This book was fun, but obsolete about five minutes after it was published. ( )

This is a fun book that describes several near future fields of research in an accessible, funny way. Each subject has the feel of mad science (from space projects to brain surgery), but people are actually working on them, and the current state of the art, near future implications, and potential risks are described. Also there are cartoony illustrations! ( )

A fun American book from 2017, with coloured cartoons, concerning many facts about: Burj Khalife the tallest building in the world at half a mile high, OSIRIS-REx (asteroid sampler return mission), National Ignition Facility, the difference between fusion (good for humans) and fission, Project Plowshare - the peaceful purposes for atomic bombs in 1961, Walt Disney's film Our Friend the Atom (in which Tinkerbell makes the atom symbol with her wand), Ford releasing a concept car design for a future nuclear vehicle called The Nucleon, early environmental protests, Professor Skylar Tibbits' programmable straw changing shape when added to water, MIT, Ernst Neufert's Hausbaumaschine - semi-automatic machines he invented to build ten houses a week using mass production on rails, and human nostrils alternate activity.
I couldn't quite understand what age-group this book was aimed at as sometimes it referred to school, and other times it talked about going to work. Also it had Americanisms such as the Dunkin donut "sawdust and tears", the crisper drawer in fridges, kibble. Nonetheless, an interesting and entertaining read. ( )

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. ( )

This was great and makes me want to follow them on twitter. Would highly recommend ( )