42 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ AUGUST 5, 2019
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their maximum thrust when they’re at standstill, so they work
really well for hovering,” Munroe says, thrilled as a toddler with
a new, noisy toy. We’re chatting over the internet—Munroe in
an austere white room in his home in “the Boston area” (he
would like his precise location to remain unclear), me having
just left “the Boston area” for Northern California. An invisible
digital matrix stretches between us from sea to shining sea,
compressing all of America into a hum of zeroes and ones—as
binary as it gets. “But then it became a question of, ‘Well, wait
a minute, can you carry enough fuel to hover any appreciable
length of time?’ ” Munroe says. “And suddenly it has introduced
all these new problems that I feel com-
pelled to solve. The cool thing with
physics is that it gives you the tools to
answer the question whether there’s any
good reason to answer it or not. Physics
doesn’t care if the questions you’re asking
it are stupid.”
Munroe has been making his living for
the past 14 years by throwing stupid ques-
tions at physics and seeing what sticks. In
fall 2005, when he was a physics major in
his final year at a college in Virginia,
Munroe began uploading his doodles to
the internet at xkcd.com. By cartoon stan-
dards, they were as basic as it gets: stick
figures. But it was the concerns plaguing
his characters—their existential crises,
scientific conundrums, and roller coasters
of romantic love—that made xkcd rise above the digital noise.
Though his comic had fans from the start—and would eventu-
ally garner awards, including a Hugo—early breakouts such as
“Pi Equals” and “Sudo-Sandwich,” which were extremely funny
and very brainy, won him the admiration of influential techies
inside companies such as Amazon, Boing Boing, Google, and
Reddit. Before he’d graduated, Munroe was working for NASA.
But a year in, he was making more money selling xkcd T-shirts
than building robots, so he left NASA to focus on internet
humor full-time. He was 23.
A book soon followed, xkcd: volume 0, which sold primarily
through Munroe’s web store, with proceeds donated to literacy
nonprofit Room to Read. In a 2009 interview, Munroe told
the New York Times that his book didn’t need to be in bookstores.
“I don’t have hard numbers about this,” he said. “But the
impression I get is that the amount of eyeballs you get from
being on the humor shelf at Barnes & Noble—it is almost
insignificant.”
Munroe may have been right. Not only did the book sell well
(over 25,000 copies in its first six months, according to its pub-
lisher, Breadpig) but a handful of packed reading events raised
enough money to build a school in Laos. In those days, Munroe
didn’t think of the physical book as all that different from his
digital comic: “It was another type of material with designsprinted on it,” he says. He calls partnering with Breadpig,
created by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, “halfway between
working with a publisher and self-publishing with some friends.”
But five years on, when he was ready with book number two,
What If? Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions,
Munroe embraced traditional publishing. “It’s helpful to work
with people who know how to sell things,” he says. “There are
all these people out there who wouldn’t have grown up reading
my website and don’t read comics online but are still interested
in, like, what happens if the moon crashes into things.”
The idea for What If? came when Munroe volunteered to
teach a class on energy to high school
students at MIT. He noticed how engaged
they became when tasked with solving a
ridiculous problem rather than sticking
with the textbook material. He took the
idea to the web, attaching a blog to xkcd
and asking readers for queries. The book,
published in 2014, featured a selection of
those queries, such as, “What would
happen if you tried to hit a baseball
pitched at 90% the speed of light?”
(answer: awful, terrible things) and,
“What would happen if everyone on earth
stood as close to each other as they could
and jumped, everyone landing on the
ground at the same instant?” (answer: not
much, followed by awful, terrible things).
What If? hit #2 on Amazon’s bestselling
books list 24 hours after Munroe announced its existence and
six months before its pub date, and it would go on to sell close
to 725,000 copies, according to NPD BookScan.
For How To, Munroe asked the questions himself. “Part of it,”
he explains, “was just thinking about stuff I have to do everyday,
or problems I could think of a fun way to solve, whether or not
it’s important or useful. I have an idea for how you could do this,
but I don’t know if it would work, and now I’ve got to go figure
it out.”
In the book, Munroe considers basic problems such as how to
move, fun problems such as how to throw a pool party (if you
don’t have a pool), and problems nobody should really have, such
as how to build a lava moat (without prohibitively high heating
and cooling costs)—all with his unique blend of the scientific
and the silly, and his surprisingly expressive stick figures. “I
wanted to find stuff that you could do any number of different
ways, and there was obviously a right way,” Munroe says. “And
I could ignore the right way and focus on the wrong ways.”
For Munroe, questions are opportunities to expand, and
problems are possibilities to explode. After all, to answer a
question is to end the conversation, and that’s the last thing he
wants to do. ■Mike Harvkey is the author of the novel In the Course of Human Events.