The Hopeful Horror of ‘Humanity Lost’

From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh… it disgusted me.

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Once you’ve become a shambling mass of flesh... there’s really no cure.

Not in science fiction, anyway. Whether a character is mutated by a virus, or absorbed into a hivemind — once their body transforms… it’s probably too late. “They’re too far gone!” Another character might shout, just so we’re clear that person is no more, their humanity digested along with their physical form.

I assumed that ‘Humanity Lost,’ a graphic novel by Callum Diggle, would follow the same conventions. I assumed its narrative of an AI mutating every person into a warped nightmare would not be a story about humanity persevering. I was wrong. ‘Humanity Lost’ is a stirring tribute to how personhood can endure no matter how altered the flesh, and with a special edition of the first volume now available, I think it’s time to take a deeper look at this surprisingly hopeful dystopia…

0:00 Humanity Lost: New Horrors
1:08 Pustules and Boils
2:58 Unlikely Heroes
3:45 Flesh Machines
5:25 Vivisecting the World
6:46 Aliens Aren’t Cuddly
8:28 Gods of the Stars
10:38 Resistance is Futile
11:42 The Borg Scare Me, Okay?
13:44 That Other Pestilence…
15:01 A Light in the Darkness
16:30 Hopeful Horror?

Other Media Shown: Inside, Akira, The Thing, The Last of Us, Star Wars, Predator, Edge of Tomorrrow, Galaxy Quest, Mass Effect 3, Life, ET, Scorn, Halo Wars 2, Halo 2: Anniversary, Halo: Anniversary, Halo Legends, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: TNG, Alien Planet, Expedition, Carrion

Copyright Disclaimer: Under section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, education, and research. All video/image content is edited under fair use rights for reasons of commentary.

I do not own the images, music, or footage used in this video. All rights and credit goes to the original owners.

♫ Music Used – Submarine (Inside), Read Access Memory (Superhot), Main Menu Theme (Metro 2033), Promise (Okami), Baptism (Bioshock)

♫ Additional music by Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio:
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

[danielhavens]

the Belisarius Saga is an example of a story that says "I'm joining the war on human body horror on the side of the human body horror" and it's soooo good

[LeafseasonMagbag]

Imagine what it must be like living in Biopunk universe before the biopunk is invented.
And then someone invents the sphincter door and it’s 900% better than all other kinds of door and everyone is like *”PRAISE THE NEW FLESH”* and that’s just forever now.

[teejaykaye]

My FAVORITE kind of horror is the intersection of body horror and cosmic horror. I think this series will be PERFECT for me.

[rustyshackleford]

Has it already been 2 years since your first video on humanity lost? Wow! Time really flies… 😭

[Ordinaryy_Charlie]

I would totally love a series on Dinotopia!! It has been a favorite series of mine and just learning there are more books in the series the other day reignited my love for the series and the art in its pages.

[carolynallisee]

Perhaps this is an apt time for me to speak about a science fiction story I read well over forty years ago. It was in a book in our secondary school library, a science fiction anthology whose title may have been generic, but is now long forgotten, along with that of the story.
Told from the viewpoint of the scientist in an exploratory team of four, it starts with the team falling into a gelatinous mass. We are then told that space exploration, and surveying new planets, has turned into something like a game of GO, a Chinese board game. This is why one of the team members is what is called a 'loyalty monitor', placed within the team to ensure everyone sticks to the rules laid down by the company funding the team.
We learn that the gelatinous mass has digested everything but the brains and spinal cords of the humans, and uses the thought processes to make body parts that will enable it to better survive its environment. Each Team member comes up with different body parts- legs, arms, eyes, ears and so on. The four still have to work together to survive, though, and it soon becomes clear that the Loyalty Monitor is a threat to the protagonist and the third team member, having persuaded the fourth to side with her.
When the organism divides into two, the Loyalty Monitor takes the opportunity try to kill or otherwise remove the protagonist from his half of the creature, but he survives. Now divided, he shares his half with the fourth team member, another scientist, who as per the LM's instructions, tries to kill him. Instead, No 4 is killed when a large rock falls on his half of the creature, crushing his brain and spinal cord to pulp. The protagonist recovers and goes in search of the other creature, to find that one of the brains and nervous systems is lying on the ground a short way from it. He discovers that the third team member, a female civilian secretary, is still alive and in sole control of the organism. She tells him that she grew bony armour to protect her brain and spinal cord when the LM tried to attack her- basically, she grew a skull and spinal column. At this point, the LM's brain and nerves were ejected from the body, she'd been excreted as waste detrimental to the survival of the creature.
The story ends with the Protagonist and the secretary attempting to shape their gelatinous forms into something more pleasing. All this time, the protagonist has been trying to name this creature, using his surname as the species name, until he comes up with an entirely new name for the creature. I can't recall what the scientific name was, but I do recall its translation into ordinary English, which was 'Man's hope'.

[LanieMae]

I’ve always found fleshy diseases and mutations incredibly interesting because for me lots of it comes off as an allegory for cancer wether it’s intentional or not. Cancer cells mutate and rapidly spread throughout the body, avoiding detection and causing only destruction, and often times these shambling masses of flesh in fiction do a similar thing. I guess why it’s so scary is not only because of a heavily mutated and fleshy human, but the fact that something like this exists in real life, albeit on a cellular level.

[hailtheprince]

Tandrax: "What if we take our solar system, and PUSH IT SOMEWHERE ELSE!"

[daskinnytexan]

it gives me all tomorrows vibes, more specifically the snakes who managed to evolve from humans that wrre turned into literal worms and yet somehow retained extremely human characteristics like it was still ingrained in their modified DNA

[Asporez]

13:00 in the storyline that was planned after Voyager, USS Titan, Romulus is destroyed and the Borg invades and assimilates about 60% of the Federation then it becomes a post-apocalyptic nightmare.
It was scrubbed because it isn't the ideal setting to restart a franchise but I was sad it never got into the cannon.

[vizzzyy]

as a disabled person, as much as i love body horror, it is also heartbreaking to know that something (physical or otherwise) that "transforms" us or makes us different, is also what makes us lesser or villainous.

[ScottTerry-rzjn]

I've been on curious binge the last couple days so I'm definitely glad you've made another episode

[thetyler]

As A.I. go, this one isn't THAT bad. It just wants humanity to thrive and grow. Now there's more "human" in the universe than ever!

[Parasolhyena]

Good example is: All Tomorrows, unwillingly transformed into the some of the most deceptite beings, however against all odds they succedeed against the creature that did this to them. All of them altered but still humans.

The ending is ambiguous, if it was a unfortunate end or if something better happened, the story was always set as speculative history and we are left to decide how we want the story to end.

[seigeengine]

Honestly, modern audiences in general have become divorced from the horrors of pathogens.

The black death is obvious, but in 1800s Europe, approximately a quarter of all people died from Tuberculosis.

Smallpox is another great example. We don't think of it in the same plague sense, but in a span of three years, a plague of smallpox killed 1/3 of the population of Japan.

[kovi-kovi-viko]

the indomitable human spirit against the face of many threats, including the IRS and utterly phallic spaceships. joking aside, this video does give me that glimmer of hope for tomorrow, even if that tomorrow ends up being either painfully mundane, samey-samey, painfully tragic, and sometimes actually great tomorrows. the feeling of longing for the distant horizons always reminds me that, for all the emptiness there is between each dot in the sky, and for all the discourse wedged between miles and miles of people and concrete forest, i'm kinda glad i still feel something.

[danthiel]

I created a Warhammer 40k faction called "The Covenant of the Flesh" in it they subscribe to the notion of evolution and modular Tyranid design but also pure unadulterated chaos. They would by all means be branded as heretics and their faction would be close to being snuffed out. They are not worshippers of the four (Chaos gods Khorne, Slanesh, Nurgle, and Tzeentch ) but worship the idea of Chaos itself. On the other side of that is the Chronus Mechanicus who are former Necrons, T'au and Adeptus Mechanicus. They subscribe to the purity of the machine. They would also be branded as heretics but not as much as the other faction would.

[Replicaate]

The alien designs in Humanity Lost are such a treat. I don't care if it looks like HP Lovecraft's loogies, I'd love a swordfighting jellyfish space buddy!

[BadgerOfTheSea]

The echo of the generational memory of the plague is arguably one of the reasons such ideas of body horror exists

[PickledJar]

It's currently 2:00AM. I'll watch this first to have the best sleep after 'cause of existential crisis