comedy – Grey Patterson

Daniel Hardcastle

This… is one of the greatest books I have ever read. I’ll tackle the easy thing first: the comedy is sublime. Not surprising, given that Hardcastle is one of my favorite YouTubers, and has been for checks notes over a decade. He’s got this ‘entertaining people’ thing down.

Next easiest to tackle: the cast and setting. The cast is delightful, a wonderfully diverse mix of species, and watching them all interact is an absolute delight. Everyone is likable, everyone has a fascinating backstory, every last one of them I want more of. And the setting is absolutely gorgeous; it has that Douglas Adams feel of some of the details being played purely for comedy, but every last one of them still works. Like, towards the end, there’s a throwaway line about banana peels having been re-engineered to be edible centuries ago, and it’s meant as a joke about the fact that they still taste like the wrong kind of banana the same way all fake banana stuff does, but that works. Centuries of scientific progress, and of course we’d have some little detail like that that we’d hang on to for the sake of nostalgia rather than sense. The future won’t be shiny and perfect, but it will be shiny, and full of interesting decisions that people have made because they’re still people.

And now, the hardest bit to talk about, particularly without spoiling anything: the time travel. It’s named “The Paradox Paradox,” of course it’s about time travel. But this is, I think, the best-thought-out system of time travel I’ve ever seen. I’m not entirely certain that I’m grasping the whole of it, but it all works. And the way the book is put together makes it work even better – the chapter numbers are chronological, the chapters themselves are not. Because it’s a book about time travel, of course the sequence of events doesn’t follow the calendar! But, beyond that, the chapter numbers don’t match the table of contents. I was reading this on an e-reader, one that shows the chapter title up at the top of each page, and those don’t always align with the actual title card at the beginning of the chapter. You can’t trust the chapter numbers, but they are deeply meaningful. They just might be lying to you. And it is sublime.

I finished this book feeling a sense of awed delight. This is a masterwork, this is one of the greatest things I have ever read. I cannot recommend it highly enough; please read it.¹

This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩

Randall Munroe

One of the tropes of the internet that I really enjoy is the concept of “relevant xkcd”. As it turns out, when you spend nearly two decades publishing three comics a week, you wind up covering a staggering variety of topics, to the point that pretty much any topic will have a relevant xkcd to link to. And, in thinking about that, I’m amazed all over again at Randall Munroe’s work; there is so much xkcd. Thousands of comics… and they aren’t always stick figure things, a few times a year it’ll some sort of complex piece of software, or a gigantic world to explore, or some other exploration of what a “webcomic” really is in light of the technology of the web.

Anyhow, that’s all a digression, because in the spare time he’s apparently got from all of the above, he’s also had time to write a couple books, and all the ones I’ve read are delightful. A couple years later, I’m back to report on the sequel of the last one I reviewed, and it’s… exactly what the title implies. More “absurd hypothetical questions,” answered with a great deal of research. “Can a person eat a whole cloud?” Well, that depends — are you squeezing the air out first? If so, you can! If not, definitely no, and you may actually wind up dehydrated amidst a larger cloud than you started with.

It’s all things like that, and it really shows that Munroe is, in his way, a very effective science communicator. This feels like a great book to give to a curious kid to encourage that curiosity, and get them to ask some really interesting questions in class.¹ It’s a delight, and, in the truest sense, fun for all ages. I absolutely loved this book; give it a read.²

And, based on the notes in some of the questions submitted, a great many of those will quickly be directed back to Munroe, for a continuation of the series. ↩
This is a Bookshop affiliate link – if you buy it from here, I get a little bit of commission. It won’t hurt my feelings if you buy it elsewhere; honestly, I’d rather you check it out from your local library, or go to a local book store. I use Bookshop affiliate links instead of Amazon because they distribute a significant chunk of their profits to small, local book stores. ↩