Thomas Halliday is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Earth Sciences of the University of Birmingham. His PhD won the Linnean Society's John C. Marsden Medal for the best thesis in the biological sciences in the UK, and he won the Hugh Miller Writing Competition in 2018. He is also the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Otherlands. He was raised in Rannoch in the Scottish Highlands, and now lives in London with his family.
This book takes us through the natural history of previous forms of
life in the most beguiling way. It makes you think about the past
differently and it certainly makes you think about the future
differently. This is a monumental work and I suspect it will be a
very important book for future generations
*Ray Mears, Chair of the Wainwright Prize for UK Nature
Writing*
The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has
produced a book the like of which I have never come across
*Jeremy Paxman*
An extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth... Epically
cinematic... The writing is so palpably alive. A book of almost
unimaginable riches. It is a book that will make its own solid and
lasting contribution. It could well be the best I read in 2022 -
and I know it's only January
*Sunday Times*
A poet among palaeontologists
*Wall Street Journal*
A mesmerising journey into those vast stretches of Earth's
pre-history that lie behind us, on such a scale that you experience
a kind of temporal vertigo just thinking about it... [Halliday is]
a brilliant writer, his lyrical style vividly conjuring myriad lost
worlds... It's obviously a bit of a gamble choosing one's Book of
the Year in March - but there's a very good chance already that
mine will be Otherlands. Stunning
*Mail on Sunday*
An impressive, tightly packed, long view of the natural world. In
cinematic terms, this book would be a blockbuster... Riveting
scientific reading; a remarkable achievement of imagination
grounded in fact
*Irish Times*
An immersive world tour of prehistoric life... Halliday never loses
sight of the bigger picture, nimbly marshalling a huge array of
insights thrown up by recent research. Each chapter gives not only
a vivid snapshot of an ecosystem in action but also insights into
geology, climate science, evolution and biochemistry...
Mind-blowing
*Financial Times*
A sweeping, lyrical biography of Earth -- the geology, the biology,
the extinctions and the ever-shifting ecology that defines our
living planet
*BBC Radio 4 Start the Week*
Superb... [An] epic, near-hallucinatory natural history of the
living earth... Dazzling
*Telegraph*
Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...]
rooted firmly in the actual science
*Scotsman*
A fascinating journey through Earth's history... [Halliday] is
appropriately lavish in his depiction of the variety and resilience
of life, without compromising on scientific accuracy... To read
Otherlands is to marvel not only at these unfamiliar lands and
creatures, but also that we have the science to bring them to life
in such vivid detail
*New Scientist*
Riveting... An intense and imaginative reading of fossils as runes
that tell us about our own times, and possible future. Halliday is
a Time Lord at heart, eager to lead us back to, say, the Permian or
Oligocene epochs and unpack their lessons for 21st Century
humanity. For all its scholarship, this is a very readable book,
full of literary reference and accessible metaphor. Otherlands is
also a wise manual for adaptive change rather than a prophecy of
inevitable doom
*Tortoise*
Thomas Halliday offers a 550m-year tour of the incredible diversity
of life that has existed on our planet... Halliday's trick is to
tell his story in reverse. The first hominids exit early; the
continents merge and drift and merge again; the sounds of the
cretaceous forest fall silent as we pass beyond the evolution of
birdsong. Life retreats from land to ocean, and the first eyes give
way to the sightless world of the Ediacaran, an alien realm of
crawling beings
*Prospect*
A brilliant series of reconstructions of life in the deep past,
richly imagined from the fine details of the fossil record... A
real achievement... Reading Halliday's book is as near to the
experience of visiting these ancient worlds as you are likely to
get
*Arts Desk*
Writing with gusto and bravado [...] Halliday has honed a unique
voice... Otherlands is a verbal feast. You feel like you are there
on the Mammoth Steppe, some 20,000 years ago, as frigid winds blow
off the glacial front... Along the way, we learn astounding
facts
*Scientific American*
Vivid... An intricate analysis of our planet's interconnected past,
it is impossible to come away from Otherlands without awe for what
may lie ahead
*Independent*
Halliday takes us on a journey into deep time in this epic book,
showing us Earth as it used to be and the worlds that were here
before ours
*Independent*
This is a piece of nature writing that covers millions of years,
from the very start of evolution, while capturing the almost
unthinkable ways geography has shifted and changed over time. Epic
in scope and executed with charming enthusiasm, Otherlands looks
set to be a big talking point for fans of non-fiction in 2022
*Mr Porter*
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. If you have
ever wondered what sound a pterosaur's wings made in flight, this
is the book for you
*New Scientist*
Full of wonder and fascination, exquisitely written, this is time
travel of spectacular dimensions - a journey into our planet's
evolution and the world in which we live. A compellingly important
read
*Isabella Tree, author of WILDING*
The best book on the history of life on Earth I have ever read
*Tom Holland, author of DOMINION*
Thomas Halliday's debut is a kaleidoscopic and evocative journey
into deep time. He takes quiet fossil records and complex
scientific research and brings them alive - riotous, full-coloured
and three-dimensional. You'll find yourself next to giant two-metre
penguins in a forested Antarctica 41 million years ago or hearing
singing icebergs in South Africa some 444 million years ago. Maybe
most importantly, Otherlands is a timely reminder of our planet's
impermanence and what we can learn from the past
*Andrea Wulf, author of THE INVENTION OF NATURE*
Deep time is very hard to capture - even to imagine - and yet
Thomas Halliday has done so in this fascinating volume. He wears
his grasp of vast scientific learning lightly; this is as close to
time travel as you are likely to get
*Bill McKibben, author of FALTER*
An absolutely gripping adventure story, exploring back through the
changing vistas of our own planet's past. Earth has been many
different worlds over its planetary history, and Thomas Halliday is
the perfect tour guide to these past landscapes, and the
extraordinary creatures that inhabited them. Otherlands is science
writing at its very finest
*Lewis Dartnell, author of ORIGINS*
Otherlands is one of those rare books that's both deeply
informative and daringly imaginative. It will change the way you
look at the history of life, and perhaps also its future
*Elizabeth Kolbert, author of THE SIXTH EXTINCTION*
This stunning biography of our venerable Earth, detailing her many
ages and moods, is an essential travel guide to the changing
landscapes of our living world. As we hurtle into the Anthropocene,
blindly at the helm of this inconstant planet, Halliday gives us
our bearings within the panorama of deep time. Aeons buckle under
his pen: the world before us made vivid; the paradox of our
permanence and impermanence visceral. Wonderful
*Gaia Vince, author of TRANSCENDENCE*
Stirring, surprising and beautifully written, Otherlands offers
glimpses of times so different to our own they feel like parallel
worlds. In its lyricism and the intimate attention it pays to
nonhuman life, Thomas Halliday's book recalls Rachel Carson's Under
the Sea Wind, and marks the arrival of an exciting new voice
*Cal Flynn, author of ISLANDS OF ABANDONMENT*
Imaginative
*Nature*
This study of our prehistoric earth is "beyond cinematic", James
McConnachie says. "It could well be the best book I read in
2022
*Sunday Times*
It's phenomenally difficult for human brains to grasp deep time.
Even thousands of years seem unfathomable, with all human existence
before the invention of writing deemed 'prehistory', a time we know
very little about. Thomas Halliday's book Otherlands helps to ease
our self-centred minds into these depths. Moving backwards in time,
starting with the thawing plains of the Pleistocene (2.58 million -
12,000 years ago) and ending up in the marine world of the
Ediacaran (635-541 mya), he devotes one chapter to each of the
intervening epochs or periods and, like a thrilling nature
documentary, presents a snapshot of life at that time. It's an
immersive experience, told in the present tense, of these bizarre
'otherlands', populated by creatures and greenery unlike any on
Earth today
*Geographical*
Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us further back in
prehistory, telling vivid stories about ancient creatures and their
alien ecologies, ending 550 million years ago
*Telegraph*
The largest-known asteroid impact on Earth is the one that killed
the dinosaurs 65?million years ago, but that is a mere pit stop on
Thomas Halliday's evocative journey into planetary history in
Otherlands. Each chapter of this literary time machine takes us
further back into the deep past, telling vivid stories about
ancient creatures and their alien ecologies, until at last we
arrive 550?million years ago in the desert of what is now
Australia, where no plant life yet covers the land. Halliday notes
the urgency of reducing carbon emissions in the present to protect
our settled patterns of life, but adds: "The idea of a pristine
Earth, unaffected by human biology and culture, is impossible."
It's an epic lesson in the impermanence of all things
*Telegraph*
The world on which we live is "undoubtedly a human planet", Thomas
Halliday writes in this extraordinary debut. But "it has not always
been, and perhaps will not always be". Humanity has dominated the
Earth for a tiny fraction of its history. And that History is vast.
We tend to lump all dinosaurs, for example, into one period in the
distant past. But more time passed between the last diplodocus and
the first tyrannosaurus than has passed between the last
tyrannosaurus and the present day. A mind-boggling fact. This is a
glorious, mesmerising guide to the past 500 million years bought to
life by this young palaeobiologist's rich and cinematic writing
*Sunday Times*
A book that I really want to read but haven't yet bought - so I
hope it goes into my Christmas stocking - is Otherlands: A World in
the Making by Thomas Halliday. It sounds so amazing - a history of
the world before history, before people. He's trying to write the
history of the organisms and the plants and the creatures and
everything else as the world grows from protozoic slime or whatever
we emerged from. It sounds like an absolutely incredible effort of
imagination. I think that Christmas presents should be books you
can curl up with and get engrossed in and transported by - and
Otherlands sounds like exactly that
*BBC History Magazine*
But, of course, not all history is human history, Otherlands, by
Thomas Halliday, casts its readers further and further back, past
the mammoths, past the dinosaurs, back to an alien world of
shifting rock and weird plants. It is a marvel
*Prospect*
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