"Dark Life" is a journalistic account of scientific efforts to identify and validate the idea of nano-bacteria, and the association between this and various formations in underground caves (and other areas, in the end).

The writing style is very chatty, very 'pop-sci' - a style that I've seen done badly far too many times, but works particularly well here, as it is not only the story of the science, but about how one person gets dragged in to a new field, despite their better judgement. Taylor starts the story as if he were a dispassionate observer, and then chronicles not only the drag out fights between different cadres of scientists, but his own descent into caves, and into being a research assistant.

The perspective is very one sided - the scientists who believe that what they are finding in rocks are nano-bacteria fossils, that the deposits they are studying are the result of life finding every niche, these scientists are portrayed as trail blazers fighting against the status quo, fighting the good fight. And right up to the end, I was expecting there to be some definitive statement that this had been accepted by the scientific 'establishment' as being generally correct to justify the bias. The lack of this was disappointing - it did change my perspective on the whole rest of the book.

In contrast, the scientists who are arguing that the 'fossils' are the result of high-temperature rock formation; those arguing that the same formations are found on the moon (and the story of that is quite fascinating), these are treated as misguided at best, and obstructive and deliberately misrepresenting their results at worst. I was not at all convinced that they should have been treated in quite so cavalier a manner, although I was quite sympathetic regarding the treatment of one, when I read the sections on how an honours student was treated. Then again, this was a biased account, and the honours student is one of the heroes of the book.

That aside, the story is engaging, and once I started to read it with the same goggles on that I read fantasy -- the 'history is written by the victors' goggles -- then the one-sided nature was less of a problem. And I didn't even need that until quite late in the book - I hadn't really realised that I was reading quite such a biased account until about 3/4 of the way through. As an introduction to an area that I know nothing about, it does well. And the vicarious portrayal of caving was interesting. I have no desire to ever go into such an environment, but at least I can understand why some people might. ( )