Creature Comforts in Space
Designing Enjoyment and Sustainability for Off-World Living
By Samuel M. Coniglio IV
Creature Comforts in Space is about the squishier side of space exploration. It covers the engineering challenges of staying in space, as opposed to the usual ones of getting there.
The book introduces the various problems that humans face living away from the Earth, discusses the ways that they are currently solved, and focuses on ways those solutions could be expanded or improved. While all aspects of space living are discussed, the focus is on the quality of life: the creature comforts of the title, and how to tend psychological and physical needs sustainably and long-term.
It is a fun, quick read. The author writes with an infectious sense of enthusiasm about space exploration and space habitation. It is well-organized, particularly in the explanation of the problems faced, and at its best when the author is discussing his own theoretical solutions. I would recommend it to any science fiction author as a primer on space life.
The weakness of the book is that it raises much more interesting questions than it answers. One of the biggest tells is the list of what constitutes a comfort, which is crowdsourced rather than the product of research, and is the seed of a Babylon Bee article. It is not wrong1 about what to list as a comfort, but it is limited.
Culture is a technology. So while the chapter on how to have a hot shower in space is impressive, first from the existing technical goes at the problem, and then from the author’s own vision of the fix, which I would in fact install in my apartment, it is the answer to a different question than what the book sets out to solve. Transplanting norms is insufficient. The question is how do you do the same cultural things that hot shower does, not necessarily how you have a hot shower. It is a much bigger, more futurist question, and maybe as such outside the scope of the book, but it stands out because of what comforts are expressed.
So, while I feel like it did engage its thesis enough, it is an insightful and comprehensive overview of off-Earth living, its challenges and solutions, and a great read on that account.
My thanks to the author, Samuel M. Coniglio, for making an ARC available to me.
- Except as regards the food replicators (think Star Trek). While not listed as one of the comforts, automated food preparation is discussed at length, and caused in me deeper feelings of nope than I knew I had about cooking. ↩︎
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