Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars ****

A City on Mars is an entertaining overview of the many ways in which we humans are not ready to settle space. Its subtitle is, "Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?"

With its focus on space settlement rather than space exploration, the book addresses questions about living somewhere other than Earth more than about getting there. For example, our knowledge about the physical effects of living in lower-gravity environments comes from short-term excursions into space by carefully screened astronauts at the peak of health. Would a human child born on Mars develop properly? We have never built a self-contained sustainable ecosystem on Earth much less in the hostile environments of the Moon or Mars. Do you know much much stuff and how many specialists we'd have to deliver there just to get started? Think about all of the infrastructure required to keep an Earth city running!

The Weinersmith's writing is snarky but enthusiastic, similar to the narrative voice of Mark Watney in The Martian. (Appropriately, they have an endorsement from Andy Weir on the cover: "Scientific, educational, and fun as hell.") The style changes a bit in the second half of the book, when they begin to cover the social, legal, and geopolitical ramifications of space cities. These topics are less cool and more controversial, and the tone of the writing is less overtly comic. I found these sections to be the most thought-provoking.

The key takeaway from A City on Mars is that we are a long way from being able to settle space, but need to start thinking through the issues realistically. Evangelists for space settlement are typically aspirational; in particular, they usually imagine a united harmonious human race that has transcended its truculent nature. The Weinersmiths politely suggest that we shouldn't count on it.

Georgi Gospodinov, Time Shelter *** 1/2

I love the premise of Time Shelter: A therapist creates a clinic that treats Alzheimer’s patients by recreating the past decade in which they feel most secure, and the idea of living in the past becomes increasingly popular for everyone. I appreciate how the plot makes literal the idea that we escape from the anxieties of the present through nostalgia for the past.

The first section of the book tells the stories of several patients to illustrate the importance of memory to our self-consciousness. For example, a man with dementia forms a strong bond with the secret policeman who monitored his activities in the Soviet era. Gospodinov emphasizes how scents and mundane details are most evocative of the past.

In the middle portion of the book, the countries of the European Union hold a referendum on which decade of the past they will return to. Various factions campaign for their favorite decades, using tactics that are familiar from political campaigning of all sorts. (The parties in any election are asking voters to decide based on their idealized version of the past.) In the end, nearly every country votes for the 1980s, not coincidentally the decade during which most voters were young.

I was disappointed that the final section didn't address the post-referendum world. The narrator briefly notes that people balk at giving up their smartphones and the complications of different countries being in different times, but the bulk of the conclusion deals with the narrator starting to lose his own memory.

Time Shelter has thought-provoking ideas about the links between the past and the present, but they felt like isolated insights that didn't develop over the course of the narrative.

Susan Casey, The Underworld ***

Susan Casey writes books about the ocean that combine science and adventure, with a pronounced tilt toward the latter. The Underworld deals with deep-sea exploration, rich men with impressive resumes who build submersibles and visit trenches seven miles below the surface of the waves.

Her books remind me of articles in Outside magazine*. The protagonists are scientific explorers, yes, but more importantly they are extreme sports enthusiasts mounting dangerous expeditions. Early on, as Casey is interviewing Terry Kirby, operations director for the Hawaii Undersea Research Lab and raconteur, she notes: 

Even his offhand comments had stories trailing behind them like party streamers. He'd throw out a phrase like "After we left Eel City..." and I'd cut in with "Wait a minute, what is Eel City?"

I have this same experience with Casey, but can't cut in with my questions. For example, just a few pages earlier, she describes a Pacific sleeper shark as having "an oddly gentle vibe, a body as brindled as old granite, and blind-white eyes thanks to a parasite that eats its corneas." Wait, what? A parasite that eats shark corneas? 

She regularly describes fascinating scientific phenomena –– say, the discovery of massive white pinnacles whose "chemistry made it a front-runner in the search for life's origins" or the nocturnal migration of a quadrillion creatures to shallower waters for feeding–– but quickly moves back to expedition logistics or the subjective feelings of the submersible pilot. 

It seemed to me that an experience so existentially big and phantasmagorically cool would change a person forever. ... I wondered what prompted Vescovo to put so much on the line... "Basically, it's the adventure."

I had a similar complaint about Casey's earlier book The Wave: the books whet my appetite for scientific insight while valorizing intrepid thrill-seekers.

The Underworld was published before the Titan submersible implosion. Casey wrote an article about Titan for Vanity Fair that may well become the afterward for the paperback edition.

* Look what I found in the acknowledgments! "It's been a pleasure to write for Outside magazine over the years."