What If? Book Review — Science, Absurd Questions & Wil Wheaton’s Narration

Read time: 5 minutes

🎧 Listened in audio | 📢 Narrated by Wil Wheaton | ⏱ Duration: 7 hours
Genre: Non fiction | 🏷️ Publisher: Blackstone Publishing and Dey Street Books

Book Blurb:

From the creator of the webcomic xkcd, Randall Munroe answers the strange, absurd questions his fans send him with real science. What if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent the speed of light? How fast could you hit a speed bump and survive? How long would humanity last in a robot apocalypse? To find out, Munroe runs simulations, digs through declassified research, solves equations, and consults actual experts, turning outlandish hypotheticals into rigorous, often hilarious answers illustrated with signature xkcd comics. The book mixes new questions with expanded fan favorites from the xkcd website, making it essential reading for xkcd fans and anyone who loves a good hypothetical.

Let’s talk about the book:

I came across this book while looking for recommendations for 99 Ways to Die by Ashley Alter, and was so supremely and pleasantly surprised. Randall Munroe takes some really absurd questions, like what if you have only one soulmate and that soulmate is decided at the time of birth, and generates actual scientific answers to them.

The questions in the book are genuinely interesting. “Could I cry myself into dehydration?” Or “if I keep floating up, will frostbite affect me first or lack of oxygen?” Randall answers these with real science. Go into this book expecting real physics, mathematical calculations, and deep-dive analysis. It’s not just “here’s a logical answer.” It’s more like “here’s a logical answer, and here’s how I arrived at this logical answer.” Munroe is a self-confessed analytics lover, so his answers are deep rooted in science.

Honest confession, some portions of it were too scientific for me and I couldn’t follow them. But I enjoyed the questions and his final answers to them either way. And Wil Wheaton really does an amazing job narrating, with funny voice modulations when the questions get so stupid, making him sound like a genuinely obnoxious person asking it.

Go into this book expecting to be consumed by science, but also to be thrilled with all the new knowledge you’ll gain.

Would I recommend it?

Yes, if you like your nonfiction with a side of “why is a grown man solving differential equations to tell me how fast I’d need to hit a speed bump to survive.” What If? is smart, funny, and occasionally over my head, but never in a way that made me want to put it down. Wil Wheaton’s narration turns every ridiculous question into its own little performance. Go in expecting real physics and real math, not just punchlines, and you’ll come out the other side thrilled with how much random, slightly terrifying knowledge you just picked up.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Book recommendations

• How To: Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World Problems by Randall Munroe
  Munroe’s own follow-up to What If?, applying the same “let’s solve this with real, unreasonably rigorous science” approach to everyday problems, like how to cross a river or move house using a helicopter.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words by Randall Munroe
  Another Munroe title, this time explaining complex machines and concepts (rockets, cells, the Solar System) using only the thousand most common English words. Same brain, same charm, completely different format.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary

• 99 Ways to Die by Ashley Alter
  The book that started this whole journey. If you came to What If? the way I did, chasing weird hypothetical mortality questions, this one scratches the same itch from a different angle.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | Litsy

• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  Roach does for the human body what Munroe does for physics: takes a topic most people avoid and makes it fascinating, funny, and weirdly hard to put down.

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• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
  For when you want the “science made accessible and funny” feeling to stretch across, well, nearly everything. Bryson’s curiosity and humor make a great companion read to Munroe’s.

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got a hypothetical Randall Munroe should answer next?

I need to know if I’m the only one who now side-eyes speed bumps differently. If you could get Randall Munroe to run the numbers on one hypothetical from your own life, what would you ask him?

Book Links:

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