I
don’t often think about mushrooms or what they do underground, but they
fascinate me every time I see one, whether it’s in a forest or a supermarket.
Their forms are otherworldly and they’re neither animal nor plant.
When I
stumbled onto Sheldrake’s book, I didn’t even think; I just bought it. And I’m
very glad I did – Sheldrake is a biologist who studies fungi and writes like a
poet. This is one of those books that widens your horizons and makes you
consider the world afresh. I came away thrilled and energised.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “brilliant [and] entrancing” (The Guardian) journey into the hidden lives of fungi—the great connectors of the living world—and their astonishing and intimate roles in human life, with the power to heal our bodies, expand our minds, and help us address our most urgent environmental problems.
“Grand and dizzying in how thoroughly it recalibrates our understanding of the natural world.”—Ed Yong, author of I Contain Multitudes
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—Time, BBC Science Focus, The Daily Mail, Geographical, The Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, London Evening Standard, Science Friday
Liu
is the author of one of my favourite recent works of science fiction, a trilogy
called The Three-Body Problem, so
deciding to read Of
Ants and Dinosaurs felt completely natural. He’s
working in a very different mode here, though.
Of Ants and Dinosaurs is a modern fable and tells the story of an
Earth where these two vastly different species achieve sentience, build a
symbiotic civilisation,
and what happens after. It’s a fast read, and you can tell Liu was having fun
in the writing. Full of wonderful ideas and perspective-shifting observations,
this is an oddball science fiction/fantasy.
Try this one if you liked George
Saunders’ Fox 8 or Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem.
On an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch.
From humble tooth-picking origins, ants and dinosaurs - two species so unalike and yet so complementary - forged an alliance that culminated in an antimatter-powered Age of Wonder.
But such magnificent industry came at a price - a price paid first by Earth's biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it. And yet the dinosaurs…
Dorohedoro is an odd fish. It’s a
manga about two parallel worlds.
One is full of sorcerers, where magic is
biological. It can be supplemented with drugs or by making a pact with one of
the devils who rule that world. The other world is much more like ours, except
the sorcerers visit so often to practice on the people there (with horrible but
funny results), that even the rain has a magical residue that can corrupt a
human body.
Into this already strange scenario, Hayashida throws an amnesiac,
lizard-headed man trying to discover his true identity and his best friend, a genius
martial artist and dumpling chef. Brilliant, bizarre, and funny.
Caiman was not lucky. A sorcerer cursed him with a reptile head and left him with no memory of his life before the transformation. Adding to the mystery, there's a spectre of a man living inside him. But Caiman has one key advantage: he's now completely immune to magic. Along with his best friend, Nikaido, Caiman is hunting down sorcerers in the Hole, searching for the one who can undo his curse and killing the rest. But when En, the head Sorcerer, of the sorcerers, gets word of a lizard-man slaughtering sorcerers, he sends a crew of "cleaners" into the…
The true story of a scientist named Mary Anning and how the
fossils she found helped invent paleontology. If you’ve heard of Ichthyosaurs,
Plesiosaurs, or Pterosaurs you already know her work but much has been hidden or
forgotten.
Some things you’ll discover: When she was one, lightning struck
Mary but could not kill her. When she was 12, she found animal bones no one had
ever seen before. When she was 16, dead people washed up on her favourite
beach. Her enemies were rich men and landslides—the first called her a liar and
the second tried to kill her (a lot). One of her friends ate mice on toast.
This visual biography contains many deaths and one squirrel; a handsome puppy
and 200-million-year-old poop.
