Quick Take
- Narration: Kelly Weinersmith and Joseph May share narration duties, and the combination gives the book an appropriate energy. May handles the more technical passages with clarity, while Kelly brings a personal warmth to the material she and her husband clearly love.
- Themes: near-future technology, scientific optimism and its complications, humor as a vehicle for genuine learning
- Mood: Playful and genuinely curious, like spending an afternoon with two very enthusiastic scientists who keep making you laugh
- Verdict: A smart and funny survey of transformative technologies that is more intellectually serious than its light tone suggests.
I came to Soonish skeptical. The humor-forward popular science format is one I have seen executed badly more often than well: the jokes undercut the substance, or the substance is thin enough that the jokes are all that remain. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, she a parasitologist and he the creator of the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic, turned out to be exactly the right people to upend that expectation. I was thirty minutes in, somewhere in the middle of the chapter on space launch systems, when I caught myself laughing out loud at a description of rocket engineering and then immediately paying closer attention to the actual technical argument. That combination is the book’s central achievement, and it is harder to pull off than it looks.
The premise is simple: the Weinersmiths identify ten technologies that are genuinely close to transformative deployment and ask three questions about each. Why is this technology needed? How would it work? What is stopping it? The technologies covered range from cheap space access and precision medicine to programmable matter, robotic construction, and augmented reality. Zach’s comics are referenced throughout the narration, and though you cannot see them in audio format, Kelly’s narration makes clear when they are doing work in the text. There is a companion PDF referenced in at least one edition, but the audiobook is complete without it.
What the Book Gets Right About Technological Progress
The Weinersmiths are not cheerleaders. Each chapter on a given technology includes an honest accounting of the obstacles, which range from the purely technical to the regulatory, the economic, and occasionally the social and political. The nuclear fusion chapter, for instance, is simultaneously enthusiastic about the physics and clear-eyed about the decades of engineering problems and funding challenges that have kept practical fusion power perpetually a generation away. This refusal to simply celebrate is what separates Soonish from conventional technology writing, and it is the quality that makes the book hold up against the passage of time.
One reviewer described it as funny and intriguing and somewhat dated, which is a fair summary of where the book stands several years after publication. Some of the technologies discussed have moved faster than the Weinersmiths expected, some more slowly, and a few have encountered the specific obstacles the book identified. That relationship between the book’s predictions and the subsequent record is itself instructive: the chapters age at different rates, and the variation tells you something about how technological progress works in practice versus in theory.
Kelly Weinersmith and the Question of Self-Narration
Having one of the book’s authors narrate it is almost always a double-edged decision. Kelly Weinersmith is clearly familiar with the material, and her delivery of the passages about her own research specialty, parasitology makes a brief but memorable appearance in the biological and medical chapters, has an authority that a hired narrator could not replicate. Joseph May handles the more technically dense passages with appropriate clarity. The combination works better than a single narrator of either type would have managed: May provides the professional pacing, Kelly provides the personal investment.
The 4.5 rating across nearly 1,000 listeners is consistent with a book that has an unusually broad appeal for popular science: the humor makes it accessible to readers who might otherwise find technology writing intimidating, while the actual technical depth satisfies readers who know something about the fields being discussed. A reviewer who said they were flabbergasted by how much information they were absorbing while being entertained captured the design principle accurately.
What the End of the Book Quietly Argues
The most interesting passage in Soonish is not in any of the individual technology chapters but at the end, where the Weinersmiths note that the people working on these technologies are largely anonymous academic researchers driven by curiosity rather than profit motive. The point is made without moralizing, but it lands: the transformative technologies the book describes are not primarily the product of corporate investment or celebrity entrepreneurship but of people who found a problem interesting enough to spend their careers on. That observation feels more necessary now than it did when the book was published, in an environment where the public narrative about technological innovation has become almost entirely absorbed by the question of who is getting rich from it.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen to this if you want a genuinely smart and entertaining survey of near-future technologies, or if you enjoy science writing that trusts the reader to handle both humor and real information at the same time. It is a particularly good listen for anyone who wants to understand the obstacles to technological progress rather than just the promise. Skip it if you want depth on any single technology rather than breadth across ten, or if the humor-in-science format is not to your taste.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does the audiobook of Soonish work without the Zach Weinersmith comics that appear in the print edition?
Yes, the audiobook is self-contained. Kelly’s narration contextualizes the comics when they appear in the text, and the substantive argument of each chapter does not depend on seeing the visual material. That said, listeners who enjoy the audiobook will likely find the print or ebook edition worth a look for the comics alone.
How well does the book hold up given that some of the technologies it covers have developed significantly since publication?
Reasonably well. The chapters that have aged best are those focused on persistent structural obstacles, regulatory barriers and funding challenges especially, rather than purely technical ones. The chapters on technologies that moved faster than expected, such as some areas of precision medicine, read as optimistic history. The overall framework for thinking about technological obstacles remains sharp throughout.
Is the split narration between Kelly Weinersmith and Joseph May consistent throughout, or does one narrator handle specific chapters?
The split appears to be consistent rather than chapter-specific, with both narrators contributing across the book. The combination creates a conversational quality that suits the co-authored nature of the text. Listeners sensitive to narrator transitions should note this before starting.
Which of the ten technologies covered in Soonish are the most developed and accessible as entry points for listeners new to the subjects?
The chapters on cheap access to space, programmable matter, and precision medicine are the most accessible entry points because they involve concepts that are already in public discussion. The chapters on nuclear fusion and robotic construction involve more background assumptions but are presented clearly enough to follow without prior knowledge. The augmented reality chapter has aged the most noticeably given subsequent developments.
