I first encountered the desire to get human life “off-planet” from an MIT rocket science graduate in the 1990s. He brought it up when we were discussing climate change on Earth. I found the logic uncompelling. If humans were dumb enough to destroy Earth’s ecosystem, what would make us smart enough to avoid doing so on Mars, a far more difficult environment to begin with? To me, the solution seemed more in educating humanity than fleeing it.

Similarly, fears of nuclear war or AI monstrosities making Earth uninhabitable seemed like a weak rationale for leaving Earth. Again, the problem would be with the humans, so changing our location wouldn’t solve that.

In Seveneves, Stephenson presents a scenario that is somewhat plausible where escaping the Earth actually makes some sense. I won’t spoil the event (which is describe on the first page), but we do have a history of asteroids doing enough damage to the Earth to wipe out entire species of dinosaurs, for instance.

I don’t know if Musk has read Seveneves, but timeline and proximity suggest he’s been influenced by it. Stephenson wrote the novel around 2013 yet says he conceived the core concepts in 2004 when he was working at the rocket company Blue Origin (from June 1999 to Nov 2006) — founded by Jeff Bezos.

Musk began publicly stating goal of settling Mars in 2007.

On August 16, 2015 Tim Urban published a blog titled But Why Wait which made the case for getting humans off planet. Musk reached out to him. Then, at the 2016 International Astronautical Congress, shortly after Seveneves was published, Musk laid out plans for one million humans to survive on Mars. So Stephenson’s book certainly captures the tech bro zeitgeist of that time.

The characters in Seveneves display a strong set of biases that mirror Musk’s public statements and actions. Scientists, athletes, and billionaires play heroic roles, politicians and bureaucrats are conniving villains. There are some cool technologies described, again reinforcing the theme that engineering will somehow save humanity from our own faults.

Seveneves shares the premise of Lord of the Flies, that humans will inevitably fight with each other when things get difficult. This comes despite significant historical and scientific evidence to the contrary, that humans actually cooperate when survival is on the line. In fact, there’s a wonderful true life story about six boys being shipwrecked on a deserted island who shared resources, chores and skills to survive 15 months before being rescued. Stephenson must have concluded cooperation makes for less entertaining plotlines.

Another bizarre, and mostly unbelievable, aspect of Seveneves is an obsession with how humans will evolve over thousands of years into different races due to genetic engineering, selective breeding, and adaptation to challenging environments. While Stephenson does accept that some cross breeding of these “races” will eventually occur, he’d have us believe that there is so little of that so as to maintain breeds as different as wolves and poodles among humanity. This obsession with genetics flies in the face of considerable scientific research that race is primarily a social construct, yet it fits perfectly with Musk’s anti-immigrant ideology and his perceived need for “western civilization” to save itself by avoiding other cultures.

I’m a huge fan of Stephenson, who has written some of the most important science fiction novels of our time. Some readers will love Sevenesves’ lengthy exposition of orbits and meteors, others won’t. The biggest flaw I find, however, is that it portrays humans at our worst in ways that just don’t feel realistic or authentic, much in the way Elon Musk seems to view humanity. I just don’t believe that the geeks are going to save us.

Mae Holland is a twenty something woman from California’s Central Valley who lands a job at a high-tech firm through an old college friend. She winds up climbing the corporate ladder and becoming a poster child for the company’s new on-line all-the-time product that streams virtually every second of her life. This has both predictable and unexpected results on her relationships with her parents, friends, and new colleagues.

The resistance to Mae’s complete capture is best summed up by her ex-boyfriend Mercer, who says “It’s not that I’m not social. I’m social enough. But the tools you guys create actually manufacture unnaturally extreme social needs. No one needs the level of contact you’re purveying. It improves nothing. It’s not nourishing. It’s like snack food. You know how they engineer this food? They scientifically determine precisely how much slat and fat they need to keep you eating. You’re not hungry, you don’t need the food, it does nothing for you, but you keep eating these empty calories. This is what you’re pushing. Same thing. Endless empty calories , but the digital-social equivalent.”

Eggers nails the feel-good, yet creepy lingo of Silicon Valley and its arrogant sense that technology and information sharing will pave the way to a wonderful new world. We can see the slippery slope of technologies that promise to make our lives better yet somehow seem to leave us empty while filling the bank accounts of tech investors and executives. Full transparency, it turns out, is not all it’s cracked up to be. Schemes to catch criminals quickly turn into corporate surveillance and accompanying control of the political process.

The Circle may be the closest contemporary novel to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where corporations have figured out how to run the world through seductive and addictive technology. It’s a bit of a long read, but I found it worth it and it’s had an impact on my own writing. The book was turned into an OK movie starring Tom Hanks and Emma Watson who did a fine job acting, but as with most novels the film version doesn’t do the story justice.

Thom Hartmann is one of today’s most important writers documenting the challenges facing US democracy. The Last American President, which chronicles Donald Trump’s long ascension to power, may be his most consequential work.

Hartmann details many items that I’d previously learned about at the one inch level, but takes you ten inches deep into the subject. Trump’s long affection and worship of Roy Cohn is one example. I hadn’t known, for instance, that as a federal prosecutor, Cohn pressured Ethel Rosenberg’s brother to provide false testimony against her, which lead to her execution. Nor did I know Cohn was a key figure in orchestrating McCarthyism’s character assassinations. Trump’s idolization of Cohn, and his own contemporary demagoguery, made a lot more sense after Hartmann’s revelations.

Hartmann further recounts how Trumpism was a logical, perhaps inevitable trajectory for the 21st century Republican Party built on Nixon’s southern strategy, Reagan’s fictional welfare queens, Tea Party astroturf, all then juiced by the Citizens United ruling.

The Last American President details many flaws in the 2024 election, which have been previously documented and are well footnoted. For instance:

* Over 2.1 million mail-in ballots were disqualified for minor clerical errors.

* 585,000 in-person ballots were thrown out.

* 1.2 million “provisional” ballots were rejected without being counted.

* 3.2 million new voter registrations were rejected or not processed in time.

Hartmann calculates this amounted to 2.3 percent of the vote, or 3,565,000 votes that he says “largely should have gone to Kamala Harris.”

As someone who has spent a lot of time studying election administration and voting rights, I agree with Hartmann’s accounting of votes that should have been counted, but weren’t. I’m less certain that these votes would necessarily have gone to Harris. We know from exit polling and voter turnout analysis that Trump made significant gains among Latino men, young voters, and low-propensity/low-information voters in 2024 compared to previous elections. These are often the same demographics disenfranchised by the voter suppression tactics Hartmann accurately details. Given Democratic gains among wealthier, well-educated voters who once leaned Republican (think Mitt Romney supporters) and Trump’s inroads into what was once the Democratic base, analysists on both the left and right might reconsider who actually benefits from suppression of infrequent voters.

It would be easy to conclude both from the book’s provocative title, and the structural issues leading up to Trumpism, that Hartmann is pessimistic about our future. And perhaps he is.

Yet if I’m right in my hunch that voter suppression tactics might blow up in Republican’s faces like an exploding cigar, maybe there is some reason for hope that their plans may backfire.

Hartmann quotes Mahatma Gandhi at opening of Part 3: “Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”

He further notes in the conclusion that there have been dirty tricks in politics before. Nixon’s deal with South Vietnam to boycott peace talks. Reagan’s deal with Ayatollah Khomeini to keep holding American hostages until he took office. Bush v Gore. Trump’s hiding hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. And yet they didn’t always work. Despite these dirty tricks and serious flaws in the fairness of our elections, we elected Presidents Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden.

Hartmann ends with hope, saying “It’s time to break this pattern and finally hold at least one (convicted) criminal Republican president accountable.” I for one, believe that is possible and that we haven’t yet seen the last American President.

Disclosure: I have been provided an advance excerpt of The Last American President by its publisher, Berrett-Koehler, a copy of which can be found here. While I received no compensation or reward for writing this review, I have also published books with Berrett-Koehler.

After facing hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending from corporations aimed at influencing elections, Maine voters overwhelmingly passed a ballot measure to prohibit foreign governments or entities with at least five percent foreign government ownership from spending money in the state’s elections while calling for passage of a constitutional amendment restoring sensible limits on all political spending. The measure passed with 86 percent support, a larger margin of victory than any Maine ballot question. Every single county, whether traditionally blue or red, backed the measure. Support for Question 2 was organized by the advocacy group American Promise along with a bipartisan group of Maine legislators and issue organizations.

Maine’s action followed a long tradition of “voter instructions” that dates back to the founding period of the United States. Early colonists instructed the elected representatives they sent to the Continental Congress to declare independence from England. They further instructed delegates how to draft our current Constitution and what amendments they wanted made after its adoption.

The 17th Amendment to our Constitution, providing for direct election of U.S. Senators, came about in response to voter instructions such as the one just passed in Maine, which requires the Commission on Government Ethics and Election Practices to issue a yearly report on which members of Maine’s congressional delegation have followed the instructions of their constituents.

The movement for a constitutional amendment to authorize limits on big money in politics began in the wake of the 1976 Supreme Court decision Buckley v Valeo, which struck down major portions of the campaign finance reforms Congress had passed in the wake of the Watergate scandals. After the 2011 Citizens United v. FEC ruling went even further than the Buckley opinion, a grassroots campaign for voter instruction ballot measures sprung to life.

In 2012, 75 percent of Montana voters supported Initiative 1–166, declaring that in Montana corporations are legally not people and directing each of the state’s elected officials to support a constitutional amendment to create a level playing field in campaign spending.

In Colorado, voters supported Amendment 65 in 2012 with 74 percent of the vote. That measure instructed the state’s congressional delegation to propose and support a Constitutional Amendment allowing Congress and the states to limit campaign contributions and spending and permitting all citizens, regardless of wealth, to express their views on a level playing field.

Both California and Washington state passed similar anti-Citizens United voter instruction ballot measures in 2016.

Massachusetts voters passed a measure in 2018 to create a commission to evaluate constitutional amendments that would allow Congress and the states to “regulate contributions and expenditures in federal, state, and local elections.”

In 2020, Alaska voters included instructions to pass a federal constitutional amendment that would allow citizens to regulate money in elections as part of a larger reform package that included ranked choice voting and required disclosure of dark money campaign funds.

More information about the text of anti-Citizen United ballot measures can be found here.