Soonish

I loved this book and all of the comics.

The Weinersmiths have more than a funny name. They are thoughtful, intelligent, AND funny! I literally laughed out loud several times.

Each chapter is divided into three sections: an introduction to the topic; “Where are we now,” which is consistently the meaty section of the chapter; concerns; “How it could change the world;” and a Nota Bene, which is sort of a connected side note narrated by Zach.

My favorite chapters are those dedicated to space, programmable matter, and precision medicine, but I learned from all of them. I really like the idea of having a bucket of nano-particle goo that will shape itself into any object I request. Sort of a T-1000 without the murdery intent. (Yes, “murdery,” not “murderous.” Stupid spell check trying to tell me what to do.)

The conclusion is also loaded with jokes. For example, I learned that scientists most fear the in-word. Included in the conclusion is the graveyard of topics that didn’t make it into the book. Each of those entries is a few pages introducing the topic and an explanation for cutting it. The Nota Bene of the conclusion on mirror organisms is my favorite. Any section that includes this combination of sentences has to be a favorite: “However, one downside was that some eaters of Olestra products experienced an increased rate of (squeamish readers beware) ‘anal oil leakage.’ This being one of the less good leakages, Olestra has largely been shelved.”

As a fan of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the webcomic of one of the authors, I forgot this existed. I don't know how I remembered, but I'm glad I did, because everything discussed was just far enough into the future that the past five years hasn't made it irrelevant. Woohoo!

This was a genuine pleasure to read. It covers a lot of cool things at a level of detail that is understandable but still shows the complexities involved, and it's also just funny. It's nice to see that they aren't just hyping up a bunch of stuff, with every chapter having a section on likely concerns and related chapters make sure to remind us of the inevitable robot uprising. 

There's a chapter dedicated to the idea graveyard, where they talk briefly about things they couldn't write about in the same way as the rest of the book, and I really like that instead of doing a half-assed job on a bunch of topics they just said "these are cool but for these reasons we're not doing it." So often books ride the hype train to be more exciting, or they pretend they're the only thing worth being hyped about, or they just fluff up a bunch of content to make it seem like they totally know what's going on, but this book is none of that. It's a bunch of cool things the authors were able to do good research on, and it's an acknowledgement that they are not the totality of things affecting the future nor are they going to do a bad job of explaining things just because they like an idea.

I feel like I'm rambling. Basically this is one of the best pop sci books I've ever read, putting the whole genre to shame, go read it before it goes too far out of date to be interesting.

This is the month that the internet becomes book form and then I read it? Except, in contrast to the other book-form internets that I've read this month, Soonish isn't based on a blog, but rather the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Which is one of those things that makes me feel a little less lonely: there are a nonzero number of people out there who, like me, eagerly wake up in the morning to read the newest math/D&D/physics/astronomy joke-based comic strip. I'm not alone in the universe.

Soonish is actually primarily by the wife of the SMBC guy, Dr. Weinersmith, who is a PhD in parasitology and her scholarly publication list certainly dwarfs her lay publications. In my opinion, the scholarly bent showed: it's easy to go off of the scifi deep end here, but Dr. Weinersmith both explained things clearly, but also evidently spent a lot of time interviewing the top scholars in the field and making sure she was accurately depicting the current state of each field as well as the promises that it might contain. Ultimately, because the book focuses on multiple future technologies in a fairly rapid fire way it was light reading, but I don't think overly simplified.

I always have pause to see my own field depicted in the lay literature: here in the form of CRISPR, synthetic DNA and precision medicine, but I found it mostly well done, with a couple of metaphors that didn't quite work out. If that's the barometer for the overall scientific rigor of the book, I would say it's in about the 95th percentile of pop science writing.

And the illustrations certainly helped! As a reader of SMBC, I found the comics absolutely consistent with the tone of the webcomic -- funny and a little dry.