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

Ignorance: How it drives science – Stuart Firestein *****

This is a delightful little book that really gets you thinking. I stress the ‘little’ part not as a negative, but as a good thing. There is nothing worse than fat, bloated popular science books where the author feels they have to get 120,000 words to be taken seriously. This is the sort of book that can be read in a couple of hours – but you will get so much more out of it than one of those tedious doorstops. The premise underlying the book is in once sense extremely simple, yet is fundamental to an understanding of what science is and what scientists do. And it is an understanding that is totally at odds with the typical way science is portrayed both in university lectures and popular science books. As Stuart Firestein points out, what is important is not the facts, but rather the area of ignorance. The interesting part and the fundamental heart of science is not about what we know, but about what we don’t know and where we want to look next. Take this lovely quote: ‘Working ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Who Invented the Computer? – Ian Watson

Ian Watson is the author of  The Universal Machine  and featured in a recent  Four Way Interview . Saturday June 23 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Alan Turing, the troubled genius who invented the modern computer. Why though do so few people recognize his name and his great achievements? In 1936 English mathematician Alan Turing, published a paper,  On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem . This became the foundation of computing. In it Turing presented a theoretical machine that could solve any problem that could be described by instructions encoded on a paper tape. A Turing Machine could calculate square roots, whilst another might solve Sudoku puzzles. Turing demonstrated you could construct a single  Universal Machine  that could simulate any Turing Machine. One machine solving any problem for which a program could be written – sound familiar? He’d invented the computer. Then,  computers  were peop...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Star Book – Peter Grego ****

This attractive landscape format book combines an excellent introduction to the stars and basic astronomy with a set of star maps, plus in depth looks at some of the stars featured, with a  bonus section on the solar system. Amazon says it’s a hardback, but in fact it’s a paperback with a rather ingenious cover – you can’t tell from the photo, but the words ‘The Star Book’ are punched through as a series of holes that show the white paper of the next page beneath. Like many astronomy/space books, the cover lacks shelf appeal because it is mostly black, but at least there is some original thought here. Unlike many books in this format which tend to concentrate on the pictures, there is a good deal of excellent text by Peter Grego, so there was no feeling that you were only getting the star maps and star ‘biographies’, something these days much more suited to an iPad or smartphone app. Instead, the opening 30 or so pages give a very good introduction that would be valuable to ...
Post a Comment
Read more