‘The meaning of life’, announces Simon Barnes in the opening pages of his new book, ‘is life, and the purpose of life is to become an ancestor.’ Simple really. Yet it is hard to imagine a title launched this autumn that has a more all-encompassing theme or a larger moral purpose. Ten Million Aliens is an impassioned hymn to the teeming multitude of organisms crowded alongside humanity on this ever-smaller planet.
In truth even Barnes’s vast panorama is only a partial statement about the Earth’s genuine biodiversity. For, as he readily acknowledges, he has been obliged to omit for want of space all 28 kingdoms of bacterial organism, five other kingdoms of unicellular life, as well as all the hundreds of thousands of green plant and fungi species. To the remaining complement numbered in the book’s title he has devoted 131 chapters in 480 pages. In case you want the maths, it works out at more than 20,000 species per page which, at times, obliges this book to look and sound like an extended catalogue.
But then how on earth do you begin to narrate life’s full and fantastical story? Barnes has come up with some immensely elegant solutions. Rather than beginning with the most rudimentary types of animal and journeying in a linear narrative towards the most complex, he intertwines the two categories in alternating chapters. So he proceeds with an account of the most sophisticated and simple in tandem.
In this way the sex-loving bonobo chimpanzee, which has only one per cent genetic variance from Homo sapiens, shares much the same space as the 10,000 varieties of water-dwelling sponge, made of calcium carbonate and living on the seabed, sometimes five miles under. Here the mighty lion or the bone-breaking hyena lies down with the loa loa parasitic worm that burrows through the eyes of its human victims.

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