Book Week 2025, Day 4: Otherlands, by Thomas Halliday

Otherlands is unlike any other book I’ve encountered. Starting in the Pleistocene and roving back in time, for each epoch of the Cenozoic and each period of the Mesozoic and Paleozoic, Thomas Halliday takes us to a specific place and time, a particular biota, that illustrates both the global changes taking place at the level of the biosphere (and, frequently, the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere), and the peculiarities of the ecosystem that serves as our temporal window. Each chapter has a narrative section, a sort of you-are-there story in the lives of the organisms concerned, a section of broader outlinks to the global patterns that shaped, and were shaped by, the specific environments and organisms under consideration, and a healthy dose of references to the scientific discoveries that wove the narratives at both scales, presented as detective story rather than homework or dry history lesson.

That’s what the book does, not what it is. What it is: a triumph.

In the foreword to Steven Pressfield’s book The War of Art, Robert McKee wrote,

As I looked beneath his seamless prose and sensed the depth of his research, of knowledge of human nature and society, of vividly imagined telling details, I was in awe of the work, the work, all the work that built the foundation of his riveting creations.

That quote starting ringing in my head like a bell by the time I’d left the hot, deep, dry Mediterranean basin. I am equally in awe of the volume and quality of Halliday’s scholarship, and of the deftness of his artistic execution. This seems like the kind of towering achievement that could only be possible after a half-century or more of dedicated study, but Halliday is a generation younger than I am. It would be easy to give myself over to profound professional jealousy, both as a paleobiologist and a writer, if I weren’t swept along by the vital strangeness that he conjures on this fascinating tour.

All my life, I’ve wanted to be a chrononaut. Otherlands is the closest I’ve come in book form. The Mammoth Steppe and the Rhynie Chert were terms I knew before, signposts pointing to vanished worlds — and ones that I don’t study — but now they are places to me, places that I feel like I’ve been to, and have memories of, like Minas Tirith or Sietch Tabr. What a rare gift, to have the past brought to life in both its fundamental reality and its unbridgeable alienness.

As I said: a triumph.