Anthropomundus is a speculative biology/evolution worldbuilding project combining the genres of future evolution and exobiology, and even touching a little upon xenobiology. Meaning "human world" in Ancient Greek and Latin (ἄνθρωπος ánthrōpos + mundus), it is as such a thought excercise principally entertaining the evolution of fauna on an alien planet descended from a single species of tiny, genetically modified post-human creature millions of years into the future following humanity's conquest by an advanced, hostile alien civilization—in essence, a planet of human-derived animals; a world of man. It explores all the possible paths human anatomy and physiology could take and its limits if it had a whole world to itself as the only species of animal—even with the highly reduced size and other genetically engineered embellishments. Between a hiatus and two reboots, Anthropomundus has been over a decade in development before finally getting showcased on its own, proper website.
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I am a Bachelor of Science in biology and a hobbyist artist and writer with a variety of focused interests, but mainly in the areas of science. I am one of the oldest and most prominent members of the speculative biology/evolution online community, where I am known as "Giant Blue Anteater," having been active in the scene since 2007. Other than for this fact and for running this project, I am perhaps best known for being responsible for rehosting Snaiad, a project involving a planet populated by familiar-looking-yet-bizzare aliens by the Turkish artist C.M. Kösemen, on 2014 after being offline for four years until 2020 under the name "Cyrus Theedishman." Since discovering his works in 2007, C.M. Kösemen, who went by "Nemo Ramjet" at the time, had truly changed my life forever, and remains a powerful inspiration to this very day, on top of Wayne D. Barlowe, author of the breathtaking book of extraterrestrial life, Expedition, another mighty source of inspiration for his work and all other speculative biology enthusiasts.
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Anthropomundus and its premise were ultimately inspired by All Tomorrows, C.M. Kösemen's unpublished future-history book chronicling the billion-year future evolution of humankind in myriad species and their various exploits, fortunes, and fates (uniquely hosted here). At 2007, it was the first future human evolution book I ever read (despite hearing of Man After Man by Dougal Dixon, another author whose work I appreciate), and I was truly blown away by the diverse forms engineered by the mysterious, triumphant Qu civilization from the elephantine Titans to the blocky flesh fields of the Colonials followed by the ultimate galactic fate of humanity as star-striding, deific beings. On top of my contemporary projects involving aliens and paleoart, this would inspire me to doodle dozens sketches of post-human creatures—including one fateful species.
One day in spring 2008 in middle school, I drew a little modified human descendant on a piece of lined paper that resembled a fetus, something whose visceral, alien, uncanny valley appearance I dreaded greatly. I took this concept home with me and drew it on the computer, named it―very clumsily―Improbonexizoon fetoides, which I thought translated to "inferior swimming animals that resembles a fetus," and, when it was finished, shared online on June that year on DeviantArt and the forums I went to at the time.
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Apart from the expected reactions of disgust given the obvious source of inspiration, the reception I was angling for was from an old online associate of mine in the speculative evolution community, who stated that biological constraints would limit what size the human body plan could be reduced to, even with genetic engineering, adding that microscopic size was a near-impossibility. The microscopic size I gave for this concept, around 0.01 mm in length, was intended to test such an assertion. His feedback: aside from his belief that, being a stickler on plausibility when it came to future evolution and other speculative evolution ideas, it was no more or less plausible than the majority of post-human concepts, his problem was its size, and recommended that I bumped it up to 0.1 mm. Critique heeded, and this adjustment was made.
Though "Improbonexizoon" started as a one-off concept, I started to wonder what descendants it could lead to, taking a page from All Tomorrows' posthumans evolving naturally following the Qu conquest. In short order, I designed concepts for descendants, from a slender carnivore, to a green-skinned herbivore, to a vermiform, sedentary suspension feeder. A full-fledged speculative evolution project seemed underway, yet it didn't yet have a name. From tentatively calling it the "Posthuman Project," I would coin the name Anthropomundus roughly a month after the submission of "Improbonexizoon."
Since the creation of "Improbonexizoon," nearly a dozen post-human species were made for the project until the next year, when I got bored of the project and moved onto other ideas—until I stumbled unto an artistic block and ran out of steam to continue any artistic endeavor after 2010. The project nevertheless acquired a small modicum of fame in the speculative evolution community.
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The project would largely go on a hiatus until 2014. In the interim, as I was regaining my artistic steam from the block of 2010, I began working on different speculative evolution ideas, mainly in the form of aliens, as well as paleoart. I was all over the place, but later wondered if it was best to return to an old project I had already established and already had a modicum of niche fame within my community. I thought it would then be best to return to Anthropomundus, and that would be the speculative evolution project I will prioritize till this very day. And so I did.
From 2014 to 2018, I rebooted the concept, creating almost twenty new posthumans and renaming the fetus-like progenitor posthuman from Improbonexizoon fetoides—a horribly constructed name—to Microhomunculus progenitor and giving it a slight redesign to boot, before rebooting it once more and one last time. The progenitor posthuman was given one last redesign, in which it resembles a composite between and embryo week six and week eight, a true fetus, and elements of adult human (from resembling an embryonic Abe Sapien from Hellboy) and was given a size boost to 5 mm. All the designs seen on this website are of that iteration and won't change apart from potential slight tweaks and odd redesigns here and there.
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Across all iterations of Anthropomundus, I have produced 52 unique organism concepts for the project, with only 27 of them being "official" for being made in this final iteration of the project. I however hope that I can not only match the former number, I exceed it with this one.
In fact, what I ultimately hope to achieve with Anthropomundus is to create a devoted worldbuilding project effected comprehensively with hundreds, if not thousands, of unique illustrated entities, to surpass even the number of C.M. Kösemen's Snaiad (Snaiad was distinguished at Loncon3 for having the most fictional entities, with myself counting 119 species at most from all his color plates). In other words, I am hopeful to be able to work on this full time, striving to have the most illustrated species of any project on a fully fleshed-out world—without the curse of having an active social life, for better or worse, for I'm not truly predisposed for such a thing! In the end, I hope for a compelling published book to come out of this. Maybe even a motion picture or a documentary. That will certainly be years off. Until then, this is my chosen passion project, my labor of love, gestating for those years to come.
Expect big things!