Who Built The Humans?
Description
47 stories. 11 universes. It's up to you which way to go. Will you save the humans from extinction, or be an instrument in their downfall? Will your adventure be serious, or silly?
★★★★★ "whether you're into Douglas Adams or Isaac Asimov or Robert Heinlein, there's something in here for you."
From godlike alien squid running their own pirated copy of a game called 'Earth,' to psychic crystals with a hunger for cartoonish violence against anyone called Susan, Who Built The Humans? is a relentless exploration of weird Science Fiction and even weirder comedy.
And it's so much more. The eleven universes in WBTH can be read front-to-back or in any other order, yielding new connections, jokes, and insights with each delirious reread, becoming a book that changes shape each time you pick it up.
★★★★★ "Carter writes like a madman and that is truly the only way these stories could have been written. Just like the scribblings of a mad genius"
Part comedian, part author, all sasquatch, Phillip Carter brings a "devastatingly acidic wit" and an oversized forehead to the literary scene. Crashing out on Earth in his makeshift starship, he brings us stories about everything from time travelling crab-men, to perversely poetic accounts of plutonian probing practices. Then, without a moment's hesitation, he launches into a dark new reality where robotic beings chew through slabs of solid time, spirals off into a pocket dimension where a little boy called Gord tries to unwrite his own story, and finally lands on the last planet at the edge of the universe, where two reptilian scientists discuss the implications of a devastating discovery. All of which is contained neatly inside Who Built The Humans?
This is a huge build-your-own-adventure book for anyone with a twisted sense of humour. Because in this book, you get to decide Who Built The Humans?
(and if you like, you can also decide what kills them).
★★★★★ "Incredibly weird, laugh out loud funny and very clever."
★★★★★ "An astonishing creation, filled with conjecture and supposition. I can honestly say that I have never read anything like this before. The scope is Universe wide and simultaneously microscopically small and incredibly intense. Phillip Carter has taken the philosophical idea that all of reality is but the dream of some immense cosmic being and dragged it kicking and screaming into a new existence [...] Phillip also infuses the book with an acerbic devastatingly acidic wit compounded with a bone dry sense of humour. The author's obvious intelligence shines through in both the creative imagination and the beauty of the language."
★★★★★ "Alien architects, infant gods, and your run-of-the-mill tinfoil-hat conspiracy theorists are just a few of the people you'll meet within these 47 stories [...] The thing I love most about Who Built The Humans? is the writing style. The cadence of the story telling is absolutely stunning."
More details
Person
Comedian, Author, Poet, Artist, and Bigfoot lookalike, Phillip Carter is a multifaceted storyteller whose stories breathe new life into everything from time travel and alien encounters, to nights out and crystal shopping.
His writing is multidisciplinary, bringing a poetic voice to Science Fiction, a comedic edge to poetry, and a bit of everything to his best stories. This multifaceted approach makes his stories accessible and unique, providing many layers of storytelling for you to glide over or explore, depending on how you are feeling.
Bragging
Phillip won the Rhiannon Evans scholarship in 2015 for excellence in Creative Writing - for a darkly comedic sci-fi poem about mosquitoes which was actually about relationship woes.
Since then he has appeared briefly in Channel 4s Lego Masters, judged a short story competition at the Edinburgh Literature Festival, told jokes about time travel at Bright Club, told jokes about marriage and religion at Wise Guys in Utah, set up his own comedy shirt company, and befriended the local pigeons. At the time of writing, he can fit 42 Lego figures in his beard.
Phillip's meandering path to world domination
Phillip's goal as a comedian is to get on various television panel shows and say clever, silly things. His goal as an author is to give people new universes to explore. His goal as a human being is to go back in time to upsell new types of fire to cave people. "Fire 2.0" will replace regular fire simply because it offers a sleeker design and alternating flame colours. The cave people do not need to know about the dangerous, hallucinogenic gases which make those colours possible. It's fine if they hallucinate a little bit, they'll only dream of harmless things like reading author bios.
Other books / Gigs
Phillip has not just written this book. He has written more of the things. Some of them are bigger. Some of them are smaller. All of them are weird. Go now, seek them out, they are waiting to be discovered.
( if you want some help finding more stuff by Phillip, try searching up Linktr.ee/phillipcarter)
