Today Paleo-Nerd interviews Keenan Taylor, author of the book Tales of Kaimere, one of the most interesting spec-evo projects around, available here.
Let’s begin with a classic – please introduce yourself:
Hi! My name is Keenan Taylor. I’m a scientific illustrator and fantasy author. I’ve had my illustrations in textbooks, museums, and national parks. Kaimere is the setting of my literary work and speculative biology project. I have an anthology of short stories, Tales of Kaimere, that’s just come out in hardcover, and run a YouTube channel with worldbuilding on the setting and a few tips and tricks for creating your own worldbuilding projects.
So exactly what is Kaimere? Some kind of Lost World?
Kaimere is a distant planet connected to Earth by a portal. Over millions of years, ever since our late Devonian era, many organisms have been harvested from Earth and replicated on Kaimere, where they evolve in independent ways in this new context than their descendants did on Earth. There are no plants or animals endemic to Kaimere: all multicellular organisms are functionally descendants of cloned flora and fauna taken from our planet harvested every few million years or so.
That sounds amazing! So dinosaurs excaped the K/T thanks to this portal. What kind of dinosaurs do you find nowadays on Kaimere?
For a while the known world (region around the portal) was dominated by hadrosaur and horned dinosaur nesting colonies, tyrannosaurs and carcharodontosaurs were the predators, and titanosaurs maintained the surrounding forest. The tyrant dynasty collapsed around 15 million years ago. Most members of those groups went extinct. Small generalist dinosaurs diversified to take over their places. Now parksosaurs and a new clade of titanosaurs are the most common large herbivores. The top predators are megaraptorans, which on Earth were generally mid sized theropods but in Kaimere grew to the size of the former tyrants. After the dynastic extinction, not only did generalist dinosaurs fill in these niches, so did mammals! Some were already in Kaimere, most notably non therian mammals and entelodonts. To replenish the biomass lost after the dynastic extinction the portal activity spiked, harvesting every million years or so. Now the known world has a lot of familiar animals to us, such as leopards and deer, living alongside dinosaurs, many of which are quite different than their ancestors we would recognize from the fossil record.
Oh! So are there men in Kaimere, too?
There are! Two harvesting events brought archaic humans to Kaimere: one in Southeast Asia some 2 million years ago introduced Homo erectus, and 300-400k years ago, the ancestor of the people who call themselves Kaimerans. The Kaimerans are either a sister species to H. sapiens, or a subspecies of our own. The specifics of that come down to if neanderthals are their own species or a subspecies, which last I looked into it has not reached consensus.
You described yourself as a fantasy author, does this mean that in Kaimere there is, like, magic?
Excellent question. Yes! All things magic, including how the portals bring Earth organisms to Kaimere, are the workings of the endemic unicellular life of Kaimere. As the movements and manipulations are invisible, or at most a haze, the Kaimerans describe it as magic. The most common magic is hives of endemic live that bind with a host, keeping them healthy and allowing a variety of environmental manipulation in exchange for a multicellular body that feeds them and moved things around. This accounts for the witches and demons you meet in my book. I call it magic because that’s the simplest explanation, but as with all things in my work, I try to give it a grounded scientific explanation even if it’s not a concept that’s reliably testable. I offer a full explanation of how this magic works and the most common magical creatures in my latest video series.
This sounds really interesting! Do you wanna talk about the creative process behind your creatures?
You bet! When designing a creature for Kaimere I first need to see if there is an available niche. Once a role is established, I look through the list of canon portals and find something that I think could adapt to fill this niche or already held it on Earth and would be competitive enough to keep it in as volatile a world is as Kaimere considering the constant influx of invasive species. I then make adjustments to its anatomy and behavior to fit this context. As I discuss in my video on animal coloration in creature design, a big contextual difference between Kaimere and Earth is that dinosaurs have color vision. A tiger stands out to us, but doesn’t to deer, their favored prey. To top it off, the megaraptorans have ultraviolet vision, so many animals practically glow to them. An advantage that South American mammals had is that they came from an ecosystem where the top predators, terror birds, also had this feature, so many of them have adaptations to reduce their UV signature or create a sort of visual noise. That’s part of why there are so many animals like giant sloths that came from South America which are successful in Kaimere.
Wow! A lot of work, indeed! So among the various Kaimeran creatures you created, which one is your favorite?
The indrakai, a dromaeosaur with owl-like ear tufts, will always be near and dear as it was the first creature I designed for Kaimere when I was twelve, which by my calculations was… oh goodness almost seventeen years ago. I’m also really proud of some of the wackier creatures like the cursorial horned dinosaurs, penguin raptors, dicynodonts that are a sort of walrus manatee hybrid, and the pterosaurs that became flightless and arboreal like apes. As I develop beyond the known world and animals have had more time to diverge from their ancestors, things will get even more creative and less familiar. I’m really excited about that.
So there will be more of Kaimere, beside the anthology of short stories?
Absolutely! I’m in the second draft of a novel following a World War 1 veteran trapped in Kaimere for a year, have several more short story ideas, and a series of novels as well. Lots of stories to tell and I’ve made a setting with so much history and ground to cover that I know it will keep my interest. I’m also working on a bestiary of the known world which will have commentary from Earth and Kaimeran naturalists to give readers as full a context as I can offer.
Tales of Kaimere is an anthology of fantasy short stories and novellas. All are written and illustrated by Keenan Taylor. These adventure stories explore love and loss, revenge, and coming of age, and include elements of thriller, romance, and horror. Kaimere is a distant planet much like Earth, but with an ecosystem influenced by waves of life taken from our world and introduced to the native magic. This magic is diverse and chaotic, taking the form of calculating forest spirit Indrakai in Trickster’s Gambit, the essence of luck that aids Argunite in Koban’s Menagerie, or a malicious demon that hunts the protagonists of Spider’s Prey. In the paperback, there are eight short stories set in Kaimere and three on Earth, exploring the influence of Kaimere’s magic on our own world. The hardcover has an additional story in Kaimere.