth Earth gravity, being given grotesquely elongated limbs and necks, becoming giraffe-like browsers of their world's skyscraper-high trees.
Parasites
- Adaptive Ability: In a very slow sense. They and their hosts described as developing all manner of abilities over the course of millions of years (like spewing acid or highly over-developed forelimbs) in the effort to compete against others of their kind in the battle for survival. It's ultimately the Parasites who develop sapience who come out on top.
Finger Fishers
- Creepy Long Fingers: The Finger Fishers have elongated middle fingers with fishhooks on the ends.
Hedonists
- Everybody Has Lots of Sex: The Hedonists are biologically incapable of reproducing until they've mated with a huge number of partners over a period of decades. Fortunately, that's pretty much all they do besides eating and sleeping.
- Extreme Libido: Their biology made it so that they only knew about mating when they were not fulfilling their basic needs — and they could keep doing so for far longer than a normal homo sapiens could do.
- The Hedonist: The Hedonists are pampered, genetically engineered posthumans who were kept as pets by the Qu. Their days are described as lazing out in the sun, drinking from the nearby bacteria lakes and having tons and tons of mind-blowing sex with no worries about STDs or unwanted kids.
- Human Pet: For a given measure of "human". The Qu created these posthumans to serve as their pampered pets, set loose in a tropical paradise where they could enjoy all of humanity's pleasures to their hearts' content.
Descendants of Earth Fauna
Panderavis
A species derived from Earth's dinosaurs. The discovery of its fossils on an alien planet inhabited by tripedal Starfish Aliens warned the Star People of another spacefaring civilization.
- Goofy Feathered Dinosaur: It's a therizinosaur and looks like a big round ball of feathers. If its ancestor were ever majestic, it isn't now.
- Natural Weapon: They appear to hold pretty big claws which they presumably used to dig for food.
- Transplanted Aliens: A direct descendant of the dinosaurs found on an alien planet predating human colonization, indicating the existence of other spacefaring species.
Killer Chickens
Descendants of chickens the Star People who were transformed into the Striders brought to the moon they originally inhabited, these chickens turned out to become considerably more fearsome approximately two million years after the Qu left the striders to their own devices.
- Ambiguous Situation: It is unclear if they're "theropod like" in the sense that theyphysically resemble non-avian theropods or if they occupy a similar niche like terror birds (could be both given Qu interference). One depiction
even essentially makes them vulture-like and flight capable. - Feathered Fiend: Through atavistic evolution, these chickens came to resemble their theropod ancestors, and quickly began hunting the Striders to extinction.
- Super-Persistent Predator: Thanks to a combination of the chickens having evolved to perfectly fit their environment through natural selection, and the Striders having been intentionally modified to have no sapience or natural defences to protect them, the chickens quickly managed to kill off their prey, becoming the dominant species on their world.
Saurosapients
Descendants of the Lizard Herders' livestock, who have evolved to become sapient.
- Animal Is the New Man: Despite originating from a completely different species, they are considered just as human as all the other "true" human-descended races and for all intents and purposes were honorary humans.
- Formerly Sapient Species: The humans of the Saurosapients world are pets now. They even provide the trope image.
- Lizard Folk: The Saurosapients are descended from lizards brought to space by pre-Qu humans.
True Aliens
Qu
Qu triumphant in the fall of Man. To his left floats a nanotechnological drone, to the right, a genetically modified tracing creature.
A race of aliens which invaded the Star People and devolved them into a myriad of posthuman species.
- Absolute Xenophobe: They felt it was their right to take living creatures of all stripes and reshape them into things the Qu saw as pleasing or as proper. When they encountered humanity, they exterminated the baseline Star Men, and punished the survivors for resistance and replaced the native ecosystems by leaving humanity's survivors as animalistic or otherwise primitive new species.
- Abusive Precursors: The Qu transformed humans into beasts (and in some cases genetic abominations for groups the Qu took a particular dislike to, such as those who would become the Colonials), and then left the galaxy.
- Aliens Are Bastards: These ones certainly are, given that they committed genocide on almost the entirety of the Star People, and turned the survivors into their own playthings and experiments, then left them to fend for themselves.
- All There in the Manual: By creator admission the Qu were not very fleshed out, being a plot device more than anything. However, Kosemen has since revealed a few factoids:
- They are apparently a Hive Mind who believes in "cosmic forces" and has strict religious beliefs against sentience itself. Their pyramids are actually beacons of some sort that punish emerging civilizations.
- Their ships◊ are basically giant versions of themselves.
- They are
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Within less than a thousand years, they completely steamrolled humanity in their "war". A few like the Colonials' ancestors managed to turn back two invasions, but that's it.
- Early-Bird Cameo: Contray to popular belief, this book is not where the Qu originally came from. They were first created at a much early point in Koseman's Speculative biology career at 1995, presumably his earliest attempt of speculative biology since he was 11 at the time of its creation.
- Evilutionary Biologist: Inverted. The Qu, upon defeating humanity and killing off most of the Star People, used humans as experiments and living playthings for their technology, but instead of trying to "evolve" humanity through technology they devolved them mentally as punishment for what they perceived as stealing their place as masters of the universe, and in some cases, transformed them into outright genetic abominations.
- Evil Luddite: As seen in the podcast above, the Qu apparently have a hatred for sapience and civilization, desiring to propagate life and nature at all costs.
- Hate Sink: While the other posthumans and aliens are portrayed as unique beings with their own agendas and beliefs, and none of them can be truly called "evil" — even the genocidal Gravitals had some of their members starting to show empathy and love towards The Subjects — the Qu are portrayed as a collective group of tyranical xenophobes and not a single member of their species is shown to be against these beliefs.
- Insectoid Aliens: They have four wings, beetle-like mandibles, stalked eyes, and an aquatic larval stage.
- Karma Houdini Warranty: It takes a while, but they do get their comeuppance in the end when humanity's Sufficiently Advanced Alien descendants track them down, having allied with the Amphicephali, aliens who are considerably more willing to form a military alliance.
- Kick the Dog: While their horrific transmations inflicted upon the human race might be justified from the point of view of their twisted Scary Dogmatic Alien morals, the punishment they decided to inflict upon The Colonials comes off as this, being a horribly cruel transformation where they let the species keep their sapience out of petty spite for them fighting their invasion until the bitter end.
- Knight Templar: Yes, other sapient life are heretical deviants whose "evil" must be punished, why do you ask?
- Laser-Guided Karma: Who thought that playing god and devolving other sapient alien races wasn't going to come back and bite them? The Qu certainly didn't, but were eventually defeated by the descendants of their victims.
- Once Done, Never Forgotten: Posthumanity never forgot what the Qu did to their ancestors.
- Scary Dogmatic Aliens: The Qu believed themselves the rightful masters of the material universe. The annihilation of the starfaring human civilization and the various cruel fates of their descendants were the Qu's idea of appropriate punishment for mankind's perceived presumption at taking what the Qu felt was their rightful place.
- Starfish Aliens: The Qu are dragonfly-like creatures the size of a man, with thick eyestalks and mandibles and what appears to be four flippers in place of wings, and a long, tentacular prehensile tail for manipulation.
- Time Abyss: They are an extremely old species which has existed long before humans came across them, with billions of years of experience behind them, plus all the millions of years that humanity spent first as non-sapient posthumans and later as new civilizations before the Qu were finally beaten by humanity in a war. This makes them more ancient than the oldest of humanity's ancestors — possibly predating life on Earth's land itself.
- Uncertain Doom: At the end of the book, when the races of sapient Posthumanity reform into a new intergalactic government, they at some point reencounter the Qu. The text states that the Qu were "subdued", but what this actually means isn't elaborated upon.
Bug Facer Invaders
Aliens who invaded the Bug Facers, but were ultimately driven back. Virtually nothing about them is known.
- Alien Invasion: Invaded the Bug Facers' homeworld, but were ultimately driven back.
- The Ghost: Only mentioned briefly as having invaded the Bug Facers with no actual details given about them.
- Lone Wolf Boss: The narrator makes it clear that these invaders are unrelated to the Qu, since they had already left the galaxy by now.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: In spite of being indirectly fairly important to the bug facer's plight by the gravitals — they disappear as fast as they are mentioned by the Author, and their ultimate fate in the universe is unknown.
Amphicephali
- A Head at Each End: The Amphicephali are named for this feature, which (along with Nested Mouths) is cited as evidence that their ancestors had undergone as much genetic manipulation and symbiosis as humanity's descendants.
- Aliens Are Bastards: Thankfully averted. While Posthumanity is understandably cautious of them, even fearing they're just as bad as the Qu, the Amphicephali meet with them peacefully.
- Hero of Another Story: Near the end of the story, the New Empire makes contact with a vaguely snake-like alien race known as the Amphicephali, which the author notes surely underwent a similarly lengthy natural and artificial evolutionary history as humanity did, clear by their physical appearance alone.
Author's Species
"Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!"
"Even now, it is sickeningly easy for beings to get lost in false grand narratives, living out completely driven lives in pursuit of non-existent codes, ideals, climaxes and golden ages."
The in-universe author of the book, a strange alien lifeform who studied the long history of humanity (along with its numerous descendants).
- The Anti-Nihilist: The author believes that at the end of the day, grand narratives are irrelevant and only lead to pain, citing other species and their persecutions and tyranies as examples of that, and that the one thing someone should focus in an uncaring universe is the present and that one should "Love Today, and seize All Tomorrows!". It's unknown how many of of the other members of his species share this view with him, but it still seems prevalent enough in his society that these beliefs are followed by individuals like him him either way.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: Notable for it's aversion: Out of all posthumans and true aliens, the author (and possibly his entire species) is arguably the one whose morality mostly aligns with the "average" beliefs of a "present day" human being, as show by his anti-nihilistic ideals and non-judgemental narration towards most events in the story.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: Downplayed, since he isn't show performing any human customs or lifestyles, but in a very subtle way, he shows a unique admiration towards humanity's struggle and ideals even though their race has been long gone now, even having beliefs more similar with human beings than a truly alien species — though it's ambiguous whether this applies only to the author itself or his entire species.
- Lab Coat Of Science And Medicine: The clothing the author uses in the last page is similar to this, though whether he is a researcher or scientist or this is merely common clothing for his species is left up for the viewer to decide.
- Starfish Aliens: While a lot of outlandish designs are featured throughout the book, the ones shown up to this point bore at least some resemblance to real animals and had easily identifiable body parts. The only things that can be said for certain about the author are that it has at least one arm, it wears clothes, and it's shorter than the average human. The creature has two lobes on opposite sides of the head with a leaf in the middle, a mound covered in holes below it, and what seems to be an eye with two pupils below that.
- Unreliable Narrator: There are large gaps in the author's narrative, and the fact that he's shown holding a human skull upside-down implies that what he's telling us may be misinterpretations of existing information — or even that the information itself is inaccurate.
