This is a RELENTLESSLY humorous round up of technological developments that authors Kelly & Zach Weinersmith believe are just around the corner (as of 2017). Kind of like Flash Forward but with the ratio of comics to textual discussions reversed. Or like a Mary Roach book, but with more technical explanations & dorkier humor. Or maybe like Zach Weinersmith’s SMBC-Comics if the ratio of comics to pop-up text was reversed.
I found the space chapters most interesting, but I wish there had been a bit more treatment of obstacles to & arguments against space exploration in the future. The “whys” of space colonization & crewed space flight are treated as givens, for instance.
The programmable matter chapter was interesting, despite programmable matter being an area technology I don’t have much interest in. I liked the descriptions in that chapter of the studies finding that humans trust robots, though I feel like those demonstrate the success of pro-robot propaganda in pop culture more than anything about human nature.
I enjoyed the conclusion chapter which rounded up all of the chapters the authors had to leave out of the book. Towards the end, the Weinersmiths say “We hope that, unlike so many books, we have not tried to sell you on a philosophy of futurology, or on a vision of the future.” But by treating our current capitalist economic system as the natural or neutral state, they are still presenting a vision of the future, albeit one in which all the future technological developments will be controlled by capital.
Overall I liked Soonish. I recommend it to anyone who likes SMBC-Comics & hard sci-fi.