For the month of February we will be reading Soonish, a brilliant, funny, accessible, and thought-provoking tour through “ten emerging technologies that’ll improve and/or ruin everything“, written and illustrated by Kelly and Zack Weinersmith. In this blog post I’ll lay out the plan.
The way our book club readings work: I pick a weekly schedule, usually involving certain chapters or pages to be finished by a given Monday. I post here about that chunk, typically by summarizing the text, offering some reflections, then adding discussion questions.
People respond in a variety of ways. Some add comments to a blog post. Others post on their own blogs. Still others take to Twitter, Google+, or Facebook, sometimes in response to my updated on those platforms. Sometimes people will create other responses, ranging from gadget development (!) to Google Docs. I try to wrangle as much of those responses as possible in the next blog post.
All posts, including this one, will live under the single tag https://bryanalexander.org/tag/soonish/. That way you can check out previous posts and discussion for reference, and also if you come late to the schedule.
If you would like to see examples of the book club in action, head to the book club home page and check some of the past readings. Perhaps the most spectacular example is the We Make the Road By Walking reading.
Here’s our schedule. We start discussion in about ten days, giving everyone time to obtain a copy and start the first section. It’s about 70-80 pages per week, which you’ll find quite manageable.
February 5, 2018: 1 (Introduction), 2 (Cheap Access to Space), 3 (Asteroid Mining)
February 12: 4 (Fusion Power), 5 (Programmable Matter), 6 (Robotic Construction)
February 19: 7 (Augmented Reality), 8 (Synthetic Biology), 9 (Precision Medicine)
February 26: 10 (Bioprinting), 11 (Brain-Computer Interfaces), 12 (Conclusion)
I’m going to reach out to the Weinersmiths to see if they’d like to join us via Twitter or a Future Trends Forum session.
Please join us. The book is terrific.
Love this idea. I’ve got myself a copy of the book and am going to join in as much as my schedule allows (last year of PhD, writing crazily, under the pump :-))
Excellent.
It’s a fun read.