Zach Weinersmith is the writer behind the delightful Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic, and with his wife wrote and researched this book on emerging technologies. If you’re a fan of the comic, you’ll enjoy this book, if you’re unfamiliar with it … fix it: http://www.smbc-comics.com. It’s pretty much the only comic I go out of my way to read daily.
The authors do a spectacular job making the cutting edge of science – by their very nature as developing fields difficult to explain and understand – relatable and human. Most of the time when I take a while to read a book it’s a bad sign, but here it was just so information dense that I wanted to make sure I was following completely.
Which is not to say dry. The authors pepper the book with jokes both textual and visual – a Dr. Elvis gets the cartoon treatment based on their inability to resist an obvious joke, and the use of increasingly absurd metaphors makes it very easy to imagine the concepts being explained. I don’t think I will ever think of fusion the same way again thanks to the image of two socially awkward nerds clotheslining an unattached one.
Anyway, the book was educational and delightful, buy one for yourself and another for your nerdy friend for Christmas.
