Table of Contents
TL;DR
Otherlands by Thomas Halliday is a breathtaking journey through the Earth’s deep past, travelling in reverse through 16 vividly reconstructed time periods over the last 550 million years. Eschewing the standard linear history or a human-centric narrative, Halliday instead invites the reader to inhabit lost worlds—each chapter a standalone portrait of a time and place long vanished. What emerges is both astonishing and humbling: life was not building towards us, but thriving, changing, and disappearing in ways we’re only beginning to understand. This is poetic palaeontology at its best, ideal for readers of nature writing, fans of Sapiens, or anyone curious about our planet’s extraordinary past.
First Thoughts
I’d seen Otherlands pop up on several bookshelves before it was gifted to me, and though I’m a fan of nature writing, it takes something special to grab my attention. While Roger Deakin’s Waterlog remains my touchstone for lyrical nature writing, Halliday’s book impressed me for altogether different reasons. He deliberately keeps himself out of frame, crafting instead an immersive, scientific yet imaginative tour of Earth’s past.
This was my book of the year in 2024—across all genres—and I suspect it’ll age well, its only obsolescence being scientific progress. Halliday’s approach isn’t to trace a complete history but to illuminate sixteen moments in time, from the near past to the unimaginably ancient, with each world vividly drawn. I was especially struck by the chapters that post-date the dinosaurs—mammals evolving in radically different ecosystems, strange and lost.
One favourite chapter, “Deluge”, set in the Mediterranean Basin 5.33 million years ago, places the reader on a rocky island as the sea slowly refills. It captures the awe of Halliday’s whole approach: that Earth’s past is stranger than alien planets, filled with forgotten life. The final chapter’s image of walking a 3,500km road where each millimetre equals a year still haunts me. Otherlands made me feel infinitesimal, but in a good way.
About the Book
Published in 2022, Otherlands: A World in the Making is the debut book by Scottish palaeontologist Thomas Halliday. In sixteen richly detailed chapters, Halliday transports readers backwards through time—beginning just 20,000 years ago and ending in the alien world of the Ediacaran period, 550 million years in the past. Rather than tell a straightforward narrative of evolution, Halliday selects distinct moments and locations, painting detailed, immersive portraits of ancient ecosystems.
We visit prehistoric Alaska, a lifeless Mediterranean basin, Antarctica’s ancient rainforests, and beyond—each world different in climate, geography, and inhabitants. The prose blends lyrical storytelling with rigorous science, eschewing footnotes and academic debate in favour of compelling narrative clarity. Each chapter stands alone but is unified by recurring themes of impermanence, adaptation, and the immense, unknowable scale of geological time.
Published by Allen Lane in the UK, the book includes illustrations by Beth Zaiken, but the power of the writing often outpaces the need for visuals. Halliday’s academic credentials lend weight to the imaginative reconstructions, while his storytelling skills elevate the science to something sublime.
What Others Think
One review on Inquisitive Biologist praises the poetic force of Halliday’s writing, noting how his metaphors and reflections on deep time are “spine-tingling”. The reviewer highlights how Otherlands avoids dry taxonomy and instead embraces a narrative approach—choosing one scientific hypothesis where necessary, rather than dwelling on competing debates. This choice, they argue, allows the book to flow and maintain its immersive quality. Particularly admired is Halliday’s skill in translating evolutionary and geological processes into striking images, from “collapsing deckchairs” to “barrels of pebbles and sand” as metaphors for evolutionary accumulation.
In The Scotsman’s review, the structure of the book is applauded: a backward march through time that transforms deep history into a sequence of strange yet familiar worlds. The review describes Otherlands as a hybrid—akin to contemporary nature writing, but focused on places and species that no longer exist. The reviewer is struck by Halliday’s ability to convey both the eeriness and recognisability of ancient Earth, from massive penguins to forests with no birdsong. The book’s epilogue is noted for its hopeful but sobering meditation on planetary resilience.
Finally, Geographical’s review underscores how the book helps readers grasp concepts of ‘deep time’, a challenge for any non-scientist. The use of present tense and chapter-based snapshots is praised for creating a documentary-like intimacy. The reviewer points out that Halliday’s reconstructions, based on incomplete fossils and conjecture, are nonetheless compelling and necessary acts of imagination. They admire his honesty in acknowledging the speculative aspects, and note how the cumulative effect is both awe-inspiring and sobering—reminding us that Earth has always been in flux, and will continue to be, with or without us.
Themes, Style & Impact
Otherlands explores not just the history of life but the nature of time, memory, and impermanence. Its central theme—that ecosystems and lifeforms are transitory, existing only as long as their conditions persist—runs throughout. In place of a linear, teleological view of evolution, Halliday gives us a complex web of lives and worlds, few of which point to our current moment.
Stylistically, the book reads more like a novel or travelogue than a textbook. Halliday writes in the present tense, placing readers amid the sights and sounds of vanished worlds. There are no tedious digressions into academic debates; instead, the narrative moves with confidence, grounded in a clear choice of hypothesis for each chapter. His prose is poetic without being florid, balancing scientific insight with lyrical description.
The impact of this approach is profound. Readers come away not just informed, but transformed. You begin to grasp—emotionally, not just intellectually—the vastness of Earth’s history and the fragility of the present. Otherlands evokes a sense of humility. Its comparisons to works like Beasts Before Us or Sapiens are well-earned, and its resonance with contemporary nature writing feels both fresh and inevitable. Halliday’s portrayal of life as a cycle of emergence and disappearance feels especially poignant given the backdrop of climate crisis.
Final Thoughts
Thomas Halliday’s Otherlands is a triumph: a beautifully structured, deeply researched, and lyrically told journey through time. What makes it stand out is not just its scope, but its emotional clarity. This is a book that lets readers experience awe—not just at life’s endurance, but at its contingency. There’s no hero’s journey, no inevitable march toward humanity. Instead, we are one brief experiment among many, fortunate to live in an interlude of relative stability.
For readers of Waterlog, Sapiens, or Entangled Life, Otherlands offers a parallel but distinct pleasure—less memoir, more mirror. It’s a book that will outlast its moment, and in doing so, deepen your understanding of what it means to be alive now.
Further Reading
- Waterlog by Roger Deakin – a lyrical masterpiece of personal nature writing, often cited as a benchmark in the genre.
- Beasts Before Us by Elsa Panciroli – explores mammalian evolution before the dinosaurs and shares Halliday’s poetic tone.
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari – another ambitious, sweeping history that reframes human existence in a wider context.
- Other Minds by Peter Godfrey-Smith – dives into the alien intelligence of octopuses and other marine life, echoing the sense of wonder in Otherlands.
- Interview with Thomas Halliday in the Guardian, 28th January 2023.