Book Review: “Otherlands” by Thomas Halliday

Otherlands by Thomas Halliday

As the subtitle indicates, this is organized as a “journey” back into Earth’s deep past.  The overall plot is to dig back in time, reveling in the strangeness of these very “other” versions of our planet.  The stops on the trip are selected from a handful of exceptionally detailed fossil records of past ages from all over the world.  This strategy contributes to both the weirdness and to the sense of arbitrary chance at play.

Going backwards emphasizes the non-teleological nature of the strangeness.  We are not as distracted by family trees, or “knowing what comes next”, because things seem so unpredictably different at each stop.

What do we learn?  We learn about the depth of time, and the depth of life.  We learn that Earth has changed a lot over billions of years, and that the climate has been much colder and much hotter than now—with gigantic consequences for living things

And we learn that extinction is constant and inevitable.  The story of life is the story of extinction.

This is an interesting book and obviously well researched. But the writing is dry and slow going.  I love the strangeness of ancient life, but I’m afraid didn’t get as much as I could have out of this book. There is simply too much detail and it’s not coherent.  At each stop, there is an inventory of strange beasts and how life is lived.  There is also planet scale geology and climate.  And microscale chemistry.  And so on.  All jumbled in a collection of loosely connected paragraphs.

Very hard to follow in many places.

This is a book that really needs pictures.  Lot’s of pictures. Much of the text is a description of very alien, long ago ecologies and critters, which the reader has no way to visualize.  So, the text with no picture is pretty much useless  Each chapter has one illustration, but mentions more than a dozen species.  That’s just not enough.

For example, we read “these Kimberella were grazing alongside Dickinsonia and the fronded Charniodiscus, using their heads to rake circles of sediment towards it like a croupier gather chips” (p. 281)  I don’t know about you, but I could use some pictures.

In addition to the lack of picture, I was driven mad by the citation system.  Halliday sticks close to the published literature, which is good.  There are zillions of footnotes, which is good.

Unfortunately he follows the practice of one note for a whole paragraph, which may contain a half dozen or more citations.  Worse, the citations are extremely condensed, many are only author and journal.  So, you can’t tell what references are about what part of the paragraph.

If I was really interested in one specimen or observation, I’d generally have to schlep through a bunch of citations in the library to find any that are pertinent to the thing I was interested in.  This is not helpful and, to me, defeats the purpose of having citations in the first place.

So—a fascinating idea, weakly realized. Almost no pictures and inaccessible references make the text even harder to understand and far less informative than it’s supposed to be.

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1. Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey through Earth’s Extinct Worlds, New York, Random House, 2022.

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