200 pages
Published 2023
Read from April 23 to April 24
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Lego sets — Lego Space sets in particular — were central to my childhood. I grew up poor, but whenever my Grandma would take me on a bus ride to the mall or to the Elder-Beerman store downtown, I would usually manage to whine or wheedle or wail a small set out of her. I hardly ever got anything larger than what would be considered a poly-bag impulse purchase set today, but I nickel-and-dimed a moonbase's worth of space guys between 1987 and the last dregs of my childhood in 1995.
Along the lines of Art & Arcana — a coffee table chronicle of the artwork behind Dungeons & Dragons — Lego Space is lovely nostalgia-bait, full of gorgeous artwork from the heyday of Lego’s Space line, with self-congratulatory corporate text masquerading as history.
Hired author Tim Johnson takes the unusual step of bulking up the profile of each set with a paragraph of fan-fiction, a miniature in-universe narrative of exploration, refueling, space rescues, and so on. Perhaps a handful of these interludes would have been charming, but they get included for each and every set, all 150-ish of them. Clearly this book was never meant for a consecutive read.
Still, the pictures are awesome, and there's an interesting section on how the box art and catalog spreads were photographed, which is pretty cool (though too brief).
