Without spoilers for the plot, here’s why I love this book so much.

Rucka understands that people lie to themselves for reasons. We lie to ourselves because it works, because it gives us something, because we need to. We lie to ourselves to protect ourselves from things that hurt. The bigger the hurt we’re avoiding, the stronger the lies.

Yet, at some point, the workarounds we use to get through dysfunctional situations run up against people and events that we don’t have to defend against. And the workarounds, well, they don’t work so well anymore.

That’s the point at which we have to be brave. We have to look at the workarounds and the lies with a clear gaze. We have to thank them for the help they’ve provided, and then show those lies the door. We have to step through pain and towards truth.

Rucka understands exactly how much that hurts, and he writes it well.

This is why I love A Fistful of Rain.

The premise of this short book is pretty amazing: What if the grandson of H.G. Wells grew up to be a marine biologist and, in studying denizens of the ocean, learned strange mostly unpopularized facts about them, which he scribbled into a journal shortly before the Shoggoths ate him?

And what if this were all true? Well it is. It’s all true except the Shoggoths.

Martin Wells writes delightfully lucid prose, that’s both witty and intellectually engaging, about all sorts of bizarre life forms: sea urchins, cephalopods, limpets, and, of course, fish. This book is filled with brilliant, short essays about said denizens that could well threaten to alter the way you view life on earth. Frankly, I’m still reeling from concepts such as the similarity in the number of heartbeats we mammals get in a lifetime — until we humans got better at staving off death, we averaged the same the number of heartbeats as a mouse; the mouse just overclocks its little heart to burn through them in a much shorter time interval. All this comes up as Wells ruminates on “How Hot is a Fish,” an essay ostensibly about how fast fish cool off their bodies to avoid overheating when escaping predators.

And the whole book’s like that. Amazing facts about amazing critters, mostly written in self-contained 10 page essays, that once again reveal life on earth is more bizarre than any Hollywood alien.

If nothing else, the book should be read to encounter the extraordinary navigational systems of limpets, something so eerie and unexplained it could have come straight out of Lovecraft.

This book will change the way you view the world. And, it’s funny. Civilization and the Limpet by Martin Wells.