Soonish

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

★★★★★

Soonish (2017) is a good overview of cutting-edge technologies, most of which are still in the near future, some of which have made dramatic progress in the last few years.

It took me several years to get around to actually reading it, which maybe wasn’t the best approach for something about the near future. So it’s been interesting to look at the chapters on space colonization, asteroid mining, robot swarms, fusion and so on where things are either still just as far away or have otherwise turned out to be more complicated (as the Weinersmiths discovered when rearching their follow-up, A City on Mars)…

…and then there’s the chapter on augmented reality (AR), which they had to revise hastily just before print to account for the arrival of Pokémon Go in mid-2016…

…and the chapter on this cool new genetic modification technique called CRISPR…which has continued making headlines, with treatments for things like sickle cell disease approved and put into practice!

Some things have been moving faster than others.

Full of the authors’ trademark irreverent humor, with cartoons scattered throughout, it’s still worth reading even if it’s a bit late!