Books like How to Clone a Mammoth — picked by fans

This book made me rethink many of my assumptions about biodiversity, extinction risk, and conservation. Telling stories from his travels and from research around the world, biologist Chris Thomas points out a paradox: While species are going extinct at an exceptionally high rate, the number of species in most Belgium or Vermont-sized areas of the world is rising.

Thomas is not denying the threats to species or the need to conserve biodiversity. Far from it. But he argues that conservation is often misguided and inherently unsustainable, trying to achieve a nonexistent ‘wild’ state and ignoring nature’s dynamism. He proposes a new philosophy of conservation, that is human-centered, accepting of biological change, sustainable, and aimed at maximizing biological diversity for future generations.

The earth is in an another extinction period, and humans blame ourselves.

So we have the motive (guilt) to de-extinct what were once living organisms, like the passenger pigeon, Tasmanian tigers, and dodo bird. It turns out we also have the means: selective breeding, cellular cloning, CRISPR/Fanzor for specific genetic modifications.

All we needed was opportunity, and we have that now, too, in well-funded labs that can justify spending huge amounts of money on cloning a mammoth. But wiser men than I have raised an important question. What are the risks? This is why Britt Wray’s Rise of the Necrofauna is a must read for anyone planning a future vacation to a de-extinct zoo—like me.

I will read anything by Mary Roach because she’s hilarious.

But in particular, she’s an expert at uncovering the unexpectedly bizarre, surreal hidden side of any topic: death, astronaut training, digestion, and… human-animal conflicts.

Animals do what they do, and many a time, humans want to arrest (and even kill) them for it. And we have tried. For centuries. With wildly uneven results. And with each story of people going to battle—vainly, quixotically—with vandalous seagulls and crows, hungry bears, uninvited elephants, poisonous beans, and home-invading macaques, I think, Holy sh*t!

One of my biggest animal-related holy sh*t moments was when I first read paleontologist Jack Horner’s plan to turn a chicken into a dinosaur.

Not an extinct dinosaur a la Jurassic Park (a movie he consulted on), but a living, breathing, ready-to-roar brand-new dinosaur. How, you ask, can he do that without, say, cloning preserved dino DNA in blood stolen by an amber-trapped mosquito (BTW, an impossible theory)? Obviously, by reverse engineering a chicken embryo.

By altering the embryo’s chemical instructions, those same genes—instead of building a barnyard icon—can theoretically develop a snout with teeth, arms with claws, and a long tail. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this dinosaur will still have a chicken’s stature and feathers, but it could mess you up. Why, oh why do this? Because Horner thinks that success will prove, once and for all, that genetic change drives evolution. Holy sh*t!

I am in awe of the repressed, elegiac emotion that Ishiguro brings to his characters.

Never Let Me Go kept me in a state of constant tension between Kathy’s version of events (which is full of omissions and self-deception) and the version I was constructing in my own head (which was so often at odds with hers).

This is something Ishiguro also does brilliantly in other books, but here I was particularly drawn to the deft way he shows us a morally bankrupt adult world through the eyes of an adolescent protagonist – that’s exactly the territory I write.

Like the fish who doesn’t realise the water is there, Kathy struggles to understand the true nature of Hailsham until it’s far too late; and there’s real moral anger behind the quiet delivery.

Would you like to live forever—or barring that, for a really long time? If the answer is yes, then who are you? Is the person you were last month you? If your consciousness from last month could be transferred to a clone of your body, would that clone be you?

Matthew FitzSimmons explores the reality of who we are and more in his fast-paced mystery sci-fi novel Constance.

If you’re like me, and you feel a hole in your reading life when you finish this book, the good news is that the sequel is just a click away. Enjoy!

Resurrecting Sunshine takes my fascination with the afterlife and combines it with my love of contemporary sci-fi. Sunshine was Adam’s best friend, girlfriend and bandmate until the day she swam out too far into the ocean. Now she’s gone. Or she was, until advanced underground cloning and memory-implantation techniques revive her. As Adam’s memories are retrieved and donated to a resurrected Sunshine, the question is…will she be the same girl as the one that lives in his memory? I love the questions this story raises about death and the complications that might arise as our science evolves. When should we stay and when should we leave when we have a choice?

“They can bring her back. But can they save her?”

This book takes everything amazing about the mystery genre and transposes it into an endlessly fascinating, well-developed sci-fi world. I was captivated by the web of interconnected plot lines, told from the perspectives of rich and multi-faceted characters throughout the entire story.

Specifically, the fact that all of their seemingly disconnected backstories converge to form the real picture of the story was masterfully done. Furthermore, the final reveal of the story was quite literally the only plot twist in fiction that has given me a verbal “oh my god” moment.

It was a massive inspiration for me and led to my love of a combination of morally gray mystery, sci-fi, and action adventure.

A commonly discussed debate among dinosaur fans is whether or not Jurassic Park was influenced in any way by this book. Not only did the Carnosaur novel predate Jurassic Park but the film adaptations of both were released only weeks apart in 1993.

Regardless, this book did many of the same things in Jurassic Park several years before Jurassic Park’s release. The novel also features an eccentric billionaire cloning dinosaurs, but what I believe truly separates both stories is the fact that while Jurassic Park is set on a remote island, Carnosaur follows a sleepy little town where the primal creatures escape to and wreak havoc.

What follows is a gruesome series of attacks and mauling that send shivers down my spine each time I revisit this story. While this book is not as highly regarded as Jurassic Park, I believe it deserves to be remembered as a piece… show more.

In this tale, the world is in post-apocalyptic decline, and human fertility has collapsed to zero. A family set up a cloning facility, hoping to overcome the odds and produce a fertile population. The clones, once mature, have other ideas. They take over the facility and marginalise the non-clones. Only rarely is a fertile clone produced, and they are kept as ‘breeders’. As the story progresses, the desire of a naturally born individual for self-determination, and conflicting values between individual and clone, lead to a tension that cannot go unresolved. The storytelling cleverly slips between omniscient in the scenes with the clones, and third person in the scenes with the individual characters.