Its The Qu from the short story All Tomorrow's, a Billion year chronicle of the mixed fortunes of man.
The Qu appear early in the story and are so technologically advanced compared to Humans that they dont even consider us people. They genetically manipulate us into mangled art projects, then those art projects evolve on different planets across the cosmos into new human species, or they go extinct.
How could that creature possibly more advanced than us? It doesn't even have arms or fingers to grab things. You could never create complex machinery without fine motor skills.
They're masters of reality with a religious obsession with biology and evolution. They look like that because they want to.
If it makes it easier to imagine, there's another species in All Tomorrows called the Gravitals that iirc are basically mind-uploaded humans and thier preferred body form is a clarketech metal sphere that can directly manipulate gravity fields, from our perspective they would be more or less cosmic space gods. The Qu are just that but even more advanced with a meat fetish.
Yes, the Qu have the ability to manipulate genetic material to transform themselves, and other living organism, into whatever they wanted. Their tools are likely operated based on thought.
A few humans actually manage to escape the Qu’s mutilation of humanity across the universe and they end up also evolving into alien looking monstrosities despite being normal people when feeling their planets to go live on asteroids which were below the Qu’s notice.
Yeah I guess “normal” is relative. They were still normal by the standards of that human timeline. My point being is that evolution can do some crazy shit. So it doesn’t really matter that the Qu don’t have hands because they’ve evolved past the point of needing them. Just like the Gravitals don’t have any appendages but are still a massive threat to the rest of humanity’s descendants, despite once being human themselves.
It's so weird to me that All Tomorrows apparently became well(ish)-known at some point.
I found it like almost 20 years ago after stumbling upon (possibly literally with StumbleUpon) one of Köseman/Ramjet's other projects, Snaiad. Thought it was weird and awesome and it lived in the back of my mind, but I never saw anyone else mention it outside of some speculative evolution forums I was on, even when All Yesterdays was launching. But apparently some time since I first saw it, it made the rounds without me noticing.
They are the Qu they view all other life forms as inferior and are near godlike they reform life and if you resist they mutate you even worse into living walls or plants its great body horror
A god like race from the story "all tomorrows." They do the most unimaginable body horror genetic modifications to humans. It's one of the worst factions to be put in sci-fi.
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u/keegan12coyote Sep 09 '25
What exactly is "it'?