Review: "Outer Space Is Closer Than Antarctica" by Michelle Ott

Outer Space Is Closer Than Antarctica by Michelle Ott
Published September 2025 via Chronicle Books
★★★

Antarctica is a place of superlatives, writes Ott again and again. The biggest and the coldest and the iciest and so it goes. She made several months-long trips to the ice when she was younger, working janitorial and kitchen jobs not because those jobs were where her passions lay but because they let her, well, go to Antarctica.

This is something of a hybrid book: a memoir, but with perhaps a quarter or a third of the pages given over to illustrations. I can't really evaluate the illustrations, as I don't think they rendered properly in the advance copy that I read (leaving the black and white illustrations more or less intact but the more colorful ones with huge gaps), so I'm giving the book the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they'll make more sense in the final product.

The writing fell rather flat for me. I've been curious about Antarctica, and books about Antarctica, for years—since I was eleven or so, I think, sitting in the backseat of the car on a road trip while my mother read Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris aloud to us. Then there was Jerri Nielsen's Ice Bound, which, my gosh, I must reread... In the early days of blogging, I remember following someone who was working a similarly unglamorous job to Ott's first jobs in Antarctica and writing about it, and even now I sometimes think that maybe it's not too late; maybe I could uproot my life for a year and be a janitor at the bottom of the world.

This kind of floats from topic to topic, though, unstructured (or: there is a structure, but not one that made for a linear story) and without a lot of strong feeling. (I'm sure the emotion was there in the writing, but it didn't translate to me as a reader.) And I always want the hard facts, the specific stories: what a day looked like, what a week looked like, what the dorm rooms looked like, what it felt like dressing to go outside in Antarctica, more people and personalities. I'm also not quite sure what to make of the "outer space" part of things, either; as Ott notes, most places are farther away than outer space, and when I realized that some of the satisfaction of a good title was lost.

So...rated solely on the written portion, a low three stars for me. Will presumably be improved with the published versions of the drawings within. Did make me dream anew about Antarctica, though.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.