Strange Old World - Late Paleocene—Early Eocene Climatic and Biotic Events in the Marine and Terrestrial Record. Edited by Marie-Pierre Aubry, Spencer Lucas, and William Berggren Columbia University Press, New York. 1998. 513 pages.

In his 1932 book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley laid out a satirical blueprint of a future so strange to people of the time that it became a symbol of the frightening and unyielding momentum of scientific progress. Literature and popular culture have since been littered with images of a future earth so transformed by human progress (or extraterrestrial intervention) that we can hardly recognize it. Earth historians and paleontologists, however, have taken a different path into the bizarre. This group of time travelers has used the kind of technology that Huxley foreshadowed to recreate past worlds of similar disparity. These worlds are neither based on, nor entirely limited by, human imagination, but are based instead on scientific observation. In short, these strange old worlds are real, not imagined. As often is the case, however, truth can b e stranger than fiction.