Otherlands by Thomas Halliday
Otherlands is the debut book from British palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday, who takes us on a guided tour through Earth's deep past. Each chapter is set during one of Earth's geological periods, such as the Triassic, Jurassic or Cretaceous and focuses on a specific place and time, whether a forested lakeside in China or the rocky beach of an Antarctic island. Each snapshot describes, often in beautiful prose, the environment as it was and the wildlife that lived there.
While that would already be enough to make this book a treat for natural history lovers, Halliday employs further techniques that truly set Otherlands apart. Firstly, while we spend time with any number of prehistoric creatures across the grand sweep of Earth's history, none of them are treated as a protagonist. Instead, Halliday allows them to move in and out of focus, foregrounding time and place rather than adopting a documentary-style approach centred on particular animals. In this way, he avoids the trap of making different species seem more or less sympathetic and therefore biasing his readers.
Halliday's true masterstroke, however, is to tell his story backwards. Rather than beginning with the origins of life and concluding with the arrival of humans, as countless documentaries have done before him, Halliday begins with the most recent geological epoch, the Pleistocene and then moves backwards through time. The book opens with a woman struggling to survive in the frozen wastes of Stone Age Alaska, but she quickly disappears, replaced by a series of animals whose stories make up the vast majority of the book. This simple technique has the effect of decentring humans, reminding us that we are but recent arrivals on a planet that has seen many previous inhabitants and featured many environments with no parallel today.
Otherlands ends in the Ediacaran, a period so remote in time that the planet occupied a different part of the galaxy and the only life forms were simple organisms unable to visualise the alien stars above them. Yet there is a quiet hope to this scene and a sense of profound awe that can only be appreciated when one contemplates the staggering breadth and depth of life on planet Earth.
Rowan
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