I waited a long while to read this. I was excited by the premise, and as much as it overwhelmed me to know I’d have to bear the weight of a book that covers 550 million years of Earth’s geological history in my hand as I laboured through it, I was consumed by a material urge to own this – in hardcover, no less. After a three week wait – because such is the travesty that entails international non-expedited shipping on BookDepository – I finally started my wrist workouts.

If a book could be a journey, Otherlands would be a life-changing expedition.

Halliday leaves no stone (age) unturned as he cruises through 550 million years of a planet’s infinite transformations in just under 400 pages. As ambitious as the scale is, the pages instantly bring to life with sensory abundance sixteen fossil sites. We are submerged into the landscape of each geological era – from Ediacaran Australia to Alaskan plains in the Quaternary Period – as covert observers of a planet in various stages of bloom, and we are ushered through periods and eras of mass extinction and flourishing alike. We see in vivid detail terrains change, landforms dissolve, continental plates collide and life reemerge across the periods; we see species thrive on landscapes hitherto unthinkable – can you imagine Antarctica as a lush rainforest 90 million years ago? – and we see the topology of the planet form and unform in endless cycles of life and loss. It is dizzying, and it is humbling.

As I drift through deep time, I am struck with a mounting sense of insignificance – as an individual, and then as a species, and then as a participant of a moment in time, and finally as an inhabitant of a planet hosting us for what is to be a blip in its lifetime.