A Review of 'All Tomorrows' by C.M. Kosemen

C.M. Kosemen; as he might say; "kind of a (lip smack) weeeiird guy.... kind of a dream cormorant.”

‘All Tomorrows’ is an artbook super-scaled in time; multi-millennia, then multi-millions of years pass in the spaces between pages. The book tells the story of mankind’s ascent to space, transformation and galactic spread through slower-than-light genesis pods, then a kind of soft galactic dominance, then the arrival of eldritch super-aliens, the Qu, who are pissed off to find the galaxy full of genocidal space-apes (that was their job).

Annoyed and offended by the weeds, they transform humanity into an hundred thousand twisted forms, more akin to the punishments of Dante or the geography of Herodotus than the blank ‘scientific’ scourings of more common sci-fi vibes.

Then ‘Qu’ then just... wander off, off to another galaxy, leaving the ruins of twisted humanity behind. These altered men, mainly fall extinct, but then, over a million or so years, fragments evolve, into wild, highly different strains.

But that’s only half way through the book, and the book is not super-long. We still have several cycles of super-races, terrifying galactic genocides, remaking’s, falls ascensions etc, before we reach the end.

‘All Tomorrows’ is a book of mutations. It takes a lot from speculative evolution, but also feels a little medieval in a way; partly as a ‘book of curiosities’ (look at this weird little guy!), partly due to playful aspects (a post-human at a rock concert, a snake man jiving to some snake-jazz), and partly due to its slight shades of moralism, punishment through transformation, ascension through time.

The book speaks in the language of (speculative) evolution, meaning reaches of deep time so great, and changes so massive, that for any single sentient in the midst of them, the journey as a whole would be so vast it was invisible, even irrelevant, and, like with evolution on earth, horrible, terrible terrifying bursts of brutal and near absolute extinction. Like if two thirds of the way through Anna Karrenena, literally EVERYONE in the cast died, and every city was destroyed, except for one side character that wasn’t really mentioned before, and the book just carried on looking at this one side character; what is this guy up to? Look, he’s trying to survive, look at him eating dirt for a couple thousand years. (Because the civilisations are galactic, all the extinctions are deliberate genocides, no meteor or pulsar could be big enough to wipe out everyone).

Like any book of deep time, from Hallidays ‘Otherworlds’ to one of Forteys books on Geology, the moral challenge it sets is subtle, mysterious, vast; great and terrible things will happen, mighty alterations, dark galactic crimes, cruel perverse punishments, utterly random and meaningless death. Can all of these things even be said to be a ‘story’? or just a record of events? The reach of deeds so vast that over the incredible eons, the meaning of these things for any particular individual is... little? Like the man who carefully raised his child without reference to particular colour linkages, simply to discover what the child would describe, and then one say asked him; “What colour is the sky?” only to be told; “The sky doesn’t have a colour.” For it was truly a vault of light and not a ‘thing’ at all; so, in a way similar to Stapledon, we are left just kind of vibing.

Stories call for villains, heroes and adventures, and this book sort of has these; after all, what are a bunch of entirely mechanical black spheroid genocidal super-science post-humans who canonically want to ‘kill all life’, if not villains? But Koseman oars his way into his own text to remind us that in the grand scheme of events, they are not, nor can there really be, ‘bad guys’, and indeed you might quite like black mechanical genocidal spheroid if you sat down with one. It’s no crime to speak both in the language of epic time, beyond the concerns of daily man, and also in the language of comprehensible adventure, in fact you might call this a central polarity of the successful large scale sci-fi story, but though this is a fundamental axis of the form, it’s still a disjunction and should be noted.

Perhaps the only viewpoint which can synthesise and imbue with meaning such vast reaches of chaotic time is that of a god so gigantic and indifferent that even their existence makes little difference to the motes that float within its eye.

It would be cool to play a fantasy RPG where you got to encounter (and perhaps play as) all these varieties of humanity, (it’s not beyond the Qu to set up such a world for a laugh), and almost as cool to play some kind of Star Trek/Mass Effect game where you play as a federation of these whacky post-humans. Think about playing an asymmetric man and a composite guy and a snake lady on some kind of Star Trek away-mission; pretty wild. (It would also make sense of everyone having pseudo-human morality and having enough psychological similarities that they could actually communicate).

I suppose we can wait for the possible Adrian Tchaikovsky ‘All Tomorrows’ expanded universe or comic book series (’AT’ seems to spring from the same general noosphere as ‘Prophet’ and Calum Diggles ‘Humanity Lost’ - it will be 50 years r more before some boomer incarnates anything like this in film, they are so slow), though the Koseman-verse, despite its playful grotesquerie’s, is much more (relatively) low-fi and saves the actual FTL causality-twisting technology until deep in a species development, when it has already become so queer and clever that its mentality and viewpoint is deeply detached from whatever we might understand.

I did say the ‘language of speculative evolution’ and I think it really is a language, with wild swings from its ‘hard sci-fi’ branch (serious dudes imagining ‘what if this bird had a _slightly differently_ shaped claw), all the way to its ‘Fantasy-with-spec-evo- influences) branch. ‘All Tomorrows’ swings a little more towards the whacky end of the sci-fi branch of the sub-genre, (but will it stay a ‘sub’ genre for long? it feels like much of the intellectual and creative ferment is going on here). Dougal Dixon has a lot to answer for.

A friendless, fingerless mind.

 It’s difficult to imagine a concept of ‘vestigial intelligence’, of intelligence, as we understand it, evolving in a creature that uses it as we use it, and then persisting even a the creature in question, or its descendants, change shape, form and niche so much that there seems little use for it.

In humans the brain is utterly ravenous, gorging itself on perhaps a quarter of the bodies energy. For something so proportionately hungry to persist, it better be putting out some obviously useful abilities to make up for its cost.

Of course, so far as we know, intelligence has only evolved once on this planet, so it might be too early to be making strong laws about it. A creature might enlarge and change habits, making intelligence less directly useful but reducing its proportionate cost, so it ends up something like an appendix; a philosophical, intelligent creature that really doesn’t have any particular need to be, but is just kinda vibing. Or an intelligence that works on fundamentally different properties, so that it costs less overall, and so persists. Or a life form that is intelligent when it is small and social, but needs that intelligence less as it grows, yet retains it.

The closest thing I can think of is the Law of the Tongue; a group of Killer Whales forming a symbiotic relationship with a group of fishermen in which they herded prey for the Fishermen and were rewarded with the tongues of the prey – which was the main thing they wanted all along. The ritual of the Law of the Tongue seems to have ended with the death of a particular alpha female Orca, increasing the likelihood that it was an expression of intelligence, rather than just a working out of instinct and happenstance into an accidental symbiosis.

Corvids having weird relationships with particular people; recognising them by face, harassing them, or rewarding them; one man reported a group of grows he regularly fed in the park, waiting at his house when he got back from holiday. Somehow they had worked out where he lived, and when he went missing from his regular feeding stop, had gone to his address to see what’s up.

Our understanding of what intelligence is, is very strongly moderated by speech, the manipulation of objects, and complex social relationships. To the extent that if something can’t, or doesn’t speak, doesn’t, or doesn’t need to, manipulate objects and doesn’t have complex social relationships, we would have a hard time saying to ourselves precisely if or how it was intelligent.

Thence we come to the subject of this essay, an analysis of the intelligence of Dragons from a somewhat speculative-evolution influenced point of view.

Curious Habits

Obsessive Cleanliness

Prey cool when they die, and with that, all the fleas, nits and gribblies that lived on them try to migrate to the nearest warm thing, which is often whatever killed them. Thence; the Mod Predator/Hippie Scavenger dichotomy, where predators tend to look cool while scavengers tend to look homeless. Why? Because predators clean and groom themselves a lot to get rid of the FUCKING FLEAS, while Scavengers arrive after the body has cooled and can support a more rustic drip.

Social animals groom each other. Creatures with fur or feathers bathe, either in water or in dust. (In ‘The Peregrine’ J.A. Barker speaks memorably of the falcons daily, and exquisitely careful baths in a nearby stream before it begins to hunt). Lizards are a bit more basic but even they will bathe for moisture and cleanliness sometimes, and groom their own sensing organs. At the far end of the scale, Komodo Dragons are famously indifferent to whatever is in-between their teeth but even crocodiles have groomer-birds. 

What does a Dragons behaviour resemble? A bird, Croc, Lizard or something else?

A Dragons fire would help it deal with many parasites, as would its scales, but it couldn’t rely on those entirely, and would have to take care of its wings, where even a small infection or fungus would be a massive issue. 

A Feathered Dragon would likely bathe itself daily, and any period or place of grooming would be one of deep vulnerability. Finding a lair with an equally useful but isolated and secure grooming spot, like an inaccessible mountaintop tarn or glacial stream, might be a key factor in choosing where to settle.

Dragons having subspecies of carrion-eating ‘Grooming Birds’ to eat the bits of raw or burnt meat from between their teeth or spaces in its rear claws, seems like an interesting possibility. One case in which a bird-watcher might be useful is in tracing this rare species; they will likely nest wherever the Dragon goes to groom or bathe itself. If you can find these birds you may be able to find that spot.

Wing Protection

Something rarely mentioned in Dragon-Hunting stories is the enormous vulnerability of a Dragons wings. Those wing-bones may be very strong but are still likely the weakest bones in its body. If even a single one snaps, it will likely be unable to fly, or at least fly well.

Its still a big fire-breathing Bird/Lizard thing, but will be much more vulnerable on the ground, not to mention the loss of pride and status caused by loss of flight.

A Dragon is not going to stick around for attritional warfare against anything big or strong enough to damage its wings, nor will it willingly get into tight environments where something can be dropped on it. If it feels like its wings might be damaged it will simply fly away. 

Retreat to the air is one of a Dragons most powerful abilities. It can simply leave combat and circle, or just fly off to heal and think, returning at a time or place of its own choosing. This core advantage and willingness to simply run away is not remarked on in Dragon-slaying stories.

Complex Builds

Considering their intelligence and access to materials, a dragons lair may well have more 'built' elements than we might suppose. Big mountains generally don't have massive caves of the kind a dragon likes at their peaks so the Dragon will need to claw, magic, or craft the holes it wants, and will probably bring up stuff to add; spars of timber etc.

One key element of a Dragons raids might be light yet strong building material that it can carry off. Parts of ships and boats especially, with their lightness but tensile strength, might be favoured.

Though it lacks manual dexterity and its human-level crafting may be a bit rubbish, it has a high intelligence, so its structural engineering would probably be quite good. A Dragons lair might be more like some kind of crazy log-cabin/palace/aircraft hanger built into a partial cave system, rather than just a bare cave. It would at least be able to wall off parts of the cave if it wanted, and would be able to build some kind of nest or platform to sleep on as both stone and gold will absolutely drink heat away from its body.

Strange Psychological Vulnerabilities

Being largely asocial, singular, very-long lived, highly individual beings, as well as being by our standards, insanely narcissistic, and also having a very high degree of intelligence but, compared to humans, relatively little to *do* with that intelligence, Dragons may be highly vulnerable to ... queer behaviour and curious states of mind.

The closest things we have to them are Kings, Dictators, top Generals, Catwalk Models and Celebrities. I guess; if Kanye was also a fighter jet, how would he act? Or if General McArthur was combined with Naomi Campbell and an aircraft carrier, how would that act?

Singular as they are, it would be hard to us to judge; just what is 'crazy' for a dragon, but they do have a LOT of time on their own, (in a sense, they are always alone), as well as being magical and living across a much greater range of time, and having senses we don't understand. If the Dragon is seeing ghosts or hearing voices, who are we to say how real they are? Or if it is starting to have some crazy theories about reality - I suppose it might be right? Or if its hoarding twine, or the bones of humans inner ears, or just spends a week staring at a tree or something...

Where exactly does the border of madness lie for a Dragon? 

The idea of a genuinely mentally ill, conspiracy theory, Alex Jones/Howard Hawks/Kanye Dragon is utterly tantalising and somehow more worrying than just a regular predictable Dragon. What if it wants to marry a local maiden, and wants an actual marriage ceremony? Or starts acting like something it’s not, like a boar or a mountain? Or if it starts saying its 'The wind' or 'is fire', which generally Dragons say stuff like that all the time but now it’s crossed some invisible kind of Kanye line where it genuinely seems like its disassociating and *actually* literally thinks it’s 'The Wind', or it’s the Sun. Or what if it gets religion, or wants to join one, or starts talking about Jew-Tunnels hidden under the earth? Wtf do you say when a Dragon starts going on about the secret rulers of the world?

Might Simply Run Away If Humiliated

The very intense pride of a dragon, obsession with status, and need to occupy the top of a hierarchy, means that if defeated, but not killed, or endangered, publicly humiliated, it might decide to burn everything around it alive and make ruin, but there is at least a reasonable percent possibility that it might just run away, or fly away somewhere very far that no-one has heard of it and either pretend it didn't happen or strew on it for centuries.

If a Dragon just waits long enough it can kill many of its mortal enemies with Time. In a way, they don’t matter much because, to it, they will be gone in the blink of an eye.

Perhaps we can add this to the capricious just-leave aspects of a Dragon that make sense in a pseudo Evo-Spec sense, and in a Fairytale sense, but don’t fit its role in Epic Fiction of a final last Boss and ultimate challenge. Imagined in this new way, they are much more tricksy, capricious, hard to predict, but also much more indifferent; genuinely part of a different world, only somewhat interacting with ours.

Strategy and Symbiosis

A dragon can take nearly any ground, but cannot hold it, it is singular and its enemies many. It is a little like an imperial power that rules by a combination of terror, buying off elites and managing the local economy and tech level so it can't get too high, but offers some actual benefits in that at least it occupies the top of the dominance hierarchy and is (hopefully) a relatively stable weapon of mass destruction.

Certainly in the area of a Dragons control, it wouldn’t allow any other Alpha-Predator, or anything dangerous enough that it might threaten the Dragon itself. If Sauron sets up shop in a nearby valley He is getting torched. If a chunky enough Giant arrives on the scene it is getting ambushed at night, with a bite to the back of the neck from above.

Humans are useful to a dragon as they cut down forests and keep them low. The Dragon probably thinks of Humanity as a form of ‘growth’. Likely it barely thinks of them as individuals, in the same way that if our garden gets moles, we don’t individually think about this mole or that mole, we just think, ‘Damn, I got too many moles, need to reduce the numbers’.

Let the man piles reach a certain height but burn them when they get too far above it, big densities can be dangerous. Likewise, a human population is stable and controllable. They keep the Orcs out and generally occupy a useful spot in the food chain. They are also a social and hierarchal organism, and so can be dominated from the top. Once there is an Alpha-Human, you only really need to dominate that one human with the gold top, and that one will govern the rest for you, making them quiescent. Very useful, and hard to govern Orcs like that. 

A Dragon might be in some sense, a reasonably good 'Governor' of a large reach of land. Though they have no interest in human flourishing, they do in the survival of human agriculture. From a human perspective - a Dragon *probably* (it might) won't eat you personally, as you are too small and scrawny to make a good meal. It might bankrupt you by eating your livestock, but if its smart it will farm you sustainably.

Rule Through Retributive Terror And Protein Tax

Like the U.S.A., a Dragon is a dangerous Air Power, with incredible destructive potential, that really does not want to get bogged down in complex environments. The biggest threat for most bands of heroes trying to scale a dragons lair has got to be literally the whole population around that lair.

If someone tries to kill the dragon and fails, the Dragon will simply burn every available farm, village and town, maybe giving enough warning for people to escape, but breaking them all back down to poverty and starvation, so they have the strongest possible motivation to prevent anyone from trying that, and it will be pretty obvious if you are going to try that as you are approaching the dragons lair with climbing gear and weapons.

Environmentalists, (to a degree)

Dragons have a deep sense of time that actual humans lack, and a direct very long term investment in their local environment remaining sustainable (for them).

Though, just because Dragons can be wise custodians of their resources, and it would be to their direct advantage to be so, that doesn't mean they actually will. Humans can be wise, but often aren’t, and Dragons would have no innate sympathy with human life, or intuitive understanding of it, a village meaning to them about what a chicken does to us. 

And they can leave at any time, and arrive at any time. So periods of stability might be long, when they happen, but rare in total number. Young Dragons moving in, Older Dragons becoming unstable, disputes between hyper-predators, changes in political system, like a new King or religion, environmental changes leading to famine and stock-loss or famine brought about by war, all could result in rapid disordering and a more conventional Maker-of-Ruin situation where the Dragon just burns and eats everything within wing-range before moving on or just going to sleep.

The View from Above

The world seen from above - a world of landscapes, rivers, food, ocean and weather, herds, whales, schools of fish, rising thermals, rain shadows and dangerous storms.

They would favour flat lands with not too much forest, and definitely not Jungle, and singular inaccessible peaks. Deserts would be good as they are totally accessible from above, everything moving is easy to spot, food clusters round rare oasiies, and caravans and herds will move along set routes. However, even if a Dragon can fly a long way, a Desert may just not be productive enough in terms of Protein, considering how far the Dragon has to fly to get it, then fly back home. If a Dragon did rule a Desert I imagine it would be a rule of 1 Desert = 1 Dragon.

Pastoralist Dragons

They would favour pastoralism (more food on the hoof), over crop-growing (what use is Grain to a Dragon?). 

So; pastoralists, in terms of their impact on other food sources, hunter-gatherer humans are preferred, but in terms of managing developed resources, limited settlements are better, as it locks the humans in place and makes their life and development dependent on something quite easily destroyed from above. A town or small city, from a Dragons perspective, is a 'human-pen', it concentrates them, makes them accessible, and vulnerable, and exploitable.

Like many empires throughout history, Rice cultivation is good, if you can get it, as it massively concentrates populations and makes them intensely vulnerable to hydraulic despotism, but again, Rice might be too efficient. Too many humans and not enough big cows. You really probably want a lot of big cows. Like the Mongols, Dragons might just destroy complex hydraulic systems; they don’t really need intensive agriculture, its much better for them to have a lower population so long as they are all herding goats out in the open or something.

Mountaintop Kings

Even letting humans occupy lesser mountains might be considered a challenge to dominance hierarchy.

However; Kings on Mountains - this might work out. Letting or even insisting Kings occupy mountaintop palaces, on much smaller mountains, separates them from their people, impoverishes them, and brings them into a system of Hierarchy which re-affirms your own place at its unreachable height - Kings are only petty lesser dragons, or you can let them think they are if it keeps the cattle quiet.

The mountaintop palace in this case becomes a kind of Dragon-Versailles, a means of controlling and containing tributary nobility, doling out useless but prized fragments of dominance hierarchy symbology while strongly limiting their actual power. 

Fishermen and Ships

The ocean has a lot of protein, but it’s hard for a Dragon to reliably and safely get. It would be quite vulnerable out to sea, with no guarantee it could land on the surface and easily get back up, and if it did, such a brutal flailing, wet, take-off, might involve a murderous expenditure of calories.

And the things in the Sea are BIG; whales, Kraken etc. Good to eat if you can usefully get one, but how do you lift it up without risking its flailing smacking a wing-bone. Perhaps you could swim back to land - but again, this would be a personal disaster.

Fishermen however, make a business of floating about, gathering Protein which is usually inaccessible to you, then concentrating it in big heaps, which, furthermore, are isolated and vulnerable to fire.

In a way, Fishermen might be so valuable to a Dragon that lives near the sea that it would actually be quite protective of them, in a limited sense. Permanently damaging a fishing fleet, breaking them to the point where they can no longer sustainably fish and gather protein, would be like shooting your Uber Eats driver. It would be wise to only take as much as the economy can stand, vary your predation between different ships, (probably the Dragon can at least remember the ships even if the individual humans are a bit indistinct), and leave the ship intact when you eat its hold full of fish, so it can get back to port and go out again.

The Horde

A Dragon understands dominance hierarchies, high-status stuff, things that gleam and shine and have unusual textures, (an actual dragons horde might be full of rotted silk, embroidered cloth and other rare but beautiful textiles). 

It would probably think more about gems and gold than many other treasures, partly due to status and gleam, but also because they are as eternal as the dragon themselves, and so are one of few things that would last as long as the dragon in a world where everything else passes after a couple of centuries.

Horded would be more like a bower-bird display than just a pile of stuff. If Dragons are intelligent and have a lot of free time they are going to spend a lot of effort arranging things. The arrangement and visual display of a Dragons Horde would be a work of art in itself, a show of astonishing beauty, arranged with mind-blowing complexity regarding the patterns of colour and lustre, but without a humanlike organising intelligence or sense of object hierarchy.

The Dragon may also collect things which are notable to it but don't seem like much to mortal men

either because it can see across a wider range of vision and these things have a lustre in the ultraviolet, or because they have magical properties it can perceive directly, or simply because of some unique element that dragons would perceive as relating to their life-world, or simply from personal preference - they would be highly individual creatures. Its possible to imagine Dragons as deranged, eccentric collectors par-excellence, filling their Bond-Lairs with more curiosities than a Wunderkammer, arranged in wild mosaics that make sense only to itself.

Theft of even a single object from a Dragons Horde would be immediately noticeable on an autistic and aesthetic level; not only is every individual element collected and considered according to its own nature and thought of as part of a ‘set’, but within that, everything is arranged in an unrelentingly specific kaleidoscope of counterpoint and form so that if a single piece goes missing, EVERYTHING IS RUINED! Not only an autists wrath when their hyperfixation is disturbed and disordered, but an artist or aesthetes rage at their long-considered patterning of form being wrecked and made ugly. 

Also these are status objects of course. But really, a Dragons absolute, unrelenting RAGE, and even deep personal wounding, at the theft of a single fragment of a massive horde, is perfectly understandable.

Speaking with a Dragon

The key unheimlich, or even horror-like element of speaking with a Dragon would be the combination of its evident intelligence and complex reasoning, with an utterly non-human perspective, and even indifference to things humans intuitively understand, and a voice and speaking pattern also utterly unlike most other living things. It would be very distinctly weird and scary to speak with a Dragon.

Lack of Intuitive Understanding

Humans learn word-sounds and their meanings bound up with human expressions, patterns of behaviour, posturing, verbal tone and so-on. Babies who don’t even understand words can sometimes still kind of ‘argue’ in a gabbly way, or be sassy or winsome; they grasp crudely the emotional complex behind the worlds long before the words themselves have specific meanings. So for humans, words are a little like pieces slotted into a complex pre-grown structure of relationships and situations, the abstract meanings clearing, defining and making things more specific.

Then, when humans are much older, they can use words alone to try to deal with abstract concepts that may have no physical referents, (though they are not good at it).

A Dragon will have no intuitive humanlike understanding of what those sounds mean, to a human, 

but it has a high intelligence, so can work out complex arrangements of appropriate sound according to circumstance. Yet, in conversation, would be nothing like talking to an actual person.

There may be apparent fluency and perfection of repetition, and even simulation, but riding between that and the deep level abstract intelligence, would be a general incomprehension of language as it is spoken by men and manlike things. It doesn't live a manlike life in a manlike body, or have a manlike society, it would be more like a very adept Minah bird, that can associate signal to utility with great skill, knows what inputs will lead to what outputs, but from an utterly Other perspective. It might be a little like when a Chat A.I. starts to break down, or exposes that it doesn’t really understand what it is saying, but is just ‘making sounds’. This would be pretty terrifying coming from something that big and predatory.

It might be impossible to have a casual conversation with a dragon, or crack a joke, since these things are closely related to the human lifeworld and play no part in anything the Dragon is interested in.

Spellcraft & Ancient Tongues

This would help account for Dragons Spellcraft since they can probably remember and replicate anything they have heard and, with innate magical potential and a high intelligence, can probably iterate and learn to approximate the mental models the spell language is meant to mirror and support - so a Dragons spells, like its language would be an echo of those used against it.

I imagine that it would probably be better at mimicking the models of more elemental spells, less attached to the human lifeworld, since I imagine the mental models used in more 'human' spells would be intuitively alien and difficult for a dragon to grasp.

The Voice

The Dragon also doesn’t have a humanlike throat or mouth. Like a parrot or Minah bird, it can mimic, duplicate and remix highly complex and subtle sounds, and would have complex birdlike trills and repetitions, and its own use of language would be consistently unheimlich; speaking in 'recorded' strands of language from different voices.

Its vocal structure would be like talking to a bunch of tape decks - the dragon knows highly complex words and phrases (can probably repeat entire songs and conversations verbatim, and these might be hundreds, or even thousands of years old). The Dragons 'tape deck' might include many ancient languages long forgotten because, to the Dragon they were not that long ago. 

These might be bent towards the statements of Kings, Heroes, Mages etc, because these are the kind of people the Dragon actually meets and at least listens to somewhat

Many of these voices would be angry or scared, threatening, defying or pleading, since that’s most of what a dragon hears from manlike things, (or negotiating, it probably understands negotiation), or might be strands of distant conversation heard from ordinary people at night, far away, as the dragon heard this when flying above them, or church bells or other church songs, as these will be regular and will probably drift over the countryside and the Dragon will have heard most of them a bunch of times, though it would sing or replicate them with the usual bell or instrumental accompaniment, and/or in full chorus, as that’s how it heard them.

So, imagine this; the core voice is Birdlike, with the slight squarks and chirps and trilling you might expect from a bird, but way, way, way too deep. Deeper than any bird you have ever heard. And it comes from deep within the throat and chest, not from the mouth, which is lipless, and only opens slightly, and not in synch with its words in a human way.  

Above this mouth, regardless of what it is currently saying, the blank lizardlike stare of the Dragon.

And what it says, its ‘calls’, come as a kind of ‘madlibs’ or hyper-complex overlaying of ancient sounds. You are in a D&D setting so have never heard of DJ’s or seen ‘Bumblebee’ from Michael Bays ‘Transformers’, so have nothing to compare it to; voices in ancient languages, cries of ancient kings, fragments of chanted spells, the sound of crowds or singing, but heard as if far away, as the Dragon heard it, natural sounds like waves and wind, secret sounds like those animals make, flowing and overlaying of words, arranged not by precise meaning but in a kind of instinctive modernist collage of sounds.

But clearly this thing, (and it is most obviously a thing when it speaks, not a person as you understand it), understands you. It responds to what you say. Its collages of screams and cries, of sentences, and chanted poetry and old songs and muttered conversation, make some kind of sense, both emotionally, in terms of whether it means weal or woe, but also perhaps in the specifics, because it feels like there are layers of inhuman meaning there, relationships like jokes, or ironies incomprehensible to you, but you can just intuit the inference, and that there is more there you cannot understand. All of it in that terrifying giant-cassowary bird-voice, coming from that staring inhuman Dinosaur-face. The awkward pidgin communication between you limited not by lack of vocabulary, or lack of intelligence, but by a fundamental Otherness.

Speaking directly to a dragon might be more like speaking to a Demon than speaking to an actual Demon would be. Demons after all, are deeply concerned with human ranges of emotion and understanding, though antiethical to them. Speaking to a Dragon would be a truly disassociating Herzogian indifference-of-nature situation.

The Roar

A Dragons full roar, as well as freezing more totally than a lions, might be enough to rupture ears and even break bones. Also pretty likely you would shit yourself. They ‘aint put that in 5e I tell you.

Imagining Roteopia

As a consequence of reading 'Cats Paws' and Catapults' I became mildly obsessed with the idea of rotational limbs in living things. WHY can't we have Segway Elephants and HOW could they evolve????

Thus I developed Roteopia, which is like that series Dinotopia but imagining an earth where creatures with rotating limbs evolved but everything else stayed at least familiar enough for the reader to understand what’s going on.

FORMAL DEFENITION OF ROTATION HERE

ITS NOT JUST WAVING YOUR ARM AROUND OK????

"By wheels we mean proper wheel and axle devices that can rotate without limit with respect to the rest of a machine. If you roll down a hill, your whole body may be a wheel, but you're no wheel and axle. So we're not talking about tumbleweeds, or about the tiny turds that dung beetles roll homeward for grubs, or about a few crustaceans that get around by rolling as a whole. Nor are we worrying about how far we can rotate our fists around our rms or our heads on our shoulders. By "rotation" we also mean something fairly specific. When you draw a circle on a piece of paper, do you rotate your hand? You may move it in a circle, but you don't truly rotate it; after all, your hand at all times points in the same compass direction. Human dances make elaborate uses of such circular but nonrotational motion, most likely because it doesn't make us dizzy. Not all dances, of course; waltzes are rotational and, one suspects, intentionally vertiginous. The wheels of a bicycle rotate; your feet and the pedals just move around in circular paths. The Ferris wheel rotates as a whole, but the seats and people just go in circles. In this precise sense - excluding both rolling as a whole and merely going in circles - the only known instance of a wheel and axle in nature is the bacterial flagellum." - Steven Vogel, Cats' paws and Catapults

(From a post by u/ExplosiveVent here)

THE GENESIS OF ROTATING BEINGS

I have two general base animals in mind depend on whether we want bones or boneless. I will start with boned.

So imagine something like a a very early form of the Angler Fish in the Cambrian era. Not quite fishlike yet, maybe flat instead of tall, but it has a spine.

This creature is highly sexually dimorphic. The females are large and the males very small. Pattern of mating is that the male physically inserts its head into one of a range of orifices in the female. This proto-womb has a muscular lock to stop the male getting away. Once penetrated the area around the males head/internal wall, dissolves, large parts of the flesh of the males head dissolve as well, allowing genetic material to enter the female. Now they are joined.

So far, not hugely different to the modern Angler Fish, which can swim around with a number of males attached to it.

At some point the mating biology mutates so that the male can 'spin' inside the muscle lock. It has a particular head shape that keeps its head 'inside' the female, and if it did manage to get out it would die anyway as now it can only gain nutrients from the females body. But it can 'swim', flex its body and turn n its own axis, part inside the female but the rear part outside.

Now we imagine multiple matings, either simultaneously or over time but with the males from previous matings remaining in place.

Now we have a vertebrae fishlike being with these mini-fish sticking out of it, and the mini fish can still swim, and crucially, they can rotate in place.

Now rotational movement, a corkscrewing, is extremely efficient, so all we are waiting for is a fluke where the males are all capable of rotating and in the right position to provide thrust and are sensitive and responsive enough to female pressure to do so on command.

So now we have a fishlike being with what are in effect, corkscrew drives. 

That’s your evolutionary pressure. From this point on the species becomes better and better at developing and maintaining these rotating 'limbs'. More and more of the species existence is spent as an actually-multiple mating group, rotating improves, adaptions to secretions and the inner wall increasing strength and decreasing friction, energy transfer between female and male improves, male body shape shifts to become more and more an efficient corkscrew, the primal rotators develop a flexible body comportment so they can group their 'screws' behind them for maximum thrust but also spread these 'limbs' for manoeuvring. 

So effectively this early fish can 'strafe', and move rapidly three-dimensionally in water.

(The G'Kek from David Brins 'Uplift' series.

They were engineered and don't count.)

BONES OR NO BONES?

The other option for this was a sort of proto-squid with the rotating 'engines' at the end of the limbs. My main difficulty with these was that I want to get them on land at some point and its very rare (maybe impossible) for a non boned creature to evolve bones. Once they get to a certain size on land bones are going to be super-useful for sustaining that weight.

HOWEVER, the squid would have extra limbs, meaning it could 'push' itself along the sea floor, provide extra thrust, and have limbs left over for manipulation and hunting. I do like the idea of a huge hairy wheeled squid mammoth, or colour-shifting high speed steppe predator wheeled squid.

THE SHIFT TO THE SHORE

Moving from sea to land would happen pretty much as it did in our world, with colonisation of reefs, rotators using their screws to aquaplane the flat sea by beaches, rotator-lungfish types living in mud etc.

The evolution from screws to wheels should be _relatively_ simple. The males changing from corkscrews to full wheels and the alignment of the limbs shifting.

EARLY LAND BASED ROTATORS

Once you have even a semi-wheeled animal which can leave the water and race up and down the beach, we are off baby!

This is another situation where it might be easier to start with Squid rather than a vertebrate as they could manoeuvre and 'lock' their wheels, turning their limbs into legs, allowing them to cross rough ground probably easier and sooner than the fish-rotators.

The great difference between evolution on Roteopia and here would be the incredible SPEED of land animals really right from the start.

(Phillip Pullmans seed wheelers

BUT HOW DID THEY EVOLVE PHILLIP? HMMMM?)

THE LORDS OF SPEED

What does evolution on a fast rotation-based world look like? 

Probably the world of Speed will start at the beaches and the river mouths, but could it propagate itself inland? 

I imagine giant slow rotator-dinosaurs CRUSHING their way through primeval forests, eating all the trees and pooping out a steady stream of waste that hardens into a kind of poop-asphalt to aid the way of their baby-rotators.

Could Rotators conquer and in fact synergise with different forms of plant life to create a world not of dense forests but of mixed plain-forest pathways. Plants on flat land more spread out and distributed, wider apart, with high crowns and little midway growth, but with very flat smooth roots that don't disturb the ground (an evolutionary reward bought with the high dispersal of becoming a rotators favourite food).

Or plants and ecosystems which sustain themselves by foiling the rotators, producing crazed root systems, foiling toxic hanging vines and 'trap' branches which fall like caltrops. An environmental war between the rough and the smooth.

The key thing about Rotopia is that things tend to move FAST. Super-fast rotator velociraptors chasing high-speed Stegadons. Propellor driven birds screaming past. Rotator-Orca-Dinosaurs aquaplaning out of the ocean to grab prey.

ROTOPIA - BEFORE THE ICE AGE

Yet somehow (because I say so) Humanity arrives and the world ends up looking at least a bit like our own.

What is Rotator Earth like? 

The key difference that I can see is that the plains are now more like oceans rather than deserts. The existence of vast rotator-herds means the plains, tundra and wastes are criss-crossed by desire paths, some perhaps millions of years old, made. An earth of natural prehistoric highways. Prehistoric highways spread like river systems, visible from space, with their own linear ecosystems, resource conflicts over connections and junctions and huge animal traffic jams.

And with Rotator-beasts the crossing of these plains and highways by man becomes much more achievable. Movement across huge distances can be accomplished relatively easily, due to the wonderous efficiency of the hyper-evolved wheeled limb. 

Imagine the maps of early civilisation but now, instead of societies and populations and development being clustered around navigable sea-ports, like the Aegean, Mediterranean, South China Sea, now civilisation has two forms of 'ocean'. Ships travel the sea, linking cultures and resources together, but vast caravans of high speed rotator elephants also travel the plain. Crossing the Sahara, the American plains or much of Mesopotamia is not that big a deal. 

In this world, cultural power comes not just from where seas, rivers and farmable land intersect, but from where the hydraulic web of interconnections itself meshes with the Rotational Plains.

If you have sea-ports, river travel AND a vast plain meshing together, then the plain can be crossed almost as easily as the sea and possibly faster. Now on the far side of that plain, even if there is no oceanic or river access, a new margin of cities and cultures can develop, and at the meshwork between the two systems forms of civilisation can develop which draw wealth and power from a much wider area. Lords of the Land and Sea, Empire multiplied.

High-speed mass chariot warfare - the ancients fighting like a drag race at 50 miles per hour!

(Wheeled Beings... 14 Million Years Ago!!!)