Science

National Poetry Month: Rhymed Tercet

Posted by Aibird on April 4, 2017
Posted in: Art, Author, Poetry, Science, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , . Leave a comment

My second poem for National Poetry Month is a Rhymed Tercet. The title of the Fractal is the Echoes of Spacetime.

Creation
by A. A. Zingler

Blazing hot inferno explodes into life
in its superheated soup of particles
the spark of inflation rapidly spikes.

Dust coalesced by gravity’s attraction
form the weave of all galaxies’ bones
and jumpstart protostars’ inner ignition.

The seeds for life erupts into existence
cooked in the crucible of massive stars–
their supernovas spew out ingredients.

New stars birthed in the galaxy’s nurseries
Gather supernova dust into planets
These abodes cultivates life’s biology.

Fractal created by A. A. Zingler

News from Pluto!

Posted by Aibird on July 15, 2015
Posted in: Author, Blogging, Physics, Science. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment

The New Horizons spacecraft has reached pluto and is sending back data! Here are some articles that highlight some of the more interesting photos to be released as of today (7/15/2015):

NASA: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/new-horizons-spacecraft-displays-pluto-s-big-heart-0
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html
http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/

Missions Operator Manager (MOM): http://www.themarysue.com/alice-bowman-new-horizons/

Neil Degrasse Tyson and Stephen Colbert: http://www.themarysue.com/colbert-pluto-neil-degrasse-tyson/

Bad Astronomer: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/07/15/pluto_and_charon_the_first_close_up_images.html

This is pretty exciting news as this is the farthest object from earth that we have examined this closely! So kudos to the space mission! Great job!

Remember, a lot of the cool devices and technology we have today comes from the space program — due to the difficulties of space in keeping instruments working and keeping humans safe, NASA and its affiliates have to constantly engineer creative solutions to problems and invent new and better devices, shielding, and new materials. NASA is also at a critical low for funding, which is incredibly sad and troublesome as that lack of funding makes it harder to innovate and produce better and more robust materials, engineering solutions, and devices to better humanity everywhere. Future space exploration can not only help us better understand the worlds within our own space neighborhood, but also help us better understand ourselves and create better and more robust ideas and devices and materials for our future.

In closing, enjoy this montage of images that show Pluto over the years.

Pluto through the years.

Tops posts for the week

Posted by Aibird on November 19, 2014
Posted in: Author, Blogging, Elivera, Science, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

It’s interesting to look and see the top posts for this past week. I’ve had a lot of people exploring my World-building posts, which is good. The template I created has also gotten a lot of interest, and I’m hoping I’ll get feedback on it soon so I can find ways to improve it. Graph of reshaping reality's statisticsIt’s also interesting to see from what locations people examine my site, and from what links do they come from. Most people seem to find my site through search engines, but others have found my site through Legendfire and some world-building forums.

Looking at the search terms is also interesting, mostly because they seem so random: “Animals elivera, glue and newspaper, earth, western hemisphere, gamergate, gender tropes in literature, future significant astronomical events, why is science uncertain, and paper mache planets.”

I find it amusing when people input in questions into searches. I know I do that sometimes just for the fun of it, so it’s interesting to see a question end up with my blog. I do actually answer why is science uncertain in my Uncertain Universe: How Science discovers its Truths blog entry from awhile back. I also explore how I created my own paper mache planet. There’s also a few posts about my universe of Elivera. I cover astronomy. I also cover gender tropes in other posts as well as diversity. I explore earth in my world-building series when I discuss geomorphology. So all the search terms I’ve covered to some extent, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve written about poetry, my own personal story, and so many other things on this blog that I can’t even begin to link them all. This is a good reminder of what I have done here. It’s been good work.

Yes, I’ve covered a lot of diverse topics on my blog, but if there is one core aspect to this blog, it is that I explore the art of imagination, where we take that instilled essence and create works to showcase to the world at large. We are the creators of universes, the explorers, and we “will not go silently in the dark night. We will rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

So this is a bit of a review of my blog and some of what a reader may discover. I am planning on more content in the future when I have more time, and once I finish my move. So expect another update in a week or so. In the meantime, happy reading!

To stand on an alien world

Posted by Aibird on August 10, 2014
Posted in: Aliens, Physics, Science, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . 1 Comment
stand alone in the void of your mind from Flickr via Wylio

© 2012 David Dehetre, Flickr | CC-BY

Our eyes can’t see Infrared light, so a world that thrives on IR might look like the above picture to us. Though the color of the sky might be a different color than this picture shows.

Our Moon

What is it like to stand on a world that is not Earth? For those that have had the chance to walk on the moon, they experienced this to a small degree. The moon is a hostile environment. There is no atmosphere, and has very light gravity. You must have technology in order to survive on the moon; without it, you’d be dead. Yet, what is it like to stand there and look up at the sky? First, you’d see the earth. Large and colorful. You’d see the clouds drifting across its surface and the blue of the oceans, the more pastel colors of the continents. You’d see the sun as a bright white light tinged with yellow far in the distance. You may even see stars, but the black void that is space will be all around you.

There isn’t an atmosphere that refracts light, giving day time a blue tint. The day and night sky would be black. There isn’t any protection from the sun’s more harmful radiation. You’d have to put the whole moon between you and the sun or hope your suit and technology could protect you from the more dangerous rays — the ones that could damage your cells and slowly kill you.

To live on the moon would require a massive undertaking, where we’d have to build a base that is sustainable and highly shielded. Any leaks would be disastrous, and help may not reach us in time. We’d have to be able to jury-rig solutions on our own and extract our own water from the moon, grow our own food within the protected and sealed base, because supplies would be expensive to send from Earth.

Alien Planet or Moon – Red Dwarf System

What about a different planet altogether? Let’s examine a system where the star has a different range of light than our sun. Let’s start with a red dwarf star system, one of the more common stars in our universe. Red Dwarf stars are fairly small and burn their fuel slowly, and thus have a fairly constant luminosity. However, its luminosity is only 10% the luminosity of our sun, so this star’s light is faint. It may appear as more of a dull orange or red in the sky.

The planet, in order to be habitable, must be fairly close to the star to receive enough light and energy to fuel the systems necessary for life. This means the planet may be tidally locked, which would cause large temperature variations. The side that faces the sun would be blistering hot, making it hostile to life, and the other side would be incredibly cold. The cold side may even be cold enough for the atmospheric gas to turn to liquid or solids, which isn’t conducive to life at all. To compensate for this, a heavy atmosphere and a large ocean would be necessary to distribute this heat from the tidally locked side to other places on the planet. However, a thicker atmosphere means you run the danger of having a greenhouse effect, where then the planet’s surface would be too hot to sustain life (a bit like Venus, the ultimate example of a run-away greenhouse effect).

Another way for life to exist in this system is if the planet is a gas giant and the moon is tidally locked around the planet. As it orbits the planet, it’s able to receive sunlight from the star at several stages of its orbit: when it’s between the planet and the sun and when it’s to the side of the planet. It’d receive no sunlight when its behind the planet. This gives the moon a day/night cycle and distribution of heat. In certain parts of the orbit, the sun will appear very low in the sky on the tidally locked side. This means that the tidally locked side won’t be completely cut-off from sunlight, which is good for life. There’s also the demarcation of the night and day side of this tidally locked moon — this border region would have less extreme temperatures than the tidally locked side and its opposite side. Thus life may be more prevalent in this border region.

Let’s say that we’re on that tidally locked moon. Remember, the red dwarf star is small, and thus will mostly emit radiation in the infrared spectrum and will be fairly faint. Even close to the star, the planet still must contend with variations in the energy output of the star due to sunspots that can cover up to 40% of the surface of the star at a time. This effects the output of the energy released, which in turn effects how much of that energy reaches the planet. During these periods, temperatures may dip a bit and plants will find it harder to absorb the needed light for photosynthesis. Perhaps they’d evolve a form of hibernating state during the sunspot periods? Sunspots often are cyclic, and thus after a long amount of time, it is possible life would adapt to the sunspot cycles.

Any plants on that moon will have to absorb spectra other than the red and blue spectrum of light that Earth plants’ absorb (and thus give them their characteristic green color) in order to receive enough nutrients to fuel its photosynthesis. This will change the color of the plants, giving them a different color than what we’d see on earth. It’s possible the plants would be black if they absorb all visible light wavelengths.

However, since infrared light is the dominant light, the plants are more likely to evolve with infrared light as the driver for photosynthesis. This means they may not appear as black at all. Our eyes, which require the visible spectrum to see, may view the plants as colorless. However, to aliens that evolve on this moon, they would likely evolve eyes that see infrared light, so they’d see the color of those plants. They’d see a very different world then us.

What will that look like? The best way for us to simulate this is to show false color images of infrared sight, where we translate the infrared spectra to visible light spectra in order for us to “see” what it’d be like. The focus would be more on the process of life — where we’d see temperature differences more keenly. In fact, the world would be based upon temperature differences since the amount of infrared light emitted (or reflected) by objects depends on the temperature of that object.

How would that alter the alien society if the world they saw was based upon the temperature variations in their environment? How would it alter their views of themselves? Their view of their world and how they construct their cultures?

Also remember, if this is a tidally locked moon around a gas giant, that planet will take up a huge section of the sky for the tidally locked side. It will take up a smaller portion for the border area, and won’t take up any of the sky for the side not facing the planet. How will this effect the evolution of the alien culture?

It’s also possible that this moon may be either be a fairly dry, desert-like world or one that is ocean rich and full of moisture. To develop an ocean, the moon needs to form with an abundance of water molecules and eventually evolve a process to keep that water cycle moving. However, it is also possible for this moon to develop a dry, desert landscape, where water is hidden under the surface or trapped in the atmosphere. This would be a warm moon where water is more scarce, but life could still evolve. However, for either possibility, the moon would still need an atmosphere to protect life as it evolves.

Another important point is that the moon would experience stress from the gas giant’s gravitational pull, which could drive enough tectonic activity to help bolster the formation of life. Tectonic activity would allow for the formation of mountains, valleys, plains, ocean trenches, rivers, lakes, and other interesting geological features. Take a look at Titan as an interesting example of a moon with an atmosphere and some minor tectonic activity. Water doesn’t exist on Titan because of how cold it is, but it still has lakes and rivers — it’s just liquid ammonia.

The temperature of that planet will influence what exists as a liquid on that surface, and if the planet is too hot, it may not have liquids but instead will be dry and arid. (This is also possible for a planet that is fairly cold. Mars is a good example of a planet where there is no flowing water because of how cold it is. A thin atmosphere also inhibits liquids existing over long periods on a planet/moon’s surface. It’s always a good idea to know the phase transitions of different elements and molecules, especially those that are fairly abundant on your moon or planet.)

The above is mostly a thought experiment to help you visualize what it might be like to stand on another planet. What else should I consider as I examine standing on an alien planet or moon?

Book Review: Grass by Sheri Tepper

Posted by Aibird on July 6, 2014
Posted in: Aliens, Reviews, Science, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , . 2 Comments

Grass by Sheri Tepper is a fascinating science fiction book.

Here is the blurb on the back of the book:

Here is a novel as original as the breathtaking, unspoiled world for which it is named, a place where all appears to be in idyllic balance.

Generations ago, humans fled to the cosmic anomaly known as Grass. Over time, they evolved a new and intricate society. But before humanity arrived another species had already claimed Grass for its own. It, too, had developed a culture…

Now, a deadly plague is spreading across the stars. No world save Grass has been left untouched. Marjorie Westriding Yrarier has been sent from Earth to discover the secret of the planet’s immunity. Amid the alien social structure and strange life-forms of Grass, Lady Westriding unravels the planet’s mysteries to find a truth so shattering it could mean the end of life itself.

Although Lady Westriding is featured as the main character, she is but one of many in a large and colorful cast of characters within Grass. Although sometimes it can seem a bit much to keep track of them all, each of them are beautifully imagined, their personalities clear and stark on the page, that I found no difficulty in keeping track of them all. The book takes time with each character, even minor ones, to give a glimpse of who they are and how they view the world around them. If there is anything this book does well, it’s an examination of events from multiple perspectives. This book tackles quite a few questions all at once and does a marvelous job of juggling and answering each one.

We all enter a situation with our own experiences, biases, and worldviews coloring our actions, thoughts, and words. This book shows how each of the characters maneuver through a complex world of politics, religion, strict traditions, and the mystery of the unknown. The book begins on Grass within the family of the bon Damfels, who are an aristocrat family who believe that they are the true rulers of Grass. Those that live in the Commons, the ones that craft much of their furniture and other necessities, are seen as lesser and not as important. The world itself is one giant biome that is various types of grass. There is some seas and Commons is built on a highland surrounded by swamp, but these are anomalies on a world that is nothing but colorful and often enormous varieties of grass. Trees are often few and far between. It’s interesting that even the landscape of the world will play a role in the unraveling of the plot and climax of the book.

The bons society is a stratified tradition-based society that centers around the hunt, where they ride the mysterious Hippae, a life-form native to Grass to hunt the Foxen, another native life-form that is even harder to see and more mysterious than the Hippae. It is on this bizarre little colony world that humanity will find the answer to its biggest and most dangerous problem: a plague that kills indiscriminately.

Back on humanity’s homeworld of Earth, Sanctity, a religious organization that also rules as the main government of Terran and its colonies, is dealing with the onslaught of the plague, trying to keep it a secret, but trying to find a way to investigate why Grass has not been affected. There’s been reports of people who have come to Grass with the plague and have left it cured. How and why? To find out, Sanctity’s dying monarch will send the Yrariers, an Old Catholic family, as ambassadors to Grass, to secretly determine why those on Grass are unaffected by the devastating plague.

Rigo, Lady Westriding’s husband, is a fiery character, who serves as a catalyst for the book’s examination of gender roles. As Old Catholics, Rigo and Marjorie often fight to stay within the realms of their gender roles, often confessing to their priests (who travel with them and often serve as their advisors) their sins and struggles to stay true to masculinity and femininity as defined by Earth society. Yet as the story progresses, both are limited by their adherence to their gender roles, and while Marjorie begins to fight past them, doing what she must to find the answer the larger questions, Rigo falls behind, trapped in this constant state to live up to his false ideal of masculinity. The book does a marvelous job of showing how the two interact and often fail to understand each other due to the great differences in their personalities. It also shows that their lack of understanding of one another isn’t because men can’t get women or vice versa, but is instead a breakdown in communication stemmed partly because of the strictness of gender roles, and the lack of patience and unwillingness to view another’s perspective that both suffer from, Rigo far more than Marjorie. Marjorie, as the book progresses, learns how to put herself into another’s shoes and grows because of it; however, Rigo struggles with this the entire book, often trapped by his own rigid adherence to traditional ideas of masculinity. Tony, his son, is depicted in sharp contrast to his father, and offers up another way to view masculinity — one that is softer, less rigid, and more empathetic, which Stella, his sister, offers up another way to view femininity, which is harsher and more fiery. Stella also serves as a disturbing catalyst for one of the biggest turning points in the entire book; what happens to Stella is the final push that forces Marjorie to act brazenly without regard to the rigid traditions that govern Grass. Through this action, she pushes a train of events that will change everything and bring her closer to the answers she so desperately seeks.

Another issue tackled by this book is the idea of what constitutes a person’s identity. Where is it housed? One of the most disturbing moments of the book lays in what happens to girls who disappear within the grass. The people within Commons eventually find the missing girls, but why they turned up at the port and the fact their minds seem to be wiped clean offers a disturbing examination of consciousness and what constitutes a person’s identity. How malleable our minds may be. This provides a horror element to the tale that weaves its disturbing thread all the way to the climax, for the role these girls play in the larger conflict is one that is just as disturbing as the mind-wipe they suffered from.

The book also examines politics, religion, and belief in wonderfully complex and intriguing ways. The society of the bons sits in stark contrast to the freer and less rigid society of the Commons. Here we examine how two very disparate societies work in tandem, and we see the differences aren’t truly caused by the location or even the people themselves but the interactions one group has with the native lifeforms that the other group does not have. Here we see how alien contact can alter and change a society, and it offers up questions as to what constitutes intelligent life? What if one intelligent life seeks dominance over another? How does one mitigate the violence or seek understanding, especially if there is a wide gap in understanding? How is the native lifeforms of Grass interconnected? The story hints at a biological connection between the main life-forms of Grass — ones most prevalent that has the most interaction with humanity. This plays a huge role in the plot of the story, and serves as the catalyst for finding the cure for the plague as well as an explanation for how the plague came to be. These lifeforms even play a role into why the Arbai, the extinct intelligent race with its abandoned cities spanning numerous planets, died. They are fascinating alien creatures, and their role in the plot was a wonderful twist that I didn’t see coming.

Another contrast is between Sanctity, the Green brothers — where those who fail their oaths are sent as punishment — who are studying the ruins of the extinct Arbai, and the Old Catholics. Here the conflict of religion and how it intersects one’s decisions, behaviors, and worldviews is examined in detail. Marjorie in particular has a crisis of faith as she struggles to deal with her duty to discover a cure for the plague and solve the mystery of Grass and her duty to be a good wife and mother; her crisis of faith digs deep into the nature of belief and how it influences us. Does God truly know us as individuals? Or are we similar to white blood cells within a larger body, only little things that are set into motion, but not truly distinct in the larger scheme of things? The Green brothers examine what it is like to be thrown into religion, where you are not given a choice as to whether you want to believe or not, and the consequences of such an approach. Sanctity itself provides insight into the question of how far is a religion willing to go to assert its dominance over its believers?

There is a lot of complex questions tackled by this book, and each one is deftly and thoroughly explored through the characters, the intricate worldbuilding, and the complex but beautifully woven plot. As disturbing as this book was at times, it was a fascinating read and one I highly recommend.

I’ve done my best to keep this review spoiler free, but for those that wish to discuss this book in the comments, feel free to discuss in detail. The comments will not be spoiler free.

How I craft a language Part 2: Phonetics and Phonology

Posted by Aibird on April 2, 2014
Posted in: Aliens, Biology, Elivera, Linguistics, World Building, Writing. Tagged: , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

You can read the first part of this series here. This is a continuation of that first post.

I’ve made some concept drawings of my Dragios species, but as I’m not the best at drawing, this is mostly sketches with only the head done in any sort of detailed fashion. Here’s one of the design sketches:Image02172014154740 I’m still not fully satisfied with it — the mouth needs to be a bit more triangular and smoothed out, but it’s close enough for my purposes.

In order to start creating their language, I need to consider the details of how this alien species evolved and their biology. The Dragios species evolved on a light gravity planet around a low mass star (spectral class of K5, which means it’s surface temperature is only 4,400K and it is 0.64 the size of our sun. This means the planet has a closer orbit in order to be in the habitable zone.), where the gravity is 3/4ths that of Earth. They are mostly a bird/reptilian type species and can glide short distances on their planet. They have the ability to alter their outer appearance to some degree, the two outer layer of cells fairly flexible, allowing for them to camouflage themselves extremely well. It takes some time for them to learn how to look like other similar sized animals, but once they master the skill, they can easily blend and walk amongst their prey without being noticed. This makes hunting fairly easy, and fairly easy for them to hide if they’re being hunted. They are bipedal with strong legs and strong wing bones, allowing them to run fairly fast and glide great distances. Their hands have a thumb and three fingers, which gives them the dexterity to grasp objects and undoubtedly proved essential in their development of technology over time.

Their mouth is shaped a bit like a bat’s snout, very compact, but with a large nasal area. Their ears are large and can easily move nearly 270 degrees. This gives them a wide range of movement, and allows for greater breadth in the range of their hearing. They also have no lips, and thus would have no consonants corresponding to those types of sounds. Within their throat, they have a four thin vocal chords, layered upon each other, which allows them to sing four pitches at the same time. This gives them versatility with their music and speech, and also makes it hard for a human to ever truly learn to speak their language. Because of this, their language is heavily based around music. When devising the phonology of their language, I had to take all of this into account.

Now I could examine the phonetics of their language, which is the production, transmission, and perception of the sounds of language. This is different then phonology , which concerns itself with the examination of the systematic organization of sounds (such as into words) and how this organizing of sounds constructs meaning. To examine how the sounds are organized, I first have to create the sounds. Here are the two phonetic maps I created:

Consonants: Dragios consonants

Vowels: Dragios vowels

As you can see, I left some space for improvement as this is a work in progress. Although I did base the categories loosely upon human linguistics, I took out a few categories that they wouldn’t have due to a difference in mouth construction. With these sounds and the characters I use to represent them, I can start to construct words, which is where I start to examine the phonology of their language. To do this, I created some simplistic word construction rules, where C stands for consonant and V for vowel:

VCV
CVCV
CVVC(V)
VVC(V)

Although this is somewhat simplistic at the moment, it’s enough for me to start constructing words based on these sounds. I decided to focus first on the musical terminology because of their ability to sing more than one sound at a time and how crucial music will be in their culture. I then expanded the vocabulary to include words for their environment and their society. From there, I could start to work on how they actually construct their sentences. In order to construct sentences, I needed to create a set of rules, also known as syntax. These rules would help speakers form sentences in which to communicate larger and more complicated ideas. Another way to view syntax is to think of grammar rules — all languages have them. Those grammar rules are the syntax of that language.

I started with a simple rule for basic sentences that focused on the word order within the sentence itself: Subject — object — verb

From there I decided that the clicks within the language would serve a bit like punctuation and articles. They’d signify when a sentence is a command, statement, or interrogative. They’d also serve as connectors of one phrase to another within the sentence. With this idea in mind, I began to construct a few basic sentences. Now this is all very simplistic currently, and I do have further plans on how to add depth to the syntax of this language, but as of this moment in time, this is where I currently stand with my alien language.

So that’s the basics of how I created my first alien language. Having a linguistics resource nearby aided me tremendously during this project, but more importantly, I had to examine how various species’ mouths were constructed. This gave me a wider range of ideas on how an alien mouth may evolve, and what it may resemble, and in turn, allowed for more versatility with the sounds they could make. Will I use this language within my stories? Possibly but even if I don’t, the act of building this language has allowed me to examine my alien species in depth. To visualize it more fully and to give me a chance to examine their society and views of the world and how that may differ from humanity. This has, in turn, given me ideas on possible conflicts that can give rise to even more stories. So the act of building their language has inspired me in a great number of ways and further enriches the world-building of my Elivera universe.

It can be a challenge to create a language, but it’s definitely rewarding in the long run.

Review: The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Posted by Aibird on March 26, 2014
Posted in: Biology, Science. Tagged: , , , , . 1 Comment

The Book of Barely Imagined Beings by Caspar Henderson

I picked it up out of curiosity. It just sat on the new book shelf at the library; the front cover a mix of bizarre creatures, many in the form of letters. This book takes the idea of a medieval bestiary — all those lovely imagined beasts and the commentary on society they induced — and slathers it with the bizarre nature of our actual reality: the true fascinating stories of weird looking beasts within our own world. Through the examination of their appearance, lives, and other intricate details, he looks deep upon humanity itself, especially our interactions with these animals and what they represent within human society and identity. It’s a lovely book that explores life, society, and our impact on the world and each other in beautiful detail.

As stated in his introduction, this isn’t meant to be a full examination of the natural world.

This book is envisaged as an ‘aletheiagoria’ — a new coinage so far as I know, which alludes to phantasmagoria (a light-projected ghost show from mthe era before cinema) but uses the world ‘aletheia,’ the Greek for ‘truth’ or ‘revealing.’ It suggests (to me, at least) flickering ‘real’ images of a greater reality. I have tried to look at a few ways of being from different angles and, through ‘a wealth of unexpected juxtaositions’, explore both how they are like and unlike humans (or how we imagine ourselves to be) and also how their differences from and similarities to us cast light on human capabilities and human concerns.*

The book itself explores much more than just the animals themselves; it often wanders into fascinating analogies and digressions, where the author makes a deliberate attempt to use the animals to think with and ponder more than just the animals themselves. One of the major themes within the book is how evolutionary biology (and the scientific method contained within it) provides a “richer and more rewarding sense of the nature of existence than a view informed by myth and tradition alone**.” Through this lens, the author is able to examine the creatures in detail, but in any easy to approach manner. Written for the lay person, the majority of the discussions won’t be overly focused upon the biology of the creatures but upon their impact upon us. The digressions into philosophy, the consequences of humanity’s actions, and our impact upon the creatures will be just as relevant as the creature’s own stories. We are all intertwined, growing up on this same planet together, and the author writes of these connections beautifully.

Another interesting theme within the book is the ocean; two-thirds of the animals contained within are from the sea, and for a very good reason: the oceans inhabit seven-tenths of the surface and contain the vast majority of Earth’s biodiversity. It’s also full of great mysteries as one of the least well known areas on the planet. Some of the creatures examined will be far more alien than anything we’ve imagined, and others are familiar and almost comforting, yet their stories will weave a sense of connection and grief, for much of the great biodiversity and creatures within the sea suffer from the consequences of our overfishing, whaling industries, heavy amounts of pollution, and the acidification of the oceans due to climate change. Those connections between us and the world in which we live are laid bare within the tales of these creatures, and through them, we see aspects of ourselves, the soul of humanity, and what is revealed will be a challenge as much as it is liberating.

The creatures you find within these pages, some you may have heard of before such as dolphins are types of whales, but others may seem like alien lifeforms, bizarre if not perhaps frightening, but no less real. There may be no dragons or unicorns or mythical beasts of old in this bestiary, but what lies inside is a wealth of wonder and beauty, far beyond what we can even begin to imagine. So take your time, sit back, and walk with the author on this fascinating journey through some of the most fascinating and/or bizarre creatures that inhabit or have inhabited our planet.

 

 

* and ** taken from the Introduction.