Review: Seveneves

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC."

Ok, to me that is a dramatic opening paragraph. After the moon mysteriously and spontaneously 'splodes apart, all manner of problems are escalating on Earth and they've given themselves two years to prepare as many ships as they can to serve as arks for humanity after which time they expect conditions on Earth to become untenable for most life. Shattered fragments of the moon now pose a major and imminent impact risk. Change (or lack) of tide and moon phases are also causing shit for countless species that rely on those to signal their biological functions.

"It means any process where the more it happens, the more it happens." - a definition of exponential growth.

It's dense with information but written accessibly, I think. The author applies smart abbreviations that are mostly easy to remember, even though there are a heap of them used. I also thought they were generally more believable acronyms and abbreviations than some of the fancy lingo employed in many other stories.

"The Shenzhou spacecraft was based on the Soyuz design, except larger, and updated in various ways. Like the Soyuz, it was meant to carry a crew of three—but this was based on the assumption that those three would want to return to Earth alive."

The story has a very good global approach. The situation is not limited to American institutions and the story is thankfully not limited to western perceptions. I also rather enjoyed the persistence of hopeful behaviours. For example, nobody wants to study for SATs when the world is about to end, that makes sense, but the remaining time isn't wasted, instead spontaneous camping trips and outdoor activities are the new learning focus. Non-standardised and non-routine education becomes the norm to ensure that children still obtain essential skills.

The author has no qualms using current references either, (like YouTube, google, fb etc.,) and I liked that.

"by manipulating some of the genes, we can create heterozygosity artificially."

Considering the slow stretched out nature of the pending doom it's hard to imagine society behaving so calmly. There are some freak outs; like some governments distributing free euthanasia pills and the morgues consequently overflowing. I guess the panic seems too civil to be very believable, given our track record, although sometimes it is nice to have the characters do what you want them to do rather than what they really would do.

It took 704 days from "Zero" until the tragedy occurred; when the moon fragments finally crash on the Earth causing unliveable conditions. If they weren't lucky enough to get into the orbital society, people went into bunkers hoping against the odds.

"Until a few months ago they’d been referred to as Arkers, ...Then someone had coined the term Arkies"

The "arkers" vs "arkies" thing is probably based on the real life "trekkers" vs "trekkies" debate, which was good for a laugh but thankfully it didn't take up much of the narrative.

"they simply were not cut out psychologically for the idea that they were going to spend the rest of their lives in crowded indoor spaces."

I'm sure I recall mention of the population being around 7 billion, so the story is set around about now. In the retreat to the orbital arks ahead of the white sky event only a few thousand make it to the orbitals. And then that number is further eroded by bickering and accidents.

The story gets a bit 'Alive' (1993) if you follow my reference and I truly love the directions this story takes but I kept wondering where the emotions and urgency were at? As I mentioned above, society seems to largely accept its fate without as much drama as I would expect but also, for such a massive crisis, I thought the writing didn't contain the right amount of urgency.

"I would argue that the human mind is mutable enough that it can become all of the different types of people that Camila, Aïda, and Tekla have been describing."

As the population is whittled down there is a great discussion on neurotypes and mental health in the context of genetic selection. I won't go into any more detail but this is where the title comes into play and this set up is fantastic.

I think the story should have ended here and continued in a sequel because I lost the thread a bit when the narrative jumped forward by five thousand years. I reread the start of this part about a half dozen times but eventually had to press on and hope for the best.

"It boiled down to Amistics."

"The density with which they’d been able to pack transistors onto chips still had not been matched by any fabrication plant now in existence." - I like the mix of some pre-zero technologies being relatively more complex than current equivalents and other stuff being less complex. It wasn't a simple "we're smarter now" storyline, not was it a "we're dumber now" storyline.

"These people are not descendants of the Seven Eves. They are rootstock. Their ancestors survived the Hard Rain and somehow found a way to live belowground until quite recently."

That there were some survivors of the hard rain was an excellent development but it instantly put in mind an easy out for genetic diversity issues and even perhaps factional differences.

I couldn't explain any more about the final third of the book if I tried. I don't think it's necessarily a fault of the writing because about the time I started struggling to keep up I also had a few pesky real world interruptions to my reading schedule.

Overall, I loved the premise and the world building that followed it. I thought the characters were in general very good, and their dialogue felt natural. The broad range of topics was pleasing to say the very least.

I'm docking the fifth star mostly because I struggled in the last part, after the narrative took that 5000 year jump forward. I have a feeling I read somewhere that the author has indicated no intention of returning to this story which is a genuine shame, I think. I would have loved the last part to be chopped out of this and added to the start of a next story. I feel strongly that there is much more to be said in this universe.

"We are the aliens," Einstein said.
"Yes," Ty said. "We are the bug-eyed monsters now."

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