Climate change is already having a profound impact on cities, as global urbanization pushes more and more people to live in them. The animals who cohabitate with human, whether we appreciate their presence or not, are changing too. Specifically, there's been an increase in invasive species — a term used to describe introduced organisms that bring dramatic and often destructive changes, and sometimes can drive other species to extinction.
But here's the thing: Invasive species don't stop evolving themselves. Consider the infamous brown rats of New York City, which have evolved longer noses and shorter upper molar tooth rows, the better to enjoy the Big Apple's colder weather and higher-quality food. Other invasive species are adapting behaviorally, physically and genetically to life in cities as well. While invasive species pose major public health implications and can certainly affect humans' quality of life, their adaptive abilities can rival those of human migrants and pose a puzzling question: Who's the real invader here?
With every heartbeat, a man can produce around 1,000 sperm – and during intercourse, more than 50 million of the intrepid swimmers set out to fertilise an egg. Only a few make it to the final destination, before a single sperm wins the race and penetrates the egg.
But much about this epic journey – and the microscopic explorers themselves – remains a mystery to science.
We are all made up of memories as much as our present experiences. Erskine’s elegant rendering of this cross-time continuum makes The Benefactors more daring than most novels – and more true to life.
This wide array of material hints at Sad Planets’ general approach, which forgoes any single thread or discipline in favor of a constellation of objects, entities, and ideas. This is media studies that far exceeds the conventional bounds of human culture and technology. Here everything mediates information and moods, sometimes in very strange and unhuman ways. Sad Planets is an attentively promiscuous book—and not only at the level of content, but also in style and form. The prose is refreshingly adventurous and unafraid to experiment. The format is a series of micro-essays complied into 16 “sequences” that can be read in any order. This format mirrors the unthinkably large expanse of the universe, the nested galaxies within, the glittering stars within them, the planets within solar systems, all the way down to the space stuff indexed by our very own sapient bodies (as the theory of panspermia—the idea that some of the key ingredients for our biological soup hitchhiked from outer space—is appearing increasingly likely). This ambient form of writing matches the book’s ambition, which is to track the affective relay between these celestial bodies on our ways of being and thinking.