Following the success of "After Man", Dixon realized that there was a market for popular-level books which use fictional examples and settings to explain factual scientific processes. "After Man" had explained the process of evolution by creating a complex hypothetical future ecosystem, the "sequel" "The New Dinosaurs" (1988) was instead aimed at creating a book on zoogeography, a subject the general public was quite unfamiliar with, by using a fictional world in which the non-avian dinosaurs had not gone extinct to explain the process. "The New Dinosaurs" was followed by another project in 1990, "Man After Man", which focused on climate change over the next few million years through the eyes of future human species genetically engineered to adapt to it.