Category: Pop

Album Reviews 23/11/30

CrowJane, Bound To Me (Kitten Robot Records)
I’d thought it’d happened a lot more recently, but it turns out I haven’t heard from this Los Angeles kook lady since the release of her Mater Dolorosa EP in October 2020, which I described using RIYL comparisons like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten. In this new five-songer she’s aiming for Siouxsie Sioux’s brand of weirdness, or so it says on the thing in front of me, and that sort of ’80s-goth-pop epicness is prominent in the works here, helped out by some pretty sweeping orchestral layers and Blue Man Group-ish drum-thumping (I should probably also mention that it’s a really captivating, super-nice tune). Elsewhere we have “Ides Of March,” which is like Siousxsie in metal mode, just an outstanding wreck-stuff rockout that’s got a bit of KMGDM to it. I hadn’t detected such a high level of accessibility in her earlier EP, but this one is remarkably good, well worth checking out. A+ —Eric W. Saeger

Maddi Ryan, Growing Pains (self-released)
In this EP I’m hearing a cross between Amy Grant and [place random anti-diva like Lorde here] undergirding the voice of this Boston-area singer, who racked up Country Act of the Year nominations at count-’em-three New England Music Awards events. Enough Kellie Pickler/Taylor Swift wannabes have dropped CDs on this desk that I’ve forgotten what real disappointment feels like, but stop the presses, this five-song EP is proof that this particular cowboy-booted Insta princess knows her way around a studio, or at least whom to seat at the mixing booth’s least rickety chair, whichever the case. “Wilderness” opens things with some Swift-in-Jewel-mode crooning atop an acoustic guitar line, her soprano aiming for the angsty, hormone-bending vibe that usually leads to a boring chorus, but instead she stays on top of it, adding a truly pleasing vocal harmony, then some floaty dobro and similar layerings as it eventually morphs into Norah Jones-ish Americana. She’s a serious contender, I kid you not. A

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Friday, Dec. 1, is the next CD release day, ermagersh, where did the summer go, what are we even doing here, and now let’s riff on ancient legendary arena-rock band Genesis for a minute, because one of the new rock ’n’ roll CD releases you can buy this week is I/O, from original Genesis singing person Peter Gabriel, his first since, holy catfish, 2011! Like his Genesis-singing successor, Phil Collins, Gabriel is famous for writing dishwasher-safe AOR-pop for dentists’ offices and Dollar Tree stores, and he’s most famous for being the singing person in the song trenchcoat-wearing kickboxing-slacker John Cusack was playing on his boombox during the famous “why aren’t the cops grabbing that guy” scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. That alone elevated his cred far higher than that of Popeye-The-Sailor-lookalike Phil Collins, whose 1980s hits were horrible enough, but in order to ensure his ”Worst Song Of All Time” achievement award — and most Xers and Boomers have subconsciously erased all this from memory — Collins participated in a duet with really bad singer Philip Bailey on the song “Easy Lover” from Bailey’s 1984 LP Chinese Wall. The only ’80s rock music fail that came anywhere close to unseating that tune as the, you know, Worst Song Of All Time, was Eddie Murphy’s hilariously hubristic fish-out-of-artistic-water laughingstock, “Party All The Time,” which saw the first time a record company ever called an emergency Auto-Tune guy to come in and clean up Murphy’s transparently off-key vocal, and let’s not forget the video for Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonight,” in which he pranced around a bedroom like a preteen girl overdosing on Flintstones vitamins, a cringe-gasm so explosive that Squier’s career instantly tanked faster than the Lusitania. But yes, Gabriel has always been borderline listenable in my book, like, “Games Without Frontiers” was OK, mostly because I, like everybody else, thought it was either Psychedelic Furs or Echo And The Bunnymen, who even knew, you know? But anyway, whatever, “Turn It On Again” was a cool Genesis song, even though Peter Gabriel wasn’t there at the time, so here we go, let’s have a look at what’s on this new Peter Gabriel album, and wait a second, two remixed versions of the kickoff single song, “Panopticom,” have been released thus far: the “Bright Side Mix” (done by Mark “Spike” Stent), and the “Dark Side Mix” (mixed by Tchad Blake), both of which were released in January of this year. The Bright Side Mix is OK; the song is important-sounding in a first-world-problems sort of way, studious Gabriel nonsense that’s kind of a chore to listen to, same as always.

• Love Minus Zero is a new collaborative project between electro-revival producer Tiga and Scottish producer Hudson Mohawke, who was part of the “wonky” techno scene (think slo-mo dubstep with a lot of distorted, wobbly dance beats) until the end of the Aughts. L’Ecstasy is their forthcoming debut full-length, which spotlights “Love Minus Zero,” a track that’s a few years old, a really cool, hypnotic dance joint combining dubstep, trance and tribal, you’d probably like it.

• We Owe is the solo project of Swans’ Christopher Pravdica, whose new LP Major Inconvenience uses such things as autoharp and djembe to make off-kilter tunes like the new “Time Suck,” a woozy, discordant, Throbbing Lobster-ish experiment.

• Lastly we have yet another Bandcamp mess to decipher: When No Birds Sang, a joint-effort album between grindcore outfit Full Of Hell and heavy shoegaze dudes Nothing. “Spend The Grace” is a skronky, apocalyptic, blissed-out noise exercise, but other than that it’s probably fine for bouncy-house parties.

The Wake-up Call by Beth O’Leary

If I were a trendy person, I would call this book “mid”: just fine, mediocre, middle of the road. The Wake-up Call is fine for what it is — a predictable entry in the women’s fiction category.

Maybe I shouldn’t have read this right after finishing Remarkably Bright Creatures, which is thoughtful, intelligent and unique; this is a very different kind of book, meant to be light and fun. And it was fun, but it’s also forgettable, sharing the same tired plot as so many other rom coms before it. I personally am tired of plots that only exist because the two main characters keep misunderstanding each other and have an unbelievable inability to communicate.

The book alternates chapters between main characters Lucas and Izzy. They hate each other! But do they? The premise is that they work together, and the previous Christmas Izzy had written a card to Lucas telling him she was interested in him. But, big shocker here, he never got the card! And thus ensues a year of miscommunication that so easily could have been rectified if Izzy had just talked about why she was so damn upset.

The hotel that they work at is a great setting, and the supporting characters are far more interesting than Izzy and Lucas. There are mysterious guests, quirky guests and lonely guests. The rest of the staff is more compelling than the main characters too.

And then there is the ring subplot; the hotel is going under, so they’re trying to sell off unclaimed items that guests have left behind. There are, somehow, several diamond rings. So the staff sets out to find the people who belong to the rings, and Izzy and Lucas turn it into a competition of sorts, and it ultimately leads to some surprises that had the potential to make the book different from others in this category but were handled in what seemed like a slapdash way.

Ultimately, I wish O’Leary had put more effort into the stories and people behind the rings and less into Izzy and Lucas’s many, many frustrating experiences together — frustrating to them and frustrating to the reader who just wants to shake them and say “Just speak out loud what is in your head and everyone will feel better!” C+

The Good Part by Sophie Cousens

Meanwhile, I devoured The Good Part. Also in the women’s fiction genre but with a much fresher take on relationships and a more thoughtful reflection on life, it was a captivating read. Were there predictable parts and unbelievable moments? Of course. Is the general trope similar to Big and 13 Going on 30? Sure. (Cousens noted as much in her author’s note.) But The Good Part offers a new twist, and Cousens’ writing is engrossing, moving the story along at a quick and entirely enjoyable pace.

Lucy Young is in her mid 20s, unhappy with her job, her dating life and her living situation. An encounter with a wishing machine prompts Lucy to wish that she could skip to the good part of her life. When she wakes up, it is 16 years in the future. Her body has changed, she has a good-looking husband, a nice house and an important job, and she’s the mother of two.

The rub here is that her memories between the time she made the wish and the present are gone. She has no idea how she got to where she is in life, and she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t know how to do her job, manage new technology or parent her toddler daughter and 7-year-old son.

The dialogue between Lucy and her son Felix is hilarious. Felix knows right away that this isn’t his mom — this is an alien imposter. When she tells him what she thinks might have happened, he sets out to find the wishing machine that could transport her back to the time of life she left behind. The way their relationship develops over the span of the book is heartwarming and, more importantly, believable.

And of course Lucy also gets to know Sam, this stranger she apparently married and had children with. Sam handles her memory loss with the right combination of compassion and sadness. He reminds her of some of the things she’s been through in the past 16 years, and it’s not all good — which is seemingly why she skipped those parts. But it also means she missed out on some of the good stuff: meeting Sam, her wedding day, the births of her children. She’s left to wonder whether it was worth it.

The Good Part is the perfect combination of thought-provoking and funny, and the characters are loveable and real. It’s a stellar example of what women’s fiction has the potential to be. A

Album Reviews 23/11/23

Gale Forces, Highlights Of Existence (self-released)

Well, I don’t mind this at all. As often as I’ve been disappointed by the last few months’ worth of Los Angeles bands darkening my door, there’s a lot of cred here, starting with the roster, which includes ex-members of Engine Kid and This White Light, along with a guy who’s still in AWOLNATION. The raucous music that’s on this LP isn’t hard to describe; there’s a lot of Aughts-era stoner rock to it, buoyed by a “brown” sort of guitar sound that typifies Trail Of Dead, and frontman Jade Devitt’s voice (he collaborated with someone from (((Sunn O))), by the way) evokes U2’s Bono on Nick Cave juice; that is to say it’s energetic but not hopelessly commercially shrinkwrapped. The end result is a bunch of tunes that are too cool for sports-bar rock but still quite accessible; SST Records would have loved this stuff as a companion product to Redd Kross and bands like that. A

dreamTX, Living In Memory Of Something Sweet (self-released)

Dallas, Texas,-based multi-instrumentalist and producer Nick Das is looking into techno reinvention after spending a few years chasing Drag City Records cred the way his fellow Texans do. He hatted out for Woodstock, New York, to inhale the spiritual air, promptly finding himself roasting in July without air conditioning, so this collection obviously has some trippy life stories behind it. “Get Around” has a tribal bend to it, evoking sunburnt neo-hippies jumping and dancing crook-legged; it’s celebratory, yes, but it’s also pretty gothic in its way, and I definitely like the muzzled no-wave guitar sound. “Elated” aims for the same sort of emotional bliss; like a sort of shoegaze 2.0, it’s sexless but rave-y, with multi-tracked faraway chant-like vocals begging the listener just to let go and be elated over something, whatever it might be. I’m sure a lot of writers will file this under dream-pop for the convenience of it, but it’s more than that, a very listenable mystery-meat I found particularly blissful really. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 24 is the day after Thanksgiving, aka Black Friday, and wouldn’t you know it, as always, even though Black Friday is the holiest of shopping days, very few albums will be released, assumedly because all the bands and artists and record company Men In Black know that people won’t be buying albums, they’ll be trapped at the mall, in the Apple and T-Mobile stores, trying to buy just the right glorified Tamagotchi for their ungrateful little Jacobs and Marissas, waiting around for some store clerk (who knows even less stuff about smartphones than they do, if that’s even possible) to take pity on them and answer their technical questions, like “Where’s the ‘on’ button?” (By now I’ve probably given away the fact that I hate smartphones; being an OG software engineer I see them as nothing more than walkie-talkies that tell you the weather). But anyway, Friday is a day that ends in ‘y’ and that means incorrigible songwriting addict Robert Pollard has written enough sort-of-songs to release a new Guided by Voices album whether I want him to or not! When last we left Pollard, federal agents were unable to confiscate his recording equipment owing to an obscure constitutional clause called “artistic freedom,” and so, for what, the 10th time this year, I’m again tasked with peering through an electron microscope at his latest songwriting outburst, an LP titled Nowhere To Go But Up, in an effort to find something to like about it. When last we left this nonsense, it was July and our intrepid hero had just released Welshpool Frillies, which had a song that I said was OK, not that I can remember anything about it, so I’ll have to take my word for it. OK, aaaand I’m riffing, let’s listen to the new single, “For The Home,” there it is, on YouTube. It starts out with some unplugged Led Zeppelin III weirdness, which would have been fine if Pollard had simply left it at that and maybe yodeled over it, but no, here we go, he rips off Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in The Sky,” hoping that there are three people left on the planet who’ve never heard that song and they’re Guided By Voices fans. It’s cool enough but pointless.

• British indie band Spector enjoy making borderline pub-rock for sports bars, you know, that goop that sounds important and edgy even though it’s not, and suddenly you’re saying to the waitress, “Sure, I’ll try the extra-hot wings,” and then you regret it. Their bandleader, Fred Macpherson, is influenced by ’80s/90s swill like OMD, Spandau Ballet and Ultravox, but I’m going to listen to the new single “Driving Home for Halloween,” from their fast-approaching new album Here Come The Early Nights, nevertheless. Oh lol, this is so gross, the tune’s faux-punk AOR hook is something you want to get out of your head as soon as it catches hold, it’s like a gothy version of the worst Kaiser Chiefs song you’ve ever heard, and there’s no escaping it. Absolutely terrible.

• Take That is a British dance-pop band that’s won zillions of British music awards, meaning that no American has ever heard of them except for me, just now. This Life is their ninth studio album, and the title track is — aw, I can’t snark at this, it’s nice and dancey, a dumb piano-pop thing, sort of like Andy Grammer or Billy Joel, and at least the video doesn’t have a runway model in it pretending to be a normal person.

• We’ll end with all y’all putting on cowboy hats, because country dude Chris Stapleton releases his new one, Higher, this week! He’ll be at the Bank of NH Pavilion for three days next August, tickets are going fast, and in the torchy new single “I Think I’m In Love With You” he sounds like a cross between Bon Scott and Peabo Bryson! Yee-haw, you have to love it!

Build the Life You Want, by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey

Build the Life You Want, by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio/Penguin, 208 pages)

Trying to make sense of the career path of Arthur C. Brooks can make your head hurt. Brooks started out as a classical French hornist and for a while played for a Baltimore brass quintet before joining an orchestra in Barcelona. From there, he was a music teacher in Florida before deciding to study economics. A master’s degree and Ph.D. later, he became head of a conservative think-tank, then a Harvard professor, and he’s now written a book with Oprah Winfrey.

The only connective tissue in all of this is that Brooks, in his own life and professionally, is a master of the pursuit of happiness, which qualifies him to teach the subject at Harvard and to write about it for The Atlantic. It is through his column there that Oprah Winfrey attached herself to his train. Their collaboration, Build the Life You Want, is a compendium of Brooks’ research on happiness, presented O magazine style.

They begin with by recounting the last days of Brooks’ mother-in-law, who had a challenging life and was confined to a bed at age 93 yet insisted she was happier than she’d ever been. Brooks questioned her and learned that her happiness came in part from her sense of agency, and her cultivation of relationships, work and religious faith.

Happiness, Brooks and Winfrey contend, in the many sections of the book that teeter dangerously toward platitude, is not a destination but a direction.

“You can’t be happy — but you can be happier,” they write. This requires nurturing the three components of happier-ness: enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose, all of which require some degree of struggle. It is throwing off the idea of happiness being an achievable, sustainable state that allows us to be happier, to their way of thinking.

They delve into arguments that feel a little tired, such as the importance of not being led by emotions. They frame this within the concept of metacognition — “thinking about thinking” — viewing emotions as something to control, rather than letting them control you. To do this requires practice, Brooks and Winfrey write, offering four ways to develop the ability: becoming more observant of your feelings, writing about them in a journal, tapping into happy memories and looking for “meaning and learning in the hard parts of life.”

Their next recommendation, choosing better emotions, is a bit trickier, but they maintain this can be done. How? Practicing gratitude (more journaling required), finding ways to laugh, and choosing hope over optimism. The latter are not synonyms, they argue, saying “Hope involves personal agency, meaning it gives you a sense of power and motivation.” Like an earlier section, in which they insist that enjoyment and pleasure are different things, this assertion can send you down a rabbit hole of disagreement unrelated to their general point. Best not go there.

You can also get bogged down in their descriptions of how sympathy differs from empathy, which is different from compassion. But their point is that compassion combines empathy with a stoic tolerance of uncomfortable feelings associated with another person’s pain. “To be a more compassionate (and thus happier) person, start by working on your toughness. To be tougher in the face of another’s pain doesn’t mean feeling it less. Rather, you should learn to feel the pain without being impaired to act.”

Brooks and Winfrey challenge the common assumption that difficult times call for more “self-care.” Research has, in fact, shown that focusing on ourselves excessively does less to improve our sense of well-being than focusing on others. They offer suggestions for breaking this cycle, such as “avoid your own reflection” (this includes things like taking selfies and Googling yourself) and refraining from making constant judgments about the world.

Perhaps most helpful, particularly as we head into the holiday season, is their advice on family conflict. Families can be morass of unmet expectations and simmering resentments even when there aren’t larger problems like a “values breach,” which is the rejection of other family members’ deeply held beliefs. People often try to ignore conflicts like these, assuming they will age out of them, but in most cases these points of contention become more fixed over time. The authors recommend regular conversations to try to work out small conflicts before they become large, accepting others’ values, and they say, “don’t treat your family like emotional ATMs.” They also warn against “chronic negativity,” which requires a degree of emotional separation to overcome.

Finally, Brooks and Winfrey offer tips on categorizing friends as “real” or “deal” and cultivating friendships that contribute to happier-ness because they are “deeply real.” Meaningful work — “work that is love made visible” — and spirituality round out what is needed for happier-ness.

It is unclear how much of Build the Life You Want is Brooks and how much is Winfrey, although the scattered “A Note from Oprah” pages throughout the book suggest Winfrey mostly lent her name to the project. Some passages, the authors acknowledge, have already been published in The Atlantic. There’s nothing groundbreaking here for anyone familiar with the authors, but also nothing that isn’t worth a reminder. Then again, with such star power, it’s a bit disappointing that it doesn’t dazzle more than it does. B-

Album Reviews 23/11/16

Sick Boss, Businessless (Drip Audio Records)

Brandishing not just post-rock but indeed post-apocalyptic sound adventures a la That F-king Tank, the meanderings of this Vancouver, B.C., six-piece outfit are mostly loud and sinister, nicking from Jimi Hendrix, 1970s-spaghetti-crime flicks, Primus and really anything they can wrap their instruments around. Slotted into the fusion jazz category for reasons of convenience, this bunch is led by guitarist Cole Schmidt and includes trumpeter JP Carter (who’s collaborated with Destroyer), as well as a violin guy and a cellist; all six of them are terrific improvisers when they’re called upon to put in two cents toward realizing the noise-stomp-meets-Ennio Morricone ideas put forth. Par for the course for any outstanding group of this sort, static-noise jams give way to passages of beauty and vice versa; there are hard riffs, proto-emo chill-outs (“CJ Blues”) and other related-or-not things that complete a picture of a very interesting instrumental group that’ll be around a while with any modicum of luck. A+

Art Feynman, Be Good The Crazy Boys (Western Vinyl Records)

Art Feynman is an alter ego of producer Luke Temple, and it’s a lucky thing I even found that out when I skimmed the press release for this LP; anyone who reads this column knows that I’ve had a soft spot for the Salem, Mass., native since I first heard him years ago and likened him to another artist you’ve never heard of, one Winston Giles (I’m waiting for just one reader to finally get into Giles and express their eternal gratitude in sonnet form in my Facebook messages). This one was recorded live in the studio with a full band, a first for Temple; the record’s nervous but basically carefree feel recalls Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, which was a touchstone in the writing process. The tunes are meant to touch on “the part of the modern collective consciousness that’s struggling to maintain balance in a toxic, chaotic world,” but it’s a lot lighter-hearted than that; “In CD” feels like a Vampire Weekend demo intended for approval by B-52s. Infectious, massively accessible, genius-level stuff. A+

Playlist

A seriously abridged compendium of recent and future CD releases

• Nov. 17 will be a day of new CD releases, try to stay calm, with regard to all the new music! It’s almost Thanksgiving, fam, and in order to honor that pumpkin-spiced holiday in the most appropriate way possible, Hollywood released a movie named after it, and the soundtrack was done by one Brandon Roberts, who handled the soundtracking for a bunch of other nonsense-horror movies, including A Quiet Place and The Woman in Black. At present the soundtrack isn’t available, probably because no one would buy a CD of a soundtrack about serial-killer turkeys or whatever it is, but, just saying, I did look into it for you. In fact, I’m a little surprised that there was an actual professional soundtrack for that movie, but you just never know what’ll happen when those Hollywood guys start drinking at Spago’s, you know?

• If you spend a lot of time on Twitter or basically any other social media site that isn’t Facebook and is thus possessed of a little bit of street credibility, you know that Dolly Parton is now Taken Seriously by Serious Internet Posters because she’s rattled off a few virtue-signaling posts about something or other, which resulted in a noticeable uptick in her cred! Yes, her coolness factor is now at Tom Jones level, and all sorts of younger musical artists are hopping on the gravy train, like when Lady Gaga recorded the duet with Tony Bennett for no rational reason whatsoever, but good for her! Yikes, just look at the roster of rockers who contributed to her fast-approaching new album, Rockstar: her version of “Let It Be” features the last two surviving Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Magoo or whatever his name is; it basically just sounds like Dolly Parton doing a Vegas version of that tune, in case you ever wanted to hear such a thing. But wait, folks, there’s more, Rob Halford from Judas Priest and Nikki Sixx from Motley Crue appear on the third single, “Bygones,” and it’s pretty funny but serious, like you end up thinking “why did they let Dolly Parton start randomly singing on a disposable heavy metal song,” not that she doesn’t do as good a job as you could ever hope for with it; she sounds wildly out of place, but yes, she does keep pace, singing fast over the metallic riffing, boy did I land on the wrong planet.

• Ah yes, Smoke Fairies, we’ve dealt with them before, to a most pleasant outcome in spite of the fact that the indie-folk ladies rose to fame mostly owing to the fact that famous hamburger-gobbling person Jack White decided they were cute and he simply had to have them on his record label! Who cares, either way, yes, they’re cute, toward an Emily Perkins I-am-the-world’s-weirdest-dorm-mate fashion, so I welcome the chance to hear them sing new songs about ghosts or whatever it is. Carried In Sound, their new album, is on the trucks headed to the stores as we speak, and it will feature a new single, called “Vanishing Line,” a haunting tune that combines Loreena McKennitt’s ren-fair shtick with Enya’s multi-tracked technique. You know, if you’re a pale-skinned goth who’s never listened to these gals, do yourself a favor and check ‘em out; they’re completely crazy but don’t let that stop you.

• We’ll end the week with Salvage Enterprise, the new album from The Polyphonic Spree, a huge-ass “choral rock band” from Dallas, Texas! On Nov. 17, they released the single, “Shadows On The Hillside,” a really pleasant tune that’s pure ’70s acid-AOR, recalling Nilsson and, quite frankly, The Who’s Tommy album. It’s pretty deep and wide, well worth checking out.

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

A City on Mars, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin Press, 448 pages)

Besides buying Twitter and normalizing electric cars, Elon Musk is known for his belief that human beings need to get off this planet and in particular colonize Mars. “It’s a little cold, but we can warm it up,” his SpaceX website says, adding that because gravity on Mars is 38 percent that of Earth’s, “you would be able to lift heavy things and bounce around.”

That sounds like an argument you would make to a 5-year-old. Also, a little cold? The average temperature is -80 Fahrenheit.

The optimism about populating an inhospitable planet has been long overdue for a reality check, and Kelly Weinersmith, a biologist, and her husband, Zach, a cartoonist, have stepped up to the plate.

The Weinersmiths are self-described “space geeks” who have studied the subject for four years, longer if you count the research they did for their 2017 book Soonish.

“We love visionary plans for a glorious future. We also are very skeptical people,” they write.

The Weinersmiths say the current conversation about Mars colonization centers around the specifics of getting there and settling in, while larger, stickier questions — such as ethical air rationing — are swept aside. They accept the noble intentions of the “space billionaires” — namely Musk and Jeff Bezos — but think that done right, colonizing space should be something that takes us centuries, not decades.

A City on Mars — subtitled “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” — comprises six parts, liberally punctuated with cartoons. The first section addresses the biological costs to spacefarers and the psychology of space settlement (i.e., how to go to Mars without losing your mind), as well as the logistical nightmare that is “space sex.” The people we’ve sent to space thus far are the best humankind has to offer; they go through gauntlets of testing to ensure they’re in peak condition. Even then, encapsulated in all their high-tech gear, they suffer the physical insults of living outside Earth’s gravity, including muscle and bone loss and eye damage. They’re exposed to higher levels of radiation in a place where medical facilities are in short supply. We don’t know what will be the physical effects of a longer period in space, much farther away than we’ve gone.

And there are the “morally dicey” issues that come with conceiving a child (should one be conceived) as basically an experiment. For example, “What we know about human bones in space today comes entirely from fully developed adults,” the authors write. “We have no knowledge about how altered gravity regimes will affect, say, a twelve-year-old girl having a growth spurt.”

The second and third sections of the book focus on living arrangements, including housing, food and waste disposal. You’d think anyone who signed up for a trip to Mars wouldn’t care about food beyond sustenance, but the Weinersmiths write, “People who study space psychology report good food as one of the most important factors in day-to-day well-being — an idea also found in books from the era of polar exploration.” (Fun fact: NASA prohibits adult beverages on the International Space Station, but on other trips, astronauts have taken cognac, whiskey and wine.)

Sections 4, 5 and 6 explore big-picture challenges: space laws, space states, space politics and of course the potential for space wars (which strikes down the argument for getting off this planet to escape the tumult here). The basis of space law was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which in English was only about 2,500 words and basically said no weapons of mass destruction or military exercises in space. It also said all space activity should be carried out “for the benefit and in the interests of all countries.” That treaty and the Moon Agreement of 1979, however, do little to mitigate the kind of conflicts a greater human presence in space will raise, both in international politics and in the minutiae of spacecraft law such as whether starving astronauts can legally eat one of their crew. (There’s a scientific paper on space cannibalism titled “Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration.”)

Mars, which has 24-hour days similar to ours, could possibly be “terraformed,” its climate made more hospitable by detonating nuclear weapons at its poles, eventually making it warmer and wetter, and it’s easy enough to get to compared to other sites, but it’s far enough away that if something goes wrong you’re on your own. And the Weinersmiths envision everything, concrete and fanciful, that can go wrong, right up to war breaking out between the factions of Bezostralia and Muskow. They leave no moon rock uncovered.

Even a dystopian Earth is still better than Mars, the Weinersmiths argue: “That Earth still has a breathable atmosphere, a magnetosphere to protect against radiation, and quite possibly still has McDonald’s breakfast. It is not a world we would like to inhabit, but it is the one world in the solar system where you can run around naked for ten minutes and still be alive at the end.”

They’re not saying we should never go to Mars, just that we should do so slowly, after having worked some things out, like how to establish a short-term research station and how to make babies in space. B+

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