A long time ago, bored with painting exploding spacecraft for others, I started painting alien creatures for my own pleasure.

— Gert van Dijk, from the Appendix

I’m distinctly late to this party, only having learned last year of the existence of Gert van Dijk’s Furaha project. Furaha is a magnificent work of worldbuilding, by an MD-PhD neurologist and professional artist, spanning decades of paintings, years of blog posts and articles across two websites, a YouTube channel, and now a physical book. I also somehow completely missed the opportunity to meet Gert van Dijk at DinoCon last year — a mistake I will be correcting as early as possible this year.

Gert’s* new book, Wildlife on the Planet Furaha: A Speculative Biology Guide to Alien Lifeforms, distills, refines, and in some cases expands the pre-existing Furahan material into an attractive, eminently digestible package, with a dizzying density of ideas packed into its 160 pages. There are short chapters up front about the Furahan solar system and the geography and plate tectonics of Furaha. Physically, Furaha is sufficiently Earth-like, in its gravity, topography, tectonics, and axial tilt and resulting seasonality, as to make no practical difference. The book is not an exploration of how Earth-like life might have evolved on a substantially different planet — say, a heavy-gravity world or a water world — but rather a tour of a profoundly Earth-like planet with multicellular life that nevertheless evolved into rather un-Earth-like plants and animals. Stephen Jay Gould argued that if we replayed the tape of the evolution of life on Earth, we might end up with substantially different organisms, with different body plans based on different historical contingencies. Wildlife on the Planet Furaha could be seen as an attempt to do that sort of tape-replaying, although that is my interpretation and nothing explicitly forced in the book.

*One could argue that I should adopt a more professional tone and refer to the author as van Dijk. But we’ve corresponded enough that doing so strikes me as unhelpfully standoffish, and one of the joys of blogging is the freedom to set my own rules. So: Gert.

After the introductory chapters, the bulk of the book covers the major clades of life on Furaha, including plants and fungus-analogues. Most of the chapters are 5-10 pages long. The exception, the 35-page chapter on hexapods, can be forgiven because hexapods are the dominant terrestrial vertebrate analogs on Furaha. As with Terran vertebrates, ‘terrestrial’ here is broad and loose, and includes flying and secondarily aquatic lineages.

If the environment asks how best to shape an animal leg bone or a plant stem, blind evolution is likely to come up with a tube to combine strength with low weight. Countless other examples show that evolution always attempts to solve mechanical problems while balancing energy demands. It is this evolutionary energy sieve that warrants the axiom ‘Darwinian evolution honours Newtonian mechanics’.

— Chapter 7, Rusps

The project seems motivated in large part by an honest attempt to imagine plausible organisms on an Earth-like world that break the geometric and bauplan constraints imposed by the unique history of life on Earth. What if trees could remodel their wood the same way that animals remodel their bones? What if some fish had necks? What if big animals had skeletons based on ladders instead of single notochords? What if fish and spiders were radially symmetrical? What if birds evolved from animals with more than four limbs?

These questions are not posed as mere flights of fancy — they are investigated with genuine intellectual rigor. The book has cutaway anatomy illustrations, and diagrams explaining how the alien animals of Furaha locomote. An Appendix at the back has the author’s notes on how the project itself has evolved over the years, and how some organisms were voted off the planet, as it were, for being insufficiently plausible.

The book is lavishly and generously illustrated. I don’t think there’s a single spread without color art, and the dominant mode of presentation is to have a full-page painting married to explanatory text and an inset with a range map and a silhouette. Almost all of the artwork is beautiful and evocative, as I think the preview images I’m posting here demonstrate. Some of it is slyly clever as well — many of the silhouettes of Furahan critters will repay close attention. There are also textual and artistic callouts to other works by other creators. Memo Koseman’s Snaiad gets a mention, for example. Any question of whether the white-skinned, four-winged Dipeau is an homage to the white pterodactyl-creature in Jean Giraud’s Arzach (and the related Taarna sequence in the 1981 Heavy Metal movie) is put to rest by its scientific name, Velivolator moebii arzachi, and by the human in its silhouette diagram. EDIT: and, duh, by the prominent ‘Hommage à Moebius’ in the corner of the painting… [forehead slap]

Terraforming (E,F) Large-scale action to change the overall environmental features of a planet, such as increasing global temperature and changing the composition of the atmosphere. The term was originally meant to indicate intentional actions to make a planet more Earth-like. Making a planet less Earth-like unintentionally proved equally feasible.

— from the Glossary

Although the book is played straight, and is by no means a comedy, it is laced with dry humor. This mostly takes the form of a keen but sympathetic cognizance that biology, like all sciences, is a human enterprise, and will therefore always be colored by human foibles — arrogance, overreach, parochialism, and simple lapses in self-awareness. In this way, the book rings true, at least to this mid-career biologist, and the occasion humorous barb lightens and adds interest to the reading experience. Like virtually everything about the book, the humor is right in the Goldilocks zone of being welcome, nicely judged, and not overdone.

Do I have any complaints? Hardly any worth mentioning, and each could be flipped over and turned into a compliment. A few pieces of art are merely serviceable, which is only noticeable because so much of the art in the book is outstanding. (Also, with no disrespect to either book, the worst piece of art in Furaha is still better than about half the art in The New Dinosaurs.) As others have noted in their reviews, the book introduces so much interesting stuff that it left me wanting more about almost everything. I want to know the whole phylogenetic and evolutionary history of the Furahan biota, I want to know about Furaha’s paleobiogeography, its mass extinctions, how food webs differ on the landmasses that have been isolated for 160-200 million years. And yet — the book is already an embarrassment of riches. It embodies so much creativity and imagination, intellectual rigor and artistic virtuosity, invested by a single person, that to ask for more seems greedy in the extreme. And on the positive side, with its short chapters and numerous illustrations, the book does not overstay its welcome. It never feels rushed or incomplete, but it also does not fall into the trap of over-explaining each topic — a too-easy pitfall for a passion project such as this.

If there are more Furaha books in the future, I’ll buy them the second they become available. If this one is all we get, well, it’s a pretty darned great book, sitting comfortably on the shelf next to Dougal Dixon’s After Man and Wayne Douglas Barlowe’s Expedition. I suspect that most readers of this blog will find the book an absorbing read, and if you’re into hard science fiction or speculative evolution, you probably have a copy in your hands or pre-ordered already. That’s a smart play, because it’s a triumph.

Want a second and third opinion? See the thoughtful reviews by Davide Gioia at Weird Anatomy, and by Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology.

Wildlife on the Planet Furaha is already available in the UK and Europe, and it is being published in the United States on July 28 — next Tuesday. If you’re coming to DinoCon this weekend, you can buy a copy from Gert in the vendor hall, at least until he sells out, which I think is quite likely. Go do the right thing.