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

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Halliday indicates that humankind bears a huge responsibility in the trajectory of our contemporary climate change. Today's atmosphere has a similar composition as during the Oligocene (an epoch ranging from 34 million to 23 million years ago during the Palaeogene period shown within the table above). However, by the end of this century, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the level of CO 2 in the atmosphere could reach levels of CO 2 similar to the Eocene (the preceding epoch to the Oligocene ranging from 56 million to 34 million years ago). Temperature ranges during the Eocene were a lot higher than contemporary ones. And, the only way to reduce this prospective increase in temperature is by decreasing CO 2 emissions and flatten the upward trajectory of atmospheric CO 2 concentration. LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE •“One of those rare books that’s both deeply informative and daringly imaginative.”—Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Under a White Sky

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 Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator. Remarkable... Ingenious... A work of immense imagination [...] rooted firmly in the actual science Stuart Kelly, Scotsman I am halfway through the book and I love it so far. But I can report that the missing titles in the reference list have bothered me as well 😉 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

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Gally—a young boy who travels with Paul. He is neither a puppet (non-sentient character) nor a citizen (a human wearing an avatar). As they try to discover the motivations of the Grail Brotherhood—obviously not world domination, since they already control the world—they discover that they are unable to log off. They are trapped, and if they die in the network, they also die in real life. The series covers their adventures as they seek to uncover the truth and wake their loved ones from their comas. Imagine the history of life on Earth as a road across Australia, Thomas Halliday suggests. You, in the present day, are in the centre of Adelaide, South Australia. The Last Universal Common Ancestor, an unknown organism that probably lurked by a deep-sea volcanic vent about four billion years ago, is in Darwin, on the north coast. McConnachie, James (January 30, 2022). "Otherlands by Thomas Halliday review — an extraordinary history of our almost-alien Earth". The Sunday Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 2022-08-28. Halliday’s brilliantly imaginative reconstructions, his deft marshalling of complex science, offersa thrilling experience of deep-time naturefor pop-science buffs.” — Library Journal (starred review)

Orlando Gardiner—a young boy suffering from progeria who is drawn to Otherland while playing a virtual reality MMORPG called Middle Country, in which he is the Barbarian hero Thargor. Otherlands also offers us a vast perspective on the current state of the planet. The thought that something as vast as the Great Barrier Reef, for example, with all its vibrant diversity, might one day soon be gone sounds improbable. But the fossil record shows us that this sort of wholesale change is not only possible but has repeatedly happened throughout Earth history. Evolutionary biologist Halliday takes an energizing spin through Earth's past in his magnificent debut...This show-stopping work deserves wide readership." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) The word "original" is really overworked. But Thomas Halliday has produced a book the like of which I have never come across Jeremy PaxmanDisclosure: The publisher provided a review copy of this book. The opinion expressed here is my own, however. Martine Desroubins—a blind French researcher who is able to sense the online world through a complex synesthesia, around which she has built her personal machine. Though deprived of sight, she is often able to sense things that her companions cannot. By studying the distant past, Halliday can envision prospective climate change scenarios. Depending on how much CO 2is emitted, the Earthcould very well be heading towards Eocene-temperature levels far faster than any underlying long term paleontology-cycle would suggest. His proposed ability to immerse oneself fully in a simulation gives him a great deal of artistic freedom, and the story winds through alternate interpretations of many classical literary works such as Through the Looking-Glass, The Odyssey and The Iliad, The War of the Worlds, and The Wizard of Oz, which are available as entertainment simulations within the series. Orlando Gardiner, one of the main characters in the books, spent most of his teenage years in this world's equivalent to MMORPGs based upon J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction. The overall series's events also bear a strong resemblance to The Lord of the Rings. Our planet has been many different worlds over its 4.5-billion-year history. Imagining what they were like is hard—with our limited lifespan, deep time eludes us by its very nature. Otherlands, the debut of Scottish palaeontologist Thomas Halliday, presents you with a series of past worlds. Though this is a non-fiction book thoroughly grounded in fact, it is the quality of the narrative that stands out. Beyond imaginative metaphors to describe extinct lifeforms, some of his reflections on deep time, taxonomy, and evolution are simply spine-tingling." [6]