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Most science fiction, even the really dark stuff, lets humanity keep a little bit of its dignity. The planet might blow up. The robots might turn on us. But somewhere in there, we're still us. Still recognizable. Still kind of noble. All Tomorrows is not one of those books.

C. M. Kösemen's cult book, written under the pen name Nemo Ramjet and first released online back in 2006, takes human history and stretches it across a billion years. Instead of pioneering the idea that we’ll only become a more advanced race, the book dismantles the idea that the human body is some kind of sacred, finished thing.

A Future Built On Biological Horror

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The book starts almost familiar, approaching a science we’re getting closer to achieving by the day. Humans successfully colonize Mars, which eventually leads to a battle between the two colonized planets. After reunification is observed, a larger colonization initiative is observed throughout the Milky Way. At this point, however, humans look a little different. We’re now known as “Star People.”

As the process of galactic colonization occurs, the Star People run into a superior genetically modified alien force known as the Qu. These dragonfly-eque aliens share a singular religion, motivating them to remake the universe through genetic engineering.

It’s no surprise that the Star People are defeated in a war against the Qu. But these aliens don’t just defeat humanity, they remake it. Hundreds of times over. Into forms that range from helpless and pitiable to something so specialized and strange it barely reads as human at all. What makes that central act of transformation so unsettling is that Kösemen treats it as something humiliating, random, and brutally ecological. The body isn't a vessel for noble destiny in this book. It's raw material.

The book never just becomes a gallery of nightmare creatures. Its structure reads like a chronicle, a far-future history, following these posthuman lineages as they go extinct, or adapt, or slowly claw back something like intelligence. That historical sweep is what gives every weird design a sense of weight. These aren't just monsters for shock value. They're the products of time, pressure, and evolution doing what evolution does.

Why The Qu Are So Hard To Shake

The Qu are terrifying partly because they're powerful, but what’s even more frightening is that they’re patient. They dominate and reshape humanity for 40 million years before just... moving on, leaving behind worlds full of altered descendants who barely have any memory of what was done to them. That timescale turns human suffering into something geological, another layer in the rock.

There's also something specifically nasty about their logic. They don't conquer humanity in the traditional sense. They don't exterminate it either. They redesigned it. The book takes forced improvement and turns it into cosmic vandalism.

The Colonials and the Mantelopes tend to be the forms people remember most vividly because they're so viscerally awful. The humans that become colonials turn into what can only be described as a wall of flesh, with their sole purpose being as a filtration system for the Qu’s water and food supply. However, they retain the high intelligence of their ancestors. The mantelopes also retained their human-like intelligence, but were modified into four-legged beings that served as singers and memory retainers for the Qu. When the Qu leave, they face extinction, unable to rebuild the world around them.

The real horror, underneath all the creature design, is watching intelligence become unstable. Contingent. Take away culture, tools, memory, and the right conditions, and a species can become something unrecognizable with terrifying speed.

Why People Keep Coming Back To It

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For all of its body horror and existential bleakness, All Tomorrows isn't actually cynical. Not really. Underneath all the collapsed empires and ruined bodies, there's this stubborn humanist streak running through the novel. The story keeps looking for traces of tenderness. Curiosity. Small moments of joy, even if these humans no longer recognize themselves.

This human streak is likely why the novel keeps resurfacing instead of just fading into internet folklore. Kösemen notes on his site that All Tomorrows has been listened to more than 14 million times in audiobook form. For a project that started life as a self-published PDF drifting around the web, that's remarkable. The internet loves a strange image, sure. But it loves a strange image with emotional ruin and existential dread underneath it even more.

The book also sits at this particular crossroads of gaming culture, tech culture, and modern sci-fi fandom. If you've ever spent time in conversations about speculative worldbuilding, or evolutionary biology, or transhumanism, or grim lore videos on YouTube, you've probably bumped into the same question that hums underneath all of it: if humans can redesign themselves, what are they actually trying to hold onto? All Tomorrows answers that with a shrug and a shiver. Survival, it suggests, might matter more than purity.