Hidden Systems by Dan Nott

What makes the world work?

You could take that question any number of ways - politically, existentially, emotionally, literally. Dan Nott went physical, following in the tradition of The Way Things Work to explore three major systems that underpin all of human civilization today. It's not the only possible answer, but it's a good answer, well explained and detailed.

The subtitle of Hidden Systems explains it: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day. Nott spent the last roughly five years researching and creating this book, in those three big chunks: first the Internet, then Electricity, and finally the most fundamental of them all, Water. 

Hidden Systems was published by a line aimed at young readers - RH Graphic - and there are some accouterments of the book that hint at that, from the "Junior Library Guild Selection" on the inside back flap to the ad page with other juvenile GNs from the publisher. But the book itself isn't obviously for young readers, except in the sense that young people are learning about everything, and are more likely to be looking for a book like this to begin with. (On their own, or as part of an assignment.) It's straightforward and detailed, diving into history and current state to explain just how all three of these systems work, and how modern human society relies on each of them - and, somewhat, how inequalities in modern society both were caused by differences in systems and how those inequalities affect the systems.

It is a vaguely ecological book, as it has to be: both the Internet and electrical power generation have outsized impacts that Nott needs to mention, and the water cycle, as he makes clear, underlies all life on Earth. But it's not strident, or pushing a specific goal - Nott seems to be aiming to be even-handed here, taking about trade-offs and options and signposting the path to better rather than proclaiming something specific as best.

A GN is a good format for this explanation: it lets Nott show schematics of all of these cycles - how data packets and clean water and electricity are created, move around, are transferred, make their ways to the end-users. Comics are visual, which is a tremendous leg up in the Explaining Things sweepstakes. Nott has a clean modern look, slightly illustrative, with light colors on top of cool mostly blue-black lines, mostly thin and single-weight.

The only thing I wanted more of is integration. These three systems interlock, and the way Nott made the book means he treats them each basically separately. The Internet takes massive amounts of power, power generation often outputs massive amounts of water (heated or polluted or just falling from a great height), and so on - he says all this in context, but I would have liked a bigger, more expansive conclusion, about how human societies need to be more planful and purposeful in their systems going forward. (But that's the old SF editor in me: I want the Big Picture, the look at tomorrow.)

This is a well-organized, intriguing, fact-filled journey through three hidden-in-plain-sight systems that underpin all of modern society. The publisher may think that's primarily of interest to twelve-year-olds, but I hope people much older than that care just as deeply.