Strange Creations by Donna Kossy, Feral House, 拢12.99, ISBN
0922915652
HOW did human beings evolve? Where did we come from? These are questions
almost everyone has toyed with at some time or other. Donna Kossy鈥檚 Strange
Creatures is about people who have spent rather more time on these problems than
most, visiting some of the weirder reaches of the human imagination鈥攖he
obsessions and cult religions that provide the raw material for lucrative books
and profitable rackets.
Some of these theories about our origins are familiar. Take the belief that
ancient astronauts colonised Earth or fertilised female hominids, thus spawning
the human race. Or the phoney spiritualist Madame Blavatsky鈥檚 鈥渞oot races鈥�, a
weird bunch headed by the Lemurians, who were 5 metres tall. Or the serpent
people from Venus who bred humans as slaves. Creationists pop up, of course.
There鈥檚 also a section on the superficially attractive idea of aquatic apes, who
took to the sea to escape predators and went back to the land later.
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Kossy says, 鈥淚 seek not to debunk strange ideas, but to present them as a
necessary segment of the full spectrum of human thought.鈥� What a cop-out! At
first passably interesting, these people and their ideas soon become tiresome.