A review of “The Future Of Geography” by Tim Marshall
Marshall has had outstanding success with two huge bestsellers: “Prisoners Of Geography” (2015) and “The Power Of Geography” (2021). Like the last chapter of the last book, this work is not really about geography but all about space. In his acknowledgements to this latest book, he thanks his publishers “for the freedom to write what I want”, but clearly the marketing guys insisted that he had to have the word ‘geography’ in the title.Marshall attempts to justify the title: “Outer space is not featureless – it has regions of intense radiation to be navigated, oceans of distance to cross, superhighways where a planet’s gravity can accelerate spaceships, strategic corridors in which to place military and commercial equipment, and land rich in natural resources.” This is really an exaggeration of the analogy. As he admits towards the end of the book: “Space is very, very big. Take the area between low Earth orbit (starting at 160 kilometres above us) and geostationary orbit (35,786 km up). The volume between the two orbits is 190 times larger than the volume of Earth.”)
And how much of this work is really about the future? The first two chapters provide a neat history of the space race between the USA and the USSR. The next six chapters look at the present situation with detailed examination of the space programmes of the USA, Russia and China. Only the final two chapters deal with the future – the one entitled Space Wars’ concedes that “For this decade at least, a war in in space would primarily be about a war on Earth.”
Notwithstanding my quibbles about the title, this latest ‘geography’ work by Marshall is, like his earlier two books, immensely informative and attractively written. So, if you want to know the best place and manner to launch a satellite (near the equator and eastwards), the number of satellites currently up there (over 8,000), or the last time humans walked on the moon (14 December 1972) and if you are inquisitive about the position of the five Lagrange points of the Earth-Sun system, the risk of the Kessler Syndrome, or the reasons why we should go to the Moon and Mars, this is the text for you. I thoroughly enjoyed it.