Snaiad, the creation of Turkish artist "Nemo Ramjet" (real name C. M. Kosemen), is an alien planet colonized by Terran explorers in the mid-twenty-fifth century, but also possessing diverse native life of its own. It's in the description of this native life that Snaiad really shines, representing one of the most well-thought out and thorough conceptions of how life might evolve on an alien planet. Most fictional "aliens" are far too close to Earth creatures, looking like minor variations on or combinations of well known animals. Rarely, designers of alien life go in the opposite direction, and create aliens that are strange and diverse but without rhyme or reason, with no apparent explanation for why they would have developed the way they did, or how they're related. With Snaiad, Nemo Ramjet avoids both those pitfalls, creating a detailed and believable population of alien fauna. (Snaiad's flora are less developed, though certainly not ignored.)

Sadly, the Snaiad website has been down since 2009; the Wayback Machine does retain an archive of it, but, alas, without the images. You can, however, see a brief introduction to Snaiad at either the Alien Species Wiki or the Speculative Biology Wiki. As for Nemo Ramjet, he's still around and active on DeviantArt—where you can see some Snaiad-related images in his gallery—but doesn't seem to be doing much with Snaiad nowadays; most of his recent art seems to be focused on dinosaurs.

On that note, incidentally, he recently wrote and illustrated a book about dinosaurs and other prehistoric life, All Yesterdays, in collaboration with artist John Conway and paleontologist Darren Naish. (This has nothing to do with the choice of Snaiad as this week's World of the Week, however; in fact, I didn't even know about All Yesterdays till I'd already made that decision, and only coincidentally found out about it last night from a mention on an otherwise unrelated site.) The title is reminiscent of that of a previous book he wrote and illustrated entitled All Tomorrows, a speculative look at a possible future evolution of humanity. All Tomorrows was never published in printed form, but was made freely available on the web, and while the site where it was disseminated is now as dead as the Snaiad site, it too is still retrievable through the Wayback Machine.

But this World of the Week entry is supposed to focus on Snaiad, not on Nemo Ramjet/C. M. Kosemen's other works. And on that note, there may be hope for this world yet. Though Snaiad may not have an official web presence at the moment, Nemo Ramjet has said within the last year that "Snaiad will be coming back". So we'll see what the future holds, and whether maybe the blumbomen and "fuckers" and all their kin will return someday to the web...