Seveneves - Neal Stephenson
You want to love Seveneves. You do. You want to love it because, well, Neal Stephenson wrote it and it’s a massive volume filled with big characters and massive (as well as micro) technology and huge ideas that are described in careful, glittering detail. You want to love it because it’s about as big a novel as they come, post-apocalyptic speculative fiction that pares the human race down to the bare minimum and then keeps on going. Most of all, you want to love it because it’s big, big, big!
Something – no one will ever know what, we assume – shattered the moon into seven giant pieces. It looked awfully darned cool at first, until a couple of big domes realized that those big pieces would continue to bang into each other, chipping off ever-smaller chunks until millions of bits the size of Toyotas began raining down on Earth – and once that happened, it would be all over but the shouting. The hurry-up plan developed to save the human race? Ship a few thousand of them into space, accompanied by as many defining artifacts of humanity as possible and carrying the seeds (genetic material) necessary to start over: a Noah’s Ark, 21st-century style, built around Izzy: the International Space Station complex.
It worked… sort of. Despite the best efforts of a whole lot of heroes – men and women who accidentally found themselves thrust into a role of “protector of the race” – the ark concept only worked up to a point. Attrition just happens in space: meteorites, accidents, the occasional murder, explosive decompression, solar flares, desertion, infighting, radiation poisoning… all in all, about 99.999999% of the human race succumbed: anyone on the surface of Earth and all but a paltry few in space. That long chain of attrition left only the “seven Eves” to start over (fortunately, one of the women was a trained geneticist…). Millennia later, their descendants returned to the home planet. Surprise…
At almost 900 pages, Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves is a massive tome right up there (in page count, anyway) with his earlier novel Anathem. It’s a long, long, long exploration of the human condition as seen through the eyes of just a few main characters, the majority of whom are female. A casual reading suggests that at least 50 pages are given over to (somewhat repetitive) discussion of orbital mechanics, though it’s been balanced by some quite inventive concepts for space habitats.
For more than 500 pages of his novel, Stephenson conducts a sort of written version of The Apprentice: billions on the planet are “fired” by the rain of chunks of the Moon, while in space a handful of heroes commit various forms of suicide in a desperate attempt to save what little remains of their species. When the survivors find themselves safe haven from which to relaunch civilization, there are still personalities to consider. That’s where the emphasis of the final 300 pages of Seveneves lies; in a study of seven “races” descended from the Eves, races defined not just by skin, hair, eyes and other physical traits; but also by their – for lack of a better word – personalities. According to Stephenson, being either a saint or a bitch is genetic…
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Seveneves, for all its drama, is not a particularly exciting read. Stephenson, as any good speculative fiction author will, carries several current trends to their logical conclusions – chief among them, the juvenile tendency to create a “team Edward/team Jacob” dichotomy and the disturbing ability of social media to strip logic out of the thought process. Cults of personality and political sausage-making also rear their ugly heads. Stephenson’s thesis is, apparently, that even in a microcosm, humanity’s frailties will out.
Should you read Seveneves? By all means: but don’t expect a gripping yarn that keeps you reading until the wee hours, for – a few chapters excepted – the pace of the novel is more glacial. It’s a powerful read, but be prepared to set it aside from time to time: you’ll want some headspace to think.
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