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Publication Date : 1 December 2025
Publisher : Student B
Genre : Fiction
Page Count : 217 pages
Series / Standalone : Standalone
Animal Intelligence: The Book of Forgotten History reimagines the story of life on Earth — from the first oceans to a post-human age — through the memories of animals who watched it unfold. Where human history often centers on progress, conquest, and conflict, extinct creatures remember something different: how intelligence emerged, adapted, fractured, and sometimes vanished altogether.
Blending fable, natural history, comic illustration, and light philosophical storytelling, the book guides readers across ten sweeping epochs of Earth’s past. Each chapter is shaped by animals interpreting the rise of humanity in their own ways — sometimes with humor, sometimes with grief, and often with unsettling clarity.
Rather than treating history as a sequence of dates and victories, Animal Intelligence presents it as a shared ecological memory — one shaped by fear and wonder, cooperation and betrayal, survival and loss.
What Readers Will Find
- A fresh retelling of evolution and extinction, seen through animal memories
- A world of humorous, tragic, and wise voices that make deep time feel personal
- A visually engaging narrative that mixes comics with myth-history
- A gentle invitation to rethink humanity’s place in the world
Ten Epochs of Forgotten History
- The Age of Arrogance (Paleozoic) — life’s first gamble with intelligence
- The Age of Wars (Mesozoic) — the rise and fall of dinosaur logic
- The Age of Myths (Cenozoic) — betrayals between early humans and animals
- The Age of Settlement — the first pacts of companionship
- The Axial Age — when some species briefly surpassed humans in knowledge
- The Age of Mirrors — cats, faith, love, and the brutality of the Middle Ages
- The Age of Migration — voyages across the sea and a promise that changed destiny
- The Age of Retreat — animals losing faith during industrial modernity
- The Age of Espionage — animals secretly observing the human world again
- The Age of Remembrance — a post-human future asking whether we can learn to remember
A New Kind of Storytelling
Animal Intelligence is more than a single book — it is the beginning of a larger creative project that uses animal stories to rewrite human knowledge and explore longtermism and posthuman ideas. Through imaginative worldbuilding, the series invites readers to view Earth’s past and future with greater curiosity and care.
About Will Shin
The publisher STUDENT B is a two-member sibling team composed of one writer and one illustrator.
Will Shin, writer, studied Artificial Intelligence at the University of Pennsylvania, International Development at Harvard, and Business at Northwestern. Guided by a lifelong fascination with animals, history, and knowledge, he builds stories that unify animal perspectives into a single narrative universe. These days, he spends most of his time shaping the philosophical foundations of the Animal Intelligence Universe — or relaxing with his puppy.
Alice Shin, illustrator, majored in Art & Design and later earned her master’s degree in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University. She works at the intersection of illustration and storytelling, developing knowledge-driven narratives through animal characters. Most days, she can be found caring for her guinea pig or bringing the Animal Intelligence Universe to life through her comic illustration.
The Animal Intelligence project is a long-term creative undertaking that reinterprets not only human history but also modern knowledge — mathematics, physics, economics, philosophy — and explores the future through the eyes of animals. Volume 1 began with a question: What if the memories of both living and extinct beings — everything they learned and felt — formed a single collective archive? The authors suggest that answers humanity may have missed could exist within those accumulated experiences.
The series also incorporates reflections on post-human forms of life. The animals metaphorically hint at possible future beings, though the specifics are not revealed here. Knowing that the author comes from an artificial intelligence background rather than a literary one helps frame the direction of this metaphor.
This first volume provides the conceptual foundation for later reinterpretations of technology, institutions, and future intelligence that will unfold in Volumes 2 and 3. Will and Alice hope readers will see the memories, experiences, and intelligence of animals not just as narrative devices, but as tools for imagining futures beyond the human timeline. They hope the message — that new answers emerge when the memories of many lives are gathered — resonates naturally with both adults and younger readers.
Ultimately, they aim for the series to leave readers with the sense that this is a project that “rereads and recreates our knowledge” and to inspire responsibility toward the life that will come after us.
