"Man After Man" is Dixon's third work on speculative evolution, following "After Man" (1981), which explored the animals of a hypothetical world 50 million years in the future where humanity had gone extinct, and "The New Dinosaurs" (1988), which explored the animals of a world where the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event never occurred.Unlike the previous two books, which were written much like field guides and explored factual natural processes through fictional examples and worlds, the focus of "Man After Man" lies much on the individual perspectives of future human individuals of various species, mainly focused on how they perceive the changing climate, which they are specifically engineered to be adapted to, around themselves.