Name: Soonish
ISBN: 9780399563829

Zach Weinersmith

Kelly Weinersmith

Presents an illustrated investigation into the technologies of the near future, from deep-space travel to 3D organ printing, to offer insight into how they will work and what is needed to advance their readiness.

Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything

Soonish

Gavin

Excellent, sceptical look at near-future tech, their enormous potential and risk. The technologies are: new ways of getting to space, asteroid mining, fusion power, programmable matter, robotic construction, brain-computer interfaces, synthetic biology, and bioprinting. They tend to be bearish about these technologies, because their default (i.e. unregulated) effects could be really dreadful. 

(Excepting robo-construction and organ printing because these are much less dangerous and dodgy than the existing hacks.) My favourite bit is the paean to Alvin Roth's organ-swap algorithm, which is a magnificent way of circumventing human squeamishness.

Lots of direct quotation from the unprepossessing scientists doing all this, <3. There are also lots of addenda of the following sort:

  
 The story of Gerald Bull goes like this. You have a brilliant engineer who's especially good at ballistics at an early age, who had a brilliant career early on where he got funding from Canada and the US to work on these ballistics programs. Then basically the funding dried up. So he kind of did whatever it took to be able to keep working in this area, which led him to do work in weapons dealing, including dealing with then apartheid South Africa. And things basically unraveled from there, resulting in his humiliation and depression and alcoholism.

 Then much later in life he began working for Saddam Hussein, building, for reasons that are not well understood, a giant gun. To be clear, it was probably not useful as a weapon. It was not going to be moveable, it was not pointing at an enemy city: it was pointing as the Earth turns, which is what you'd want to do if you were shooting into space. Then, shortly after that, in the early ‘90s he ended up in a Brussels hotel with a bullet in his head and $20,000 on his body, and nobody is sure who killed him. I believe his son suspected Mossad, but no one as far as I can find has come forward to say here's who did it. 



Suitable for all ages, knob jokes aside. (There's a segue joke at the end of every block, and they are uniformly a bit forced.) The illustrations actually don't add anything, even though I love SMBC.

Recep Karabicak

Einstein is said to have said “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” 
This book is the effort of two authors to explain 10 possible future technologies in a simple manner and i think they nailed it! The number of references at the end of the book shows the effort they put in research yet the text is a breeze to read. 

Each technology is explained in four parts:

(1) the science backing the technology and its history, 
(2) the current state, the achievements, the problems waiting to be solved
(3) some concerns about possible things that mat go wrong
(4) some brainstorming on what life will be like when the technology becomes mainstream

I have a few concerns though 

1- As expressed in other reviews depending on your level of enthusiasm on the topic there may be nothing new for you. This is a price paid for being simple

2- Considering the pace of development the content bears the risk of being outdated in a few years. 

3- I found the cartoons unnecesary and dull. They add nearly nothing to the material presented instead the authors could have used more visuals to support their explanations.

What will the world of tomorrow be like? How does progress happen? And why don't we have a lunar colony already? In this witty and entertaining book, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith give us a snapshot of the transformative technologies that are coming next - from robot swarms to nuclear fusion powered-toasters - and explain how they will change our world in astonishing ways. By weaving together their own research, interviews with pioneering scientists and Zach's trademark comics, the Weinersmiths investigate why these innovations are needed, how they would work, and what is standing in their way.

Luke Kanies

A useful and entertaining overview of a lot of interesting areas. It quickly and effectively answers the questions of what these areas are, why they matter (or don’t), and when/if they might start to affect us.

It’s approachable and entertaining enough that basically anyone can and should read it, and covers topics that are likely to affect literally everyone at some point.

Jeremy Cote

Note: I received an ARC from Netgalley.

I found the book quite good. I liked that it was short. Many books seem to feel like they have to be super long, when their message can actually be condensed into a more suitable length. I particularly liked the metaphors used in the book. I feel like Kelly and Zach Weinersmith is a very good science writer, and the humour that is contained in the comics is great as well. Overall, I highly recommend people to check out the book.

Bryan Alexander

A delightful and deeply researched look into the possible future of certain technologies, Soonish is a fine feast for the mind.

We read this for my online book club. Several posts have tons of material: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 (tk).

Soonish Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything

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