I picked this one up as research for some pessimistic scifi, but was excited to see the creator behind SMBC anyway.
It delivers on its premise; it will convince you that we are not within striking distance of sustainable off-world human life. But Kelly’s Endurance already told me that. City is lean despite its size. Regular asides on Space Cannibalism and cartoons are fun but they are taking up space that the Weinersmiths could have spent better fleshing out their ideas. And to be fair to the Cartoonist author, who’s comics have always relied much more on dialogue than visuals to convey their humor, but the illustrations don’t really feel necessary. The last couple of chapters read like surveys rather than fully formed persuasive arguments.
It starts out strong though, and perhaps because it’s also written by a Biologist, it does a great job laying out the known and unknown issues with keeping humans alive for extended periods in the harrowing conditions of space and other-than-Earth planets. Oft-neglected points like the need to essentially create a fully functional biosphere, something we struggle to do even on Earth, are given lots of attention in those early chapters. They clearly relished the chance to describe just how horrible moon dust would be for equipment and astronauts. There’s also an extended discussion of the unknowns surrounding human development in space from conception on; we’ve traditionally only sent adults but an off-world colony couldn’t sustain itself indefinitely without kids.
They’re less confident talking about social factors. They spend an inordinate amount of time explain how we probably won’t get Space Madness, but that we would require infrastructure for dealing with behavioral issues. When they get to the real meat of the sociological issues–that creating off-world colonies means creating societies that might out of necessity make peace with inhuman conditions and in the process lose some of what makes them human, and that such societies could become a threat to Earth–they barely touch it. It’s not as if Expanse (its authors give a back cover quote) didn’t already turn everyone on to a version of this, but I would have liked a more in-depth treatment. It feels like a pulled punch.
Perhaps they chose not to dwell on colony cultures going sour because they figure colonies will be so dependent on Earth that any sort of rebellion is impossible, which is reasonable. But rebellion isn’t the only threat. Ruminating on and accepting the sorts of inhuman tradeoffs “necessary” for a sustainable society off-world could be used to shift the Overton Window in the here-and-now. I don’t think the authors wanted to present space fantasists as horrifying ideologues, but this was of course published before the most famous Mars advocate on our planet gave a salute that would have made even the Militaristic Martians from Expanse blush. In that light I think we do need to ask those questions, and I wish they’d been a bit harsher and less apologetic about spoiling everyone’s fun.
That is not to say I didn’t like it or that it wasn’t good. Their overall premise that you need to send a whole civilization was convincing. I just wish it had allocated its resources a little differently.