A City on Mars is illustrated by Zach Weinersmith, a cartoonist. His wife Kelly did most of the text, I think - but its moral sensibilities are still cartoonish.
Over the last fortnight I've been looking for additional reviews. Jeff Foust was one; but more serious is Peter Hague, who's not done yet. Hague calls out this book for using left-wing sources like Dark Skies overmuch. Hague is right.
"White flight" makes an appearance (admittedly in quotation). When Black people in Darfur flee partisan militia of an invasive ancestry, they are refugees. When White people do that in southwestern Michigan, they're racists.
And this blog must issue a health-advisory, especially for minors. Do not - at any cost - make a drinking-game out of the land-acknowledgements of North America, nor of the mentions of global-warming. For the former redditism: I have not yet read Fynn-Paul's Not Stolen, but do feel free to.
If your wine bar will even allow such contrary links. Aim to find a shop (somewhere somehow) as lacks the rainbow-flag and/or anti-"racism" posturing. (For my part, I stay out of Seattle's Best where possible.) For this review's purpose, I must request this of my readers on principle; your coffee site will certainly allow Weinersmith work.
As to the Gretaïsme, many excesses could have been stymied had the Weinersmiths simply refused to speak of "climate deniers" in the same paragraph as ex-cosmonaut Putin-propagandistes. The authors could even have stated up front that they, personally, believe in The SCIENCE Which Is Settled. Their book prefers to moot climate-change in its worse cases, scenarios shared - we must note - also by several libertarian-leaning advocates, such as Elon Musk. A worst case suffices for the Weinersmith's argument; the book needed to leave it as argument.
Weinersmiths are Concerned Scientists who don't say much about nuclear power on Earth, nor (more relevant here) beamed-solar. They want us to eat ze bugs. Yes, we need rules on Earth. But do we really need as many agencies as we have, to sandbag enterprise, often just because they don't like what Elon poasts on Twitter? Is China going to nuke us because of a rocket that doesn't go near China?
So now we must discuss the book's take on spacemadness (which I guess a Moon station might actually call "lunacy"). For the ISS, Serena Auñón-Chancellor is unmentioned. I find difficult to believe that the Weinersmiths missed this - in fact, here is another anecdote which would have served the book's overall Decel cause. The story is perhaps mediated by their lawyers. [UPDATE 1/22/24: Wang's padlock...] But if SAC didn't sabotage the station, the story then moves to false accusations on-deck. LEO can handle the drama; maybe a Moon station can handle it. Can a Mars mission?
I have found that the Weinersmiths' little lapses tend to point in one direction, and rarely point in the other. Those lapses fall in the Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson direction. Disappointing, I posit.
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