allanderek reviewed A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith
A lot of legal issues for space
4 stars
This is, obviously, a good book, a fun read, and informative. The main take-away is that space is cool and all, and obviously at some point if we want the human race to continue indefinitely then we probably need to be a space-faring species, but, well, it's harder than it looks in the movies. There are complications.
I found the book a little lacking in the technical, for example, the picture on the cover depicts a city on Mars, underground, but at no point is this really described. There is some suggestion as to why it would be underground, mostly radiation, but I was expecting a bunch of facts about what would be needed, for example waste-removal/recycling?
The book's third part is then an exploration of legal issues. This is interesting, but I found it a little unconvincing, whereas the earlier more technical parts are very convincing, such as the …
This is, obviously, a good book, a fun read, and informative. The main take-away is that space is cool and all, and obviously at some point if we want the human race to continue indefinitely then we probably need to be a space-faring species, but, well, it's harder than it looks in the movies. There are complications.
I found the book a little lacking in the technical, for example, the picture on the cover depicts a city on Mars, underground, but at no point is this really described. There is some suggestion as to why it would be underground, mostly radiation, but I was expecting a bunch of facts about what would be needed, for example waste-removal/recycling?
The book's third part is then an exploration of legal issues. This is interesting, but I found it a little unconvincing, whereas the earlier more technical parts are very convincing, such as the discussion of exploiting lunar resources such as Helium-3, the legal parts just seem like less of an insurmountable barrier. Discussion of similar situations on earth, such as the high-seas and Antarctica are interesting.
I would have liked a bit more of a delve into the history of company towns. For example it's mentioned that in one such company town, the antogonism between the company and the workers' union was so bad it involved "bombs being dropped", but we're never quite told the story of how/why/when this happened. So it's hard to relate the relevance of this to anything, let alone to space exploration.
Overall a great book, which was quite the book I wanted.