Seveneves

The first two thirds were great, lots of drama and challenges as people hastily scramble for survival. Stephenson isn't great at realistic social dynamics, but since that isn't the most important part of the story, I could happily overlook it. Then I got to the final third of the book, which emphasizes the growth of new cultures, and things went downhill fast. Still, I enjoyed the characters, especially Kath and her personal evolution. ( )

This is an amazing far reaching story about a catastrophic natural event. How humanity survives this event takes many forms. Sometimes the science involved went right over my head, but the story kept my interest. It's a long book. Even though I've finished reading it, I will be thinking and wondering about these characters for a long time. ( )

This is a difficult book to review without discussing spoilers, but I will constrain most of my comments around what is in the book description on Goodreads and hide specifics as needed.

I didn’t love this. I was absolutely drawn forward to discover how it all came together in the end but experienced mixed feelings along the way.

First off, this is a very SCIENCE-Y science fiction book. As in, a tremendous volume of wordstuff is spent on explaining how shit happens in a non-fantasy, realistic manner. Particularly around orbital mechanics, space flight, ship design, and such. It becomes less “specific,” shall we say, when it gets to genetics. For me, I found far too much of the book dealing with mechanics and technology for my taste. I found technology to actually be the primary subject of the book, Seveneves is a paean to technology with human survival as the outcome of being really clever with technology.

Which, frankly, also seemed like an undercurrent of the story. How clever the author is for understanding the latest astronautical science. Impressive, yes. Good for the reader? Not really. It causes the book to teeter from science fiction novel into being a science fiction treatise.

Which takes me to the characters. I found them rather uninteresting. Yes, they had some personalities that were distinct from each other, but even those personalities seemed mechanical. Mostly they felt like props used to carry the future forward in Stephenson’s vision. Feeling as though you are really living with these characters is not Stephenson’s forte. He’s all about the ideas and the science.

For a near 900 page book that goes from the near future to the distant future, strangely, I felt like not a lot actually happens in the story. Odd if you know the premise. An apocalypse makes the earth uninhabitable for 4,000 years. The human race attempts to survive in outer space in space-station like conditions and eventually propagate our species once the earth returns to a habitable state. Yet oddly, the actually experiences of the characters are rather small. Working to survive. Surviving. Jumping forward 5000 years to see how the species turned out. Touring the future through the eyes of one of the future generation and learning the eventual disposition and situation on Earth. As far as the lives of the characters go…there’s not much to tell. Everything happens at the level of premise and concept. Which made the book overall feel rather cold and empty.

Last subject I want to tackle is the racial theme of the book. I think race is primarily a matter of culture. Why are different skin tones or facial structures (which break down when looked at too closely) considered to be “races?” How do races relate to geographic, religious, economic, or political isolation of groups? The answers are ambiguous and race is a concept more than a reality. A concept that causes significant oppression due to how people think about it. Cops see a black man they treat him differently than a white man because of their belief system about the concept of blackness. So what does Stephenson do with the concept of race? (The following is mentioned in the description, so I do not think this is a spoiler.) He actually projects a way to make races “concrete” and not concepts through genetic engineering. He posits a future based on seven genetically engineered “races” that are intentionally, genetically differentiated from each other to have distinct characteristics. He took an ambiguous concept and with highly questionable genetic science, made it essentialist. And I felt like the way he made it happen was also extremely far-fetched. Only seven women left, hence the title of the book, and they must breed initially with artificially created Y chromosomes. A sort of cloning. I do not believe he projected real science in this case. But either way, I find it a rather unpleasant premise to spin the future this way. And further, once the seven eves reproduced through a twist on parthenogenesis, why didn’t their kids immediately start having sex with each other? Why remain relatively “pure” for thousands of years? I found that a questionable assumption as well.

The prose was nothing exciting, it was carried by the complexity of the subject matter more than complexity of grammar. Serviceable and better than pulp but uninspiring. Overall, the book is carried by the momentum of wanting to know how things turn out. I could call it “plot driven,” but really the plot itself is rather sparse as far as the humans are concerned. It’s more in terms of, what happens to the human race? How do we turn out? I imagine Seveneves doesn’t really reflect reality, but it made for an interesting thought experiment. ( )

america-centered view of the world: not only are they the only ones who managed to survive on Earth (even in two independently executed schemes), they actually are the only ones who even tried?! ( )

Awesome! ( )