Seveneves: A Novel

Some minor spoilers ahead...When I got super interested in space flight technology and orbital mechanics back in 2005, I played with the Orbiter space flight simulator for a few months and wrote a 181 page tutorial book for it called Go Play In Space. When Neal Stephenson got interested in space technology and orbital mechanics, he researched it for 9 years and wrote 880 pages to create a novel called SevenEves. The only common thread I can claim is that Neal and I both did our homework on the physics of space flight. But Neal did his homework on much more than this, and tied it all together into a fantastic story. Two major stories, actually -- one an extremely detailed, near-future "disaster movie" (the first two thirds of the book), the other an imaginative and ultimately exciting speculation on the lives of the survivors' descendants, 5000 years in the future. How many survivors were there? The book's title gives a clue that's at least partially correct (it's also a palindrome).I really enjoy most of Neal Stephenson's writing, and when I learned that his next book would be based in space, I pre-ordered it immediately. When it was released last Monday, it jumped the queue of all the books I was reading or planning to read. I saw a couple of early reviews, including a fairly negative one focused on Stephenson's relative lack of character development and other novelish niceties, in favor of nerdish discussions of all technical sorts. To me, this is a feature, not a bug. I loved the wide-ranging and carefully researched details, and I thought the characters were mostly well drawn. The storytelling and pace are good, although I did feel that it bogged down in the first third of part 3 (the 5000 years from now part). In fairness, there's a lot of explaining to do when you introduce a complex future civilization and many new characters, and after all that setup, the last 300 pages are quite thrilling. Good save, Neal!The book starts with the moon exploding for no apparent reason. It initially breaks into seven major pieces, but a popular public outreach astrophysicist nicknamed "Doob" (clearly modeled on Neil Degrasse Tyson) and his grad students figure out that it will soon break further into trillions of pieces, many of which will reenter Earth's atmosphere, destroying the atmosphere and everything in it. In 25 months (plus or minus 2 months). Scientists in many other countries independently reach the same conclusion.Two years is not much time to get ready for the end of the world, so most of the 7 billion people and virtually all other living things will die. And unfortunately, the incoming swarm of debris dubbed "hard rain" is estimated to continue for some 5000 years. So immediate repopulation of Earth's surface will not be possible. People will have to learn to live deep underground or in space, indefinitely -- somehow. The first 600 pages are mainly focused on a gigantic space lifeboat effort, although it's clear that only a relative handful of people (a few thousand at most) can make it to space in that short time, even with all of Earth's resources, industry, and minds focused on this.Of course this immediately answers the question, what is the International Space Station good for? Why, to serve as the centerpiece of a swarm of hastily constructed and launched habitat spacecraft that will be used to save this small number of humans in hopes of some sort of future. It's fortunate that in this near future world, the ISS has been expanded to include an experimental rotating habitat and a captured asteroid for experimentation with mining using a fleet of small robots. That at least gives the planetless survivors a fighting chance. But to say there are challenges is a vast understatement. There are many close calls and heroic efforts that turn out to be essential -- like a hastily organized mission led by an Elon Musk-like space entrepreneur to retrieve a chunk of a comet. This huge mass of water is needed for radiation shielding and to make rocket fuel. You can do that (extract hydrogen and oxygen) if you have enough electric power, like a nuclear power plant repurposed from a submarine. Since part 3 takes place 5000 years in the future, you know that somehow humanity makes it, but it is by the very thinnest of margins.Is this book realistic? You have to just accept the premise that the Moon just blows up for some reason. The "agent" responsible for this is never really explained, but it doesn't really matter. Everything else within parts one and two ("now") is constrained by realistic physics and plausible current or near-future technology. Orbital mechanics is a major constraint and is handled very well. The problems of radiation, microgravity, growing food in space, living in crowded spaces, and many other issues are handled realistically. Space debris is a constant problem, especially once the "hard rain" starts throwing parts of the former moon in all directions. Space construction requires the help of thousands of small robots, but these are not especially smart robots -- plausible extrapolations of things I have read about in MIT Technology Review. All in all, I consider parts 1 and 2 to be some of the best "hard SF" that I've ever read.Part 3 is more problematic for me, though ultimately enjoyable. The future space construction technology is massive, though still believable by extrapolation of robotic capabilities. But the tight connection between the personalities of the few survivors and the characteristics of the resulting race-driven civilization in 5000 years often did not ring true to me. There are a lot of interesting and plausible ideas, but also a lot that I thought was very silly, seemingly just made up, "because I said so." These are extrapolations of genetic and social engineering over 5000 years. I don't think you can say anything definitive about this based on anything we know, even if you accept genetic manipulation of the human genome as a required and well-understood tool.Of course it is all just made up by the author. But it is in part 3 that I have to say to myself, "that's why they call it science fiction." It's still more than fantasy or magic, though I wouldn't call it hard SF. But overall, it's a really good book, and most of those 880 pages flew by over the last six days (actually 14,403 Kindle "locations," read mostly on my iPad).It's a long book, full of interesting ideas and good writing. I learned a lot, as I always do from Stephenson's books. It is ultimately a hopeful book -- humans are resourceful and manage to barely survive, and eventually go on to build a new and very different civilization and to start to repopulate the Earth (with genetically engineered plants and animals, synthesized from a comprehensive DNA database that was saved from "Old Earth," since no actual animals and very few plants were brought to space -- the Old Earth mission planners did manage to preserve much of Earth's knowledge, genetic and otherwise). But as different as their new civilizations are, aggression and racial stereotypes remain -- even though the races are completely new. Even if we were capable of building a future "paradise," even a small handful of people will fail to agree that it is paradise -- some will want something else. Humans are difficult creatures. It will always be so.Note: the picture is my own impression of "Izzy" in the Orbiter space flight simulator

Some spoilers ahead.Like all of Neal Stephenson's books, good and bad, Seveneves is a kind of science fiction artifact itself.For one thing, his prose has a sort of otherworldly element of appearing to be frictionless. You can only read normal prose for so long. Friction, in the form of mental strain, eye muscle fatigue, to-do lists hovering in the back of your mind, distractions like fire alarms or crying children, all tend to slow you down, and eventually you stop reading.Not with Stephenson. With his prose you just sort of roll effortlessly along, seemingly forever. It's a good thing his books are only 800-900 pages. if they were an order of magnitude longer, his readers would starve to death.Of course they're not really frictionless, he's just a master of using prose technology to create the illusion. For example, he'll strategically place unresolved points, like strange words or juxtapositions or names, that you know will become clear in some charming or amazing way in just another few paragraphs. He inserts stopping points that are no good for actual stopping, but give you a moment to catch your breath. He writes so lucidly that even complex ideas require very little brain power to make sense of. He makes small jokes or inserts felicitous turns of phrase that act like little booster jets.A related SF artifact in his books is that they operate kind of like black holes. If you come near the thing's gravity well - it's by the coffee pot when you're ready to take a short break from work, or it's sitting next to the light switch near your bed which you were just about to turn off and go to sleep, or it's on the couch when you go sit down to watch TV - the gravity of the thing will just suck you in and you'll be reading before you even realize it.And when you are reading it, it's like being on that planet near the black hole in the Interstellar movie. Time dilates and you just read along for what seems like moments, not realizing that hours are passing in the outside world.So that's the experience of reading Seveneves, and it's plenty of reason to pick up and enjoy the book, particularly if no one is depending on you for anything. But what about the content? Like most of his books, it's a mixed bag.His better books, like Snowcrash, Anathem, Cryptonomicon, are great in the idea department. He's a terrific curator of interesting ideas, and he uses them as foundations for really wonderful explorations. In the less good books he still curates well but fails to make the ideas his own or weave them into much. Seveneves is is kind of a borderline case. He does a great job with alternative transport and space propulsion technologies, building a fascinating world (in the second part of the book) based on these ideas. He doesn't do as well with epigenetics. The idea is well curated but its development is clumsy and unimaginative.The book is in two parts; a 500-page near future save-the-human-race story, followed, five thousand years later, with a 300-page discovery and conflict story. The overall structure: this happens, then 5,000 years later, these are the consequences, is also problematic. It's imaginative, but way too linear. Culture just morphs way more than this structure allows for. The cultural distance across what's nominally five millennia feels more like the distance from here to maybe Victorian England or something. It's not so much that the technologies haven't progressed as that language, relationships, priorities, ethics, architecture, etc. are all recognizably descendants of the first part. If he could have plausibly built up this elaborate culture from the end of the first part to the beginning of the second over a couple centuries, I would have swallowed it more easily.Each part starts with a very implausible premise [again, spoiler alert]: part one: that the moon has mysteriously blown up and we have less than three years to figure out how to survive, and, part two, that the human race has been divided into seven distinct races through genetic manipulation. The first premise works beautifully. It's implausible in a plausible way (s*** happens.) and it just kicks things off and then recedes into the background. The premise of the second part actually drives the narrative, so you keep thinking about it and noticing how implausible it is.The plot, like the premises, works better in the beginning than in the end. In the end part, it takes quite a while to shape up - what are the characters doing? Why? What's at stake? The conflicts and attractions between the characters of different races and the big conflict between "reds" and "blues" are described but not really felt.The characters are, as usual, pretty good but not great. On the plus side, they're set up as human beings with recognizable characteristics; you can tell them apart, and like them, and identify with them to some extent. And also, their dialog has the same magical quality as the narrative prose; it just rolls along perfectly. On the minus side, this isn't a character-driven book; they are more or less along for the ride. Like the objects in orbit, they just tend to do their duty in the physics of the book.The overall experience of a Stephenson novel is that you're strapped in, and there's nothing to do but enjoy the ride. Seveneves lives up to that. It's a great ride. It's also more than that. You finish the ride feeling like you learned stuff, have added a new perspective, got delighted by some tech possibilities. This isn't Stephenson's best, but it's a good one.

Ciencia ficción; Presente/Futuro cercan; Un día la luna se descompone y se convierte en polvo espacial. Los pedazos caerán a la tierra y lo acabarán todo. La humanidad se prepara para sobrevivir. EXCELENTE historia :P

Una costruzione complessa e articolata che esplora sotto vari aspetti le vicende umane dei protagonisti e proponi vari modelli di sviluppo sociale e tecnologico non tralasciando la sostenibilità psicologica degli scenari che propone.Ben fatto, unica pecca a volte si perde per svariate pagine in dettagli tecnici che non sempre sono particolarmente emblematici o così centrali nella narrazione.

Other reviews have said it already, it's really a matter of whether what they describe is right for you. I liked Seveneves, a lot. As much as the best of Iain M. Banks (a representative favourite there would be Player of Games) or anyone else in the genre who's been able to spin a thoughtful, engaging tale across hundreds or thousands of years. Yes, it can be clinically descriptive. But like the people in the narrative, there is a balance among logic, emotion, and the story, and it all works in service of the story (and after a few hundred pages, efficiency can seem a good thing). I found the detail less efficient in Stephenson's historical writing, but it worked for me here. That's all I have to add, check the other reviews and decide whether Seveneves right for you. On the fence? Give it a spin. It really is an impressive, thought-provoking piece of work.

This huge volume of a space opera gripped me from the very start and is absolutely filled with novel and intricate designs.Stephenson has crafted an epic book which has received quite a few polarised reviews on Amazon. For me, I thought it was an intelligent, creative and well-reasoned exploration into how humanity may survive in a Hawking-scale celestial disaster.The story begins with a mystery Agent crashing through the moon, severing it into several large pieces. After the initial scientific gawping, humanity realises that the Earth will soon be the target of an avalanche of lunar debris which will obliterate life on the planet. The race starts from there, with two years in order to amass enough provisions for a select few humans to survive the onslaught in space for an unimaginably long time.While I’m not an astrophysicist by any standards, I do have an appreciation of space travel. What really stands out for me is that this book features no FTL travel, no cryo-freezing and no hyperdrives. All of the usual space opera tools and imaginings (despite being very much enjoyed in other stories) are deliberately absent. That fact made this book so distinctly enjoyable for me; it is not getting around the difficult obstacles for surviving in space with fictional technology. It is about how would we survive if it happened TODAY.The characters are distinctive (highlighted very acutely later on in the book), engaging and relatable. They are highly intelligent, creative and manipulative in their own ways and they all project very well from the pages.The writing style has put off some readers but for me, it was highly intimate and instructive. It’s akin to having someone patiently explain the solutions and methodologies. Sometimes it can be difficult to keep up with exactly what something is doing or used for, but the overall story comes together in a vastly enjoyable fashion. The book often crosses a line between fiction and non-fiction because of this, which is unusual but not unpleasant.If you just enjoy space operas with distant galaxies or alien races, then perhaps this isn’t the book for you. However, if you enjoy a story which tackles the practicalities, ethics and technology in a story finely woven with characters you’ll love, hate and really, really despise, I’d definitely recommend reading Seveneves.

The best sci-fi I have read in a long time. As much a look at the psychological/sociological impacts of a huge distaste affecting the human race as a sci-fi, the interactions between the different players within the book was masterly done and you could imagine this is exactly how humans would handle a crisis of this magnitude.