276°
Posted 20 hours ago

Otherlands: A World in the Making - A Sunday Times bestseller

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

A few years ago I entered the Hugh Miller writing competition and wrote about some of the earliest four-limbed vertebrates to come on to the land, which had been found in south-east Scotland. Palaeobiologist Thomas Halliday embraces a yet more epic timescale in Otherlands: A World in the Making, touring the many living worlds that preceded ours, from the mammoth steppe in glaciated Alaska to the lush rainforests of Eocene Antarctica. In each chapter, guided by the fossil record, we will visit a site from the geological past to observe the plants and animals, immerse ourselves in the landscape, and learn what we can about our own world from these extinct ecosystems. In the Zulu language, thula means quiet, and though the author consistently seeks to provide that calm to her charges, peace and tranquility are not always easy to come by at Thula Thula. Following the trail of the city, he and Fredericks gain access to the online fringe community TreeHouse, from where they too find their way into Otherland.

I’ve just started Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees by Jared Farmer, and it’s very interesting so far.Halliday includes well-known sites such as end-Cretaceous Hell Creek (66 million years ago, or mya) and the Carboniferous world of Mazon Creek (309 mya) or Lagerstätten (sites of exceptional fossil preservation) such as the Cambrian Chengjiang biota in China (520 mya) and the Australian Ediacara Hills during the Ediacaran (550 mya). Paul Jonas—a British man trapped in Otherland and pursued by the Grail Brotherhood for unknown reasons. One idea is that, once in place, fundamentals cannot be changed easily: “ evolution today can only be played within the constraints set by the past“. Halliday brings good news: After periods of mass extinction come mass flourishing: “A new age begins, with new gods, and new worlds. Suffering from almost complete memory loss, he begins to travel through a series of bizarre worlds, seeking answers to who he is and his connection to the bird-woman.

Take out the hubris, and the poem can be read as being about finding the reality of the past from the remnants that survive to the present. Deep time is very hard to capture—even to imagine—and yet Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. The conceit is that humans have discovered one-way time travel into the past and the government is using it to send political dissidents back to the Cambrian period.That’s why I didn’t refer to things like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, where characters go in with guns and bring back specimens, or the likes of Jurassic Park where it’s all very bestial. An intricate analysis of our planet’s interconnected past, it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what may lie ahead.

Below the icy gravel lies the London Clay, in which even older residents of this land are preserved–crocodiles, sea turtles, and early relatives of horses.I am looking out of the window, across farmland, houses, and parks, towards a place that for hundreds of years has been known as World’s End.

An intense and imaginative reading of fossils as runes that tell us about our own times, and possible future.The narrative becomes shockingly real and immediate, as individual dramas and entire, vibrant panoramas unfold in what feels like real time. I arranged the chapters from most recent to oldest, purely for the purposes of easing the reader in, so we start off with organisms that are more familiar. The only way to experience them is rockwise, to read the imprints in the frozen sand and to imagine a disappeared Earth. The table below provides more detailed information about the specific locations and periods covered.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment