The Moon bounces and drifts languidly over its topic, Earth's nearest neighbor and how it's been conceptualized and made concrete.

As a world just out of reach, but easily visible even with the naked eye, the Moon has proven important to theories of Copernican astronomy and geological understanding of the world. The book doesn't really get moving until Morton describes 'the Orphans of Apollo', his own generation who were promised a new world, and left instead with scattered bootprints and a few thousand kg of moon rocks. In the 50 years since Apollo, no human has gone beyond Low Earth Orbit. The big science agencies turned their attention to Mars, Jupiter, and the stars.

This may all be changing, of course, with SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the revolution in launch costs. Oliver's discussion of the contemporary landscape of space exploration is not systematic enough to call a survey, but lays out the major economic reasons to exploit the Moon's resources, and why He3 and ice mining might be bad ideas, unless using the Moon's resources is axiomatic.

Discussion of speculative literature, starting with early modern Utopians and closing with a wonderful critical essay on Heinelin's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in light of the Anthropocene are the true heart of the book. Morton is a scifi nerd par excelance, and you think fans are slans, that essay is worth the price of admission. And you don't, you'll probably enjoy hearing what Morton thinks of Elon Musk.