Lots of people love anthropomorphic characters. Perhaps you are one such fan. Perhaps you are a writer who plans to feature them in your fiction. Many authors don’t feel a particular need to justify anthropomorphic characters’ presence in their stories. There are plenty of examples available, but attempting to list all the relevant folktale figures, manga characters, and inhabitants of Duckburg would take up an entire essay, at least. But there are other people—people like me—who become anxious if important elements aren’t given a backstory or explanation. For those people, here are some semi-plausible ways anthropomorphic characters could have appeared in your setting…
There’s the surgical approach: Doctor Moreau, for example, was quite keen on surgically sculpting animals into forms that he considered more pleasing. This effort did not entirely go according to plan, but still, it was an impressive result for someone limited to Victorian medical technology1. Now passé.
Drugs: Take Jack Kirby’s comic book character Kamandi. A scientist developed a drug which he hoped would enhance animal intelligence. There’s no hint that he intended for the enhanced animals to start ambulating on their hind legs and imitating various human cultures, but that’s precisely what happened after the Great Disaster wiped out most humans.
Genetic engineering and other forms of biological manipulation: S. Andrew Swan’s Moreau series features engineered anthropomorphs. Cordwainer Smith imagined Underpeople and Masamune Shirow imagined the Puma sisters. Then of course, there’s Brin’s Uplift series. Why create anthropomorphs? In the Uplift series, it’s for galactic status. In other series, it’s often because humans want expendable others to do the heavy lifting. Or exploitable beings to use for unsavoury purposes. Note that if the creator humans are still thriving, it’s probable that the uplifted animals lead unpleasant lives.
Sometimes the humans are gone. Revolution! Planet of the Apes! But in most cases it seems that humans killed themselves off and other animals took over their ecological niche. Given enough time, the new species could become sorta kinda humanoid (See Stableford’s Realms of Tartarus. Granted, humans still existed in that setting, just not where the new intelligent species were evolving.)
Alternatively, if you don’t want to set your story in the sufficiently distant future, there’s always another trouser-leg of time. Perhaps humans never evolved at all, leaving that niche entirely open for another species to fill. (See Boyett’s The Architect of Sleep)
Or you could always start with humans rather than animals. Lots of humans like to dress up as animals, with some opting for more permanent alterations. SF authors have also imagined ways to do this: see Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun or Charles Sheffield’s Sight of Proteus.
Why not start with aliens! Surely, somewhere on the millions of inhabitable planets out there (cough) species have evolved to look like Earth species with a dash of human. That’s how you get lion folk (Chanur’s Hani), ant folk (Serpent’s Reach’s Majat), or bear folk (Spacial Delivery’s Dilbians). Just set the book on an alien world and practice saying, “convergent evolution.”
But the easiest way to introduce anthropomorphs to SF is just to write them, put them in spaceships, and eschew obsessing about backstory: Here are catpeople! Readers won’t really mind as long as the story is interesting.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He was a finalist for the 2019 Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]Try not to think about what Moreau’s post-surgical infection rate looked like.
See also Stross’ Neptune’s Brood. Robots were imprinted on humans, and when humans were gone, robots recreated them.
Try also not to think of what swell development systems Moreau’s productions would be for exciting new zoonotic plagues.
I’m amused that this column was published the day after Furplanet announced pre-orders for The Reclamation Project: Year One. It definitely uses the “Animals take over after the humans” trope, though in this case the 1% er, surviving humans just abandoned the Earth’s surface in favor of flying cities.
You forgot “A wizard did it.”
@1, that’s more true in Saturn’s Children than the sequel, where the bots have taken different forms, tentacled sea-dwellers to Space Bat Pirates.
Mention of catpeople always makes me think of Lieber’s The Wanderer.
After contact with an alien society based on Uplift, yes. But humans started to uplift animals before that, and their motivation for doing that isn’t obvious.
I’m always up for cat people! Who isn’t? But if you’re still alive, James, you can’t be a Darwin Award Winner, just an endangered survivor. And from some of the stories you’ve told I think your Guardian Angel must get overtime pay. And therapy.
There’s also Albedo, where humans are absent precursors. (During the series, the characters discover the idea of history, and start wondering where they came from.)
No Spellsinger fans here?
#5– Oh, right. I was thinking about actual humans. In Saturn’s Children, the robots were anthropomorphic, but they were worried about recreating humans. In Neptune’s Brood, they’ve recreated humans several times, but the robots are less anthropomorphic.
Absolutely to all points, and I love most of the books in the collage. Enjoyed the subtle Pratchett shout-out too :)
@9 good point. Roseroar was always one of my favorite characters – deep, straightforward, and comfortably powerful in a way that wouldn’t have worked as a human. Still no Hani, but hey, who is?
See also Andre Norton: One of her recurring alien races were the Salariki, who were derived from feline ancestry. I believe their first appearance was in “Plague Ship,” the second of the Solar Queen series.
There was also “Breed to Come,” in which humanity fled a polluted Earth, leaving it to the animals. Over millenia, mutations caused animals to evolve, leading to an intelligent race of feline-ancestored humanoids.
Far, far too many examples to enumerate…
The Uplift books actually feel a bit of a stretch. IIRC the engineered Terran species look much like the originals. Dolphins use cyber implants and waldoes to interface with human tech rather than, say, primate-style arms. So, the brains are anthropomorphic?
The Durulz in Glorantha, which are basically humanoid ducks, have a pretty entertaining backstory. The Doylist backstory is that the creators of the world loved Carl Barks’s work (writer and artist of the first Donald Duck stories), and the Watsonian justification amounts to “we think it was a curse back in mythological time, but they Do Not Speak Of This.” It’s sort of a big “There are ducks; you gotta problem with that?” thing, which I find amusing in its simple audacity.