An Entertaining Look at the Future
Written: Jan 01 '04 (Updated Jan 02 '04)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Interesting and fun.
Cons: Much too short. Some of the names are silly.
The Bottom Line: An entertaining, but overly short companion volume to the show. It explains some things better than the show did, but also leaves out some things.
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| a_r_egerton's Full Review: |
The Future is Wild is a companion volume to the miniseries of the same name that has appeared on both the Discovery Channel and Animal Planet. Like the show, it is based on the speculations of scientists from many different disciplines, including biology, climatology, and geology. It was written-- or-- perhaps, more accurately-- edited by Dougal Dixon and John Adams. I admit I've never heard of Adams, but Dixon is a science writer who had made a splash back in the 80's with a book called After Man, which described what Earth might be like 50 million years from now.
As with the show, Future concentrates on three eras: 5 million years from now, 100 million years from now, and 200 years from now. Dixon and his colleagues set the stage by describing what Earth will be like in each era, and then populate Earth with a variety of animals, some plausible, and some that you make think, "Yeah, right." To their credit, they do explain the seemingly more implausible creatures. For example, the notion of a hawk-sized wasp might sound ludicrous, but Dixon reminds the readers that giant insects did exist during the Carboniferous Age and then describes the environment that can produce them. (Basically, giant insects can evolve in environments having high concentrations of oxygen.) Unfortunately, Dixon still has a penchant for dumb names. Readers of After Man had likely groaned after being subjected to the "rabbucks" (deer-like descendants of rabbits). Similarly, Future gives us "flish" (winged fish), "swampus" (swamp-dwelling octopus), and "squibbon" (arboreal squid that swing through trees like the gibbon). I don't mind the animals themselves, but those names are truly dreadful.
Dixon and Adams begin each section with a description of the major geographical and climatological changes in Earth. Then they describe some of the organisms. Mercifully, they do not use the stupid space probe that the T.V. series had. In fact, in their version of Future, humans are extinct. They don't go into details as to what happened, but we apparently wiped ourselves out. In any case, they predict an Ice Age five million years from now. 100 million years from now, the polar ice caps have melted and much of Earth is underwater. The climate has warmed up, and there is a greater concentration of oxygen in the air. 200 million years from now, the continents have all collided into each other and merged into a single super-continent. A good chunk of "Pangea II" is desert, but there are rainforests in the northern regions.
The bulk of the book is dedicated to the organisms that populate these future Earths. One of the more irritating aspects about After Man was its emphasis on mammals. Far too many of the creatures in After Man had been some type of mammal. To an extent, this bias is understandable. After all, we're mammals, and so are most of the creatures we live with. But mammals only make up a small percentage of the species on Earth. There are only four thousand mammal species, as opposed to roughly one million insect species, for instance. Fortunately, Dixon and his colleagues have rectified that earlier mistake and give non-mammals their due. Among these are the spink (subterranean quail), the lurkfish ( a giant electric catfish), the falconfly (a hawk-sized wasp), the silver spider, and the rainbow squid. Among the mammals that turn up are the snowstalker (sabre-toothed wolverine), the deathgleaner (large, predatory bat), and the scrofa (desert-dwelling pig).
Dixon and Adams also depict certain evolutionary trends, most notably some species' invasion of land. In our prehistory, both arthropods and vertebrates had evolved as aquatic or marine life-forms, but eventually moved onto land. In Future fish and cephalopods move onto land, and fish even develop flight capabilities. They also describe the impacts of a mass extinction, which, while destroying many species, provides opportunities for others. For example, fish could become airborne because the birds had died out.
Unfortunately, interesting as Future is, it gives only a superficial treatment of the science involved. The problem is simple: its length, or more accurately, its lack of length. The book is only 160 pages long, which is much too short to do its subject justice. It was plainly designed simply to be a complement to the T.V. series, which means that people who missed the program won't get to see the gannetwhale's defense techniques or see the deadly game of tag between a lurkfish and a swampus. The book does a good job of explaining such phenomena as the bumblebeetle's life cycle, which is rather poorly explained in the show. Given more space, the book could have given even more details about the organisms and scenarios it depicts, and it could have therefore been even better.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
a_r_egerton
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Member: Ann Egerton
Location: Baltimore, MD
Reviews written: 56
Trusted by: 20 members
About Me:
Graduate student of biology at Towson University. I'll write about practically anything.
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