6 reviews for Seveneves
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Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
Description:
A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . . Five thousand years later, their progeny seven distinct races now three billion strong embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
About The Author
Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer and game designer known for his works of speculative fiction.
His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Stephenson’s work explores subjects such as mathematics, cryptography, linguistics, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired. He has also written novels with his uncle, George Jewsbury (“J. Frederick George”), under the collective pseudonym Stephen Bury.
Stephenson has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system, and is also a cofounder of Subutai Corporation, whose first offering is the interactive fiction project The Mongoliad. He is currently Magic Leap’s Chief Futurist.
Skryf Review
“Good Reading”
Naman
This epic tale of survival of the human species in space after the earth gets wrecked by a “Hard Rain” of meteorites was a real treat for me. It represents a landmark in revival of old themes of science fiction from the Golden Age of the 40s and 50s, which had hallmarks of inspiring a sense of wonder and of extolling human technological capacities and can-do spirit sufficient to break out of our fragile planetary prison. For those who have been disappointed in previous attempts to read recent Stephenson works, I see improvement in his character development and tendencies toward digression and diversion. A handful of characters here get fleshed out enough as lively personalities for satisfactory levels of emotional engagement, and the expository writing he incorporates to explain science and engineering feats are less like information dumps and more subjugated to the critical problem solving of the character’s heroic missions. Despite my appreciation of the plausibility of much of the engineering and physics in this book, I am somewhat disappointed that the biology did not get as much care. For one thing, living on reprocessed algae for generations is a bit of hand waving at the complexities involved for chemical manufacturing in a space environment. The problem of not having enough biodiversity in the human population in their final situation is handled okay with a fair projection of editing out deleterious mutations and splicing in of artificial variant of genes. However, the prospects of creating organisms and ecologies starting just from stored DNA sequences seems forever impossible to me. You will always need living cells of related species to insert any synthesized sequences into (for more information see this article from the Genetic Literacy Project). E.O. Wilson in his book, The Diversity of Life, argues that an ecosystem with its interdependencies of thousands of species evolving over millions of years is unlikely to ever be something that technology interventions will ever be able to reconstitute. The idea in the end sections of generating races with different genetic proclivities in personality types also seemed not to be founded on current behavioral genetics as I understand it or likely to be founded on voluntary genetic segregation among human survivors.
Havisha
The first book is a very much on-trend apocalyptic-event novel. An enigmatic something causes the moon to blow apart into 7 huge chunks. Since Neal Stephenson covered it at the talk I saw him give recently, I’m going to say he doesn’t think it’d be too much of a spoiler to reveal that those seven chunks are soon predicted to keep banging up against each other in orbit until they eventually become a devastating hail of meteorites that are going to transform the Earth into a very, very unpleasant place to be for the foreseeable future.As I said, though, the last third is a completely different book. Suddenly, we jump to 5,000 years in the future, where we get to see what has become of humanity. There are some interesting extrapolations – but I also think, some oversimplifications. Mixed in with the predictive theorizing there’s an action-oriented plot… which sort-of seems to be here just for the sake of having a plot (another thing that reminded me of Robinson’s Mars-terraforming trilogy, actually.) It’s still entertaining!
Helly
This is a book for people who who really like Stephenson’s work and I have to admit that I loved his earlier work (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle). Whilst I enjoyed it, there are a number of serious issues with the sub characters that prevent me from giving this a high score. It’s also too long by about 400 pages.The book is split into two sections. The first half is about humanities fight for survival following the destruction of the moon, (that is not a real spoiler, as the moon is blown up in the first sentence of the book!) The second part of the book is set 5000 years later and deals with the descendants of the survivors. As with all of Stephenson’s books it is full of great ideas and some good characters. In this case the commander of the space station, the robotics engineer, the swashbuckling Swiss astronaut and the science guy, all well developed and rounded characters!
aashna
I don’t know what all those complainers are going on about. As far as I can see, I just got two novels for the price of one. The first 2/3rds is all hard science fiction, where science matters and the whole thing is tied together with plausibility. The last third is pure unadulterated speculative fiction with damn fine worldbuilding and extrapolation from the first 2/3rds.Let me back up. I can honestly say that I loved the gigantic erector set that was the first novel, but I will admit that I wasn’t head over heels in love with most of the characters, and the few that I really liked were at least two dimensional. This isn’t a condemnation. A lot had to be covered to get us from a happyish world, through a blown-up moon, to a mad scramble to survive before the earth gets fireballed by our ex-moon. That means the International Space Station needs one hell of an upgrade. A lot happens, and it’s tragic and heroic and beautiful. I’ve read a lot worse hard sf, and when I say it, it’s not a condemnation, either. Hard sf is a lifestyle choice. It’s hard to do and successfully pull off a great story with great characters against, say, any other novel that doesn’t care about consistency and scrupulous attention to detail.
Kahaan
This is Stephenson turning his eye on the world of hard sf, imagining a complex but totally believable future for a humanity bereft of earth. In fact at one point I was having a total squee because he’s created a world where both the old sf imaginings of the future with their great dumb machines, and the newer sf with its knowledge of computers, come together to form this intriguing vision of the world. And, for a book that deals with a lot of tech and the annihilation of a lot of the human race this is a book with a lot of heart and a careful focus on the human side of the equation. The characters were interesting and varied, some symapthetic, some heroic, some (very literally) screamingly awful. Finally, Stephenson’s writing is wonderful; easy to read and yet injected with complex ideas and some lesser known nuggets of vocabulary, I always come out of his books feeling a little bit smarter than when I went in.