On Wet Feet
Xenofiction Short StoryIn 2012, I tried a new concept: A non-fiction book built upon a short fiction story. The book was originally published under the title Feuchten Fußes (On Wet Feet) in German, my second ever standalone publication and the first in a series called Meilensteine der Evolution (Milestones of Evolution).
This is an English translation of this first published shortly which I still consider the best short in the series so far because it works the best as a standalone story.
The idea here is to give readers a story followed by an explanation of the science behind it. What parts of it are fact and how we know, what parts of it are speculative in order to make a story happen. This would be followed by non-fiction texts about the larger context like the way the earth was back in the Devonian age, the evolutionary processes mainly involved, imported species during the transition, and so on. All books in the series turned out to be very well-received. Because they began with a short story, many people gave or read them to their kids. I was surprised about this, but could not have been happier about reaching children with science education, especially on topics seemingly less popular than the obvious choice of dinosaurs.
What I wanted to do was to introduce people to the knowledge required to see through the falsehoods creationists had begun to spread in Europe, mainly their claim of a lack of transitional fossils when nothing could be further from the truth. I did not consider them lies, as I still am sure most creationists simply do not know any better and believe these false claims themselves. This is why I chose one of the most well-documented and most important transitions in the history of life on earth, the one that spun the first amphibians from a line of fish.
The series produced three volumes on the first amphibians, the first birds, and the end of the dinosaurs, respectively, before some problems got the better of it. Turned out it was not that easy to write short stories about the lives of animals without repeating the same plot over and over again. So as of 2016, I am working on changing the series into three larger volumes, spanning all of life's history on earth between them.
There is some literary heritage here, as well. One of my favorite authors as a child was German writer Lothar Streblow. He wrote stories from the viewpoint of animals, including some prehistoric ones (an Apatosaurus, a Triceratops, and a mammoth). Streblow is now mostly forgotten even in Germany, but I remember his stories. These resulted in a lifelong (well, so far) fascination with xenofiction, the far-too-rare genre of stories written from a non-human perspective. See Watership Down for a famous English example of this genre, or Bambi for another German-language one. Both have excellent animated movies based on them, as you probably know.
April 2012
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How to Sing Butterflies
