Skip to main content

The Future is Wild – Douglas Dixon & John Adams ****

Subtitled “a natural history of the future”, this book (and presumably the accompanying 12 part TV series that the book accompanies) is a fascinating reverse of all those books looking backwards in time at evolution. Here the authors have beautifully speculated on how things will go in the future.
The book is split into three broad sections. One, set 5 million years in the future finds a largely unchanged world in the grip of an ice age. Here the animals may be unfamiliar, but they are clearly derived from current forms. In the other two sections, looking 100 and 200 million years ahead, much bigger changes have occurred. Continental drift has resulted in a reshaping of the earth’s surface. Creatures are developing significantly, with some creatures leaving the sea (imagine a land-based giant squid), birds taking to the water, and descendents of fish flying. Highest in yuck factor is probably some of the insect life, while most striking are the envisaged developments from jellyfish, huge and beautiful floating cities of life.
It’s stunningly illustrated (if one or two of the creatures verge on the cartoon) and much of the speculation is fascinating – all in all, an excellent achievement.
There are a couple of quibbles. Humanity is dismissed rather summarily. We are assumed to die out in a few thousand years because of the “devastating effects of our energy consumption” and because of the return of the ice age. These are rather weak assumptions, given human flexibility. Certainly we wouldn’t be still living in the UK under a polar ice cap, but that hardly excludes the tropics. It’s not that we couldn’t be wiped out, but there’s no logic behind the assumption, which is mainly made to conveniently get us out of the way – that should have been explicitly stated. Also, all the animals have names. This is nice, but who is supposed to have given them the names? Okay, it’s a bit pedantic, but this just seems weird when you get a comment like “it is tracking a herd of scrofas and their young, called scroflets.” Called scroflets by whom?
Anyone familiar with DK’s very rigid format might be a bit surprised by this book. Not only do the authors get their names on the cover (something DK discourages), but inside the book flows from page to page rather than being in two page chunks – and there’s a lot more solid text than you would expect in a DK book. That’s because this isn’t really one of theirs. The older US edition is from a different publisher, and the pages look identical. Although the normal DK format is probably more young reader friendly, this topic does well from having the extra flow – perhaps we could see more DK books breaking the mould in the future.

Paperback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you 
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mathematics with Love – Mary Stopes-Roe *****

Admittedly it’s early days (this review is written in January), but this, for me, is the surprise hit of the year so far! I approached this book with trepidation, but found it absolutely delightful. It is described on the cover as the “courtship correspondence of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb”, and contains a series of letters between Wallis and his cousin and eventual wife Molly Bloxham, along with some useful annotation by their daughter, Mary. The courtship itself is not without difficulties, as Wallis was 18 years older than the 17-year-old Molly at the start of the correspondence, and her father, not surprisingly, wasn’t too pleased about the interest of such an elderly suitor, but that isn’t the only reason the letters are interesting – it’s also because of maths, and Wallis’s position in the UK as the engineering hero of the Second World War. (Incidentally, it seemed very strange to see letters addressed to “Barnes” – I had always assumed Barnes Wallis was a ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Andrew Jaffe - Five way interview

Andrew Jaffe is professor of astrophysics and cosmology at Imperial College, London and director of the Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology. His new book is The Random Universe. Why science? I’ve always been interested in science, in particular in  astronomy, astrophysics, and space. One of my earliest memories - back in nursery school in New Jersey, I think - was watching one of the moon launches. I wanted that excitement to be part of my life! I never got to be an astronaut, but I did get to be part of the Planck Satellite team, and was privileged to be able to travel to the ESA Spaceport in French Guiana to watch the launch.  In between, I was lucky enough to have a supportive family, get a good education, and find inspiring teachers, mentors, and collaborators. They helped me model the universe, and helped me learn how to refine those models in the face of experimental and observational evidence. That is, they taught me to be a scientist. Why this book? The Random...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why Nobody Understands Quantum Physics - Frank Verstraete and Céline Broeckaert **

It's with a heavy heart that I have to say that I could not get on with this book. The structure is all over the place, while the content veers from childish remarks to unexplained jargon. Frank Versraete is a highly regarded physicist and knows what he’s talking about - but unfortunately, physics professors are not always the best people to explain physics to a general audience and, possibly contributed to by this being a translation, I thought this book simply doesn’t work. A small issue is that there are few historical inaccuracies, but that’s often the case when scientists write history of science, and that’s not the main part of the book so I would have overlooked it. As an example, we are told that Newton's apple story originated with Voltaire. Yet Newton himself mentioned the apple story to William Stukeley in 1726. He may have made it up - but he certainly originated it, not Voltaire. We are also told that ‘Galileo discovered the counterintuitive law behind a swinging o...
Post a Comment
Read more