Those of us who care about space (or “outer space,” as we used to say when I was a kid in the 1950s) are a motley crew. Some of us are tech-savvy to the extreme; others (myself included) are nearly illiterate in that sphere. Some are entrepreneurial (in their dreams, they are investing in ice-mining on Mars, providing water necessary for exploration further afield); others (like me) never so much as presided over a lemonade stand. Some were recruited by science fiction in their youth (again, myself included); others never read the stuff. And so on. But there are also commonalities, widely shared if not universal among the space-minded: a fascination with the possibility of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, for instance.
And there’s something else the space-minded have in common: Many of them like to read books on their subject, lots of books. Most of these will never show up on best-seller lists, but they appear in a steady stream year after year, from trade publishers and university presses alike. This fall, for instance, Princeton University Press will publish Joseph Silk’s Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind (“A scientist’s inspiring vision of our return to the Moon as humanity’s next thrilling step in space exploration”) and Les Johnson’s A Traveler’s Guide to the Stars (“A brief guide to the real science of interstellar travel”). This spring, Harvard University Press published The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Space Exploration, by Donald Goldsmith and Martin Rees.
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