If you’re a fan of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (SMBC) webcomic, you’ll definitely enjoy this and don’t really need to read this review. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith strike the perfect balance of humor and science, creating an entertaining blend that hits the sweet spot for lifelong nerds (hello!) who love learning for the sake of it.
There’s a type of reader who thrives on the intersection of humor and knowledge—the kind of person who wants to learn everything but laments the fact there’s no job that pays you to just…do that?? If that’s you, this book taps into that feeling perfectly, offering an enjoyable and accessible deep dive into a topic that leaves you feeling like you Learnt Something and are Becoming Smarter. Maybe even you’d be able to move into Mars colonization as a career path?? (no, you likely can’t)
That being said, there’s a lot of information packed in here. While I loved the ride, I often found it challenging to keep everything straight as I was reading. It’s the kind of book that might benefit from a conversation while you’re working through it—explaining the concepts to someone else or discussing it with a friend would probably help solidify things. I almost wonder if that’s what the Weinersmiths were doing as they wrote it…
It also makes me curious about revisiting this book in a few decades. I’d love to see how much of it pans out in the future. It’s also interesting to think about this book as it sits within the current thinking re: space exploration. It’s annoying that so much of “we’ve got to colonize Mars!” is run by the worst of our current age of Gilded Age Barons, and it’s also utterly true that “escape to Mars to fix this planet” is an untenable situation (I cannot remember right now, but there’s an excellent passage in another book which talks about how there is no option B, we must fix this planet we have right here). Back in the day I worked on the
Perseverance rover, and so much of what we did was just making sure that everything was as airtight and invulnerable as possible. No way to fix things when you’re so far away–no offense to Andy Weir, but a trip to Mars is always going to be a bit of a one way trip.