Kelly and Zach Weinersmiths' A City on Mars was a pretty big nonfiction bestseller. And, as with many best sellers, that doesn't necessarily mean that lots of people read it all the way through. But having just finished it a couple of days ago, I hope that lots of people do, because this book sits in a very interesting and uncomfortable place:
The Weinersmiths are absolutely space-colonization enthusiasts, very much in favor of humanity expanding across the solar system. And they're huge nerds about it, who've spent years interviewing everybody who's working on space exploration, including a fair number of living astronauts.
And they don't think it can be done, not any time in the next century, more or less, because they're appalled, to the point of being amused, by just how much hand-wavium gets invoked. This is an entire book about all of the things we do not know enough about, and need a lot more time to find out, before we can put any kind of permanent settlement in zero-G, on the moon, or on Mars, let alone anywhere even harder.
Don't get them wrong, that they're space colonization enthusiasts is why, all the way through the book, once they've highlighted a deal-breaker they say that that's why we should be spending research money on answering those questions instead of spending 20 to 100 times as much on "let's just hope it's not a problem."
They're also not shy about how a lot of the anarcho-capitalists who are pouring money lobbying for the idea are doing so for reasons that are almost certain to ignite World War III as soon as they try to do it their way. Even if, as is highly likely, everybody in those first settlements will be dead in a matter of months even if they're left alone.
... a humanity advanced enough to save itself from asteroid impact is a humanity advanced enough to deflect an asteroid into itself. ... in a world of easy access to doomsday weapons, it takes only one society gone autocratically evil to create a nightmare scenario. If some aspects of space-settlement actively increase the likelihood of this outcome, the point becomes even more worrisome.
Space geeks often cite a quote by science fiction author Larry Niven: “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!” But ... giant asteroids are rare. Humans haven’t been around that long, while the dinosaurs had a good long run. “Given these possibilities, perhaps the reason the dinosaurs lasted for nearly two hundred million years is because they did not have a space program.”
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On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.
Bea Wolf is Zach Weinersmith and Boulet's ferociously amazingly great illustrated kids' graphic novel adaptation of the Old English epic poem, which inspired Tolkien, who helped bring it to popularity after it had languished in obscurity for centuries:
Boy is this a wildly improbable artifact. Weinersmith and Boulet set themselves the task of bringing Germanic heroic saga from more than a thousand years ago to modern children, while preserving the meter and the linguistic and literary tropes of the original. And they did it!
There are some changes, of course. Grendel – the boss monster that both Beowulf and Bea Wulf must defeat – is no longer obsessed with decapitating his foes and stealing their heads. In Bea Wulf, Grendel is a monstrously grown up and boring adult who watches cable news and flosses twice per day, and when he defeats the kids whose destruction he is bent upon, he does so by turning them into boring adults, too.
And Bea Wulf – and the kings that do battle with Grendel – are not interested in the gold and jewels that the kings of Beowulf hoard. In Bea Wulf, the treasure is toys, chocolate, soda, candy, food without fiber, television shows without redeeming educational content, water balloons, nerf swords and spears, and other stuff beloved of kids and hated by parents.
That substitution is key to transposing the thousand-year-old adult epic Beowulf for enjoyment by small children in the 21st century. After all, what makes Beowulf so epic is the sense that it is set in a time in which a primal valor still reigned, but it is narrated for an audience that has been tamed and domesticated. Beowulf makes you long for a never-was time of fierce and unwavering bravery. Bea Wulf beautifully conjures the years of early childhood when you and the kids in your group had your own little sealed-off world, which grownups could barely perceive and never understand.
Growing up, after all, is a process of repeating things that are brave the first time you do them, over and over again, until they become banal. That's what "coming of age" really boils down to: the slow and relentless transformation of the mythic, the epic, and the unknowable and unknown into the tame, the explained, the mastered. When you're just mastering balance and coordination, the playground climber is a challenge out of legend. A couple years later, it's just something you climb.
The correspondences between the leeching away of magic lamented in Beowulf and experienced by all of us as we grow out of childhood are obvious in hindsight and surprising and beautiful and bittersweet when you encounter them in Bea Wolf.
This effect owes a large debt to Boulet's stupendous artwork. Boulet brings a vibe rarely seen in American kids' illustration, owing quite a lot to France's bande dessinée tradition. Of course, this is a Firstsecond book, and they established themselves as an exciting and fresh kids' publisher in the USA nearly 20 years ago by bringing some of Europe's finest comics to an American audience for the first time. You can get a sense of Boulet's darker-than-average, unabashedly anarchic illustrations here:
The utter brilliance of Bea Wulf is as much due to the things it preserves from the original epic as it is to the updates and changes. Weinersmith has kept the Old English tradition of alliteration, right from the earliest passages, with celebrations of heroes like "Tanya, treat-taker, terror of Halloween, her costume-cache vast, sieging kin and neighbor, draining full candy-bins, fearing not the fate of her teeth. Ten thousand treats she took. That was a fine Tuesday."
Weinersmith also preserves the kennings – the elaborate figurative compound phrases that replace nouns – that turn ordinary names and places into epithets at you have to riddle out, like calling a river "the sliding sea."
These literary devices, rarely seen today, are extremely powerful, and they conjure up the force and mystique that has kept Beowulf in our current literary discourse for more than a millennium. They also make this a super fun book to read aloud.
When Jim Henson was first conceiving of Sesame Street, he made a point of designing it to have jokes and riffs that would appeal to adults, even if some of the nuance would be lost on kids. He did this because he wanted to make art that adults and kids could enjoy together, both because that would give adults a chance to help kids actively explore the ideas on-screen, but also because it would bring some magic into those adults' lives.
This is a very winning combination (not for nothing, it's also the original design brief for Disneyland). Weinersmith and Boulet have produced a first-rate work of adult and kid literature, both a perfect entree to Beowulf for anyone contemplating a dive into old English epic poetry, and a kids' book full of booger jokes and transgressive scenes of perfect mischief.
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So I've been reading through A City on Mars(it's engaging, well-written, and Funny. If you have any interest at all in space exploration and settlement, I thoroughly recommend checking it out) and, beyond everything else, I just want to say how Fucking Gross space-travel is. Just absolutely Disgusting. My God: why would anybody do this? Why would ANYBODY want to Put Themselves through this?? Zeus above it's So Vile. Don't worry, I'm not going to share the details here, you can read the book yourselves if you want to know but, Sincerely, Yuck :| Yuck Yuck Yuck :| :| I'll wait until we've mastered the Amenities, thank you very much X| X| X|
