John McPhee's Basin and Range, the first of his geology books usually read in a collection as the (sized rather like a large rock itself) Annals of the Former World is a funny choice for a Passages classic, at first glance. Maybe at second glance too, come to think of it. Basin and Range is a travelogue, haphazard intro textbook on plate tectonics, and a meditation on the Earth, its age, and the rocks that give us some clue to almost utterly alien worlds that once occupied the space we now inhabit. Lava flows, trilobites, ancient seas, and primordial continents; the great extinctions that bookend geological periods of time, what does this all have to do with software engineering?