New Media Are Evil: the harm to the Swarm caused by Spacebook is enough to make social media taboo among the spacers. For me the first two thirds of the book were really heavy going. Even thought Stephenson introduces a long list of characters, it’s hard to get into their innermost thoughts despite the dire situation facing them. As crisis follows crisis, the odds get more and more insurmountable. There are plenty of fascinating details, but the pace of progress is really slow. Finally humanity finds itself down to just seven women, or “seveneves”. With extinction looming, these women must make a momentous decision on how to survive. Their council sets the stage for the creation of seven races of humans that evolve from them. If I had to put my finger on what prompted me to leave off a star from what, in all fairness, is a pretty magnificent book, it was the ending. It is an iconically satisfying hollywood ending in which all major threads are almost too neatly tied up. And, of course, we are left with the tease of a whole parallel survival saga to be satisfied in a sequel Astronomers name the pieces of the moon and watch as they dance around each other, occasionally colliding. Life goes on with little change...until one astronomer determines that those collisions are going to send debris toward the earth in the form of fiery bolides.

The Orbits of Seveneves" (PDF). PRINCIPIUM - Issue 20 (February 2018), p. 16–18. The Initiative for Interstellar Studies . Retrieved 17 December 2018. Residents of the Cloud Ark disagree about the best way to organize their new society. One faction wants to break away from the central hub of the ISS in favor of a decentralized swarm of arklets. They will occupy a higher orbit well out of the range of the Moon debris. Doc Harris suggests taking refuge in the “Cleft,” a crevasse on what remains of the Moon. Julia Flaherty starts to draw followers to her and raises support for the decentralization plan. Earth-Shattering Kaboom: Averted. It's mentioned that unlike how movies portray exploding planetary bodies, the moon's destruction was silent, the effects not even immediate until some minutes after the fact when the dust cleared. Consider the quandary of being Neal Stephenson. You have written several of the longest, most complex and most bleeding-edge books of the past 20 years. There are characters and ideas so abstract that perhaps only three or four other writers are in your league now: Peter F. Hamilton (Void Series), Dan Simmons (Hyperion), Alastair Reynolds (Revelation Space Trilogy, Terminal World), Richard K. Morgan (Altered Carbon) and most recently Charles Stross. (Halting State and Rule 34.) Stephenson does action-adventure pretty well, and there is plenty of that here. The end of the Earth is a compelling starting point and survival of the species concerns will keep you engaged. Will this work? Will that? Who will live? Who won’t?

Tropes used:

No Transhumanism Allowed: The Blue have an unspoken cultural taboo against body augmentation; The Red, not so much. Crosses the Line Twice: In-Universe, when Ty meets Bard. Ty makes a joke about worrying about Neoanders cannibalizing his people to Bard, a Neoander descended from the Eve known for cannibalism. The narration notes that the joke is so offensive that it will either make Bard an enemy for life, or make him laugh and serve as a good ice breaker. The latter ends up being the case. When Endurance reaches the safety of the Cleft, there are only eight female survivors, only seven of whom (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) are able to bear children. Moira can still use her genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by automictic parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the seven "Eves" gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced.

Humans Through Alien Eyes: The Diggers and the Spacers both perceive themselves as humans and each-other as aliens, though perhaps more so the Diggers than the Spacers. Retirony: Inverted, Doc Dubois survives to see Endurance landed on Cleft and succumbs to his cancer shortly after a spacewalk to see it there. 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. Jason Sheehan, reviewing “Seveneves” for National Public Radio, came up with this apt description: “Where most hard SF really means ‘a bunch of ray guns, then some talk about wormholes,’ he plays with hard ballistics, hard genetics, hard sociology. And what thrills me is that he makes it interesting. That he makes life and death in space about actual life and death — about the million things that will kill you and the two or three things that really smart people can do to stay alive.”Moira Crewe: A geneticist sent aboard to ensure humanity's heterozygosity, Crewe was raised in London and obtained degrees from Cambridge and Harvard, and previously worked on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. The loss of the physical Human Genetic Archive makes Crewe's talents extremely valuable. Disability Superpower: Sonar Taxlaw says that one of the factors in the decision to make her a "cyc" was her autism.

Not so much "outgrown" as "beaten out of them." The narration dryly notes that humanity being whittled down to eight surviving women more or less killed the idea that God was running things. As a result, the Spacers don't really have a concept of God, but a form of nontheistic spirituality called dukh is practiced. None of my criticisms should put you off reading this novel if you're a fan of hard sci-fi or post-apocalyptic fiction. Its structural and narrative flaws don't outweigh its merit as one of the very best treatments of the end of world scenario. Everybody Has Lots of Sex: In-Universe, as the coming of a Mass Extinction Event becomes apparent, most of the people left on Earth devote their last months to a healthy amount of boning.I liked the science. It seemed researched and thorough and plausible. And fascinating. Got me interested. Some sections are less riveting, but they play into a general feeling of the book being thorough and comprehensive. Part 3 takes place 5,000 years later. Three billion humans live in Earth’s orbit and are comprised of seven distinct races. These races have divided into two main factions, Red and Blue, engaged in a cold war. They are in the process of terraforming Earth and are able to recreate a breathable atmosphere and life-sustaining conditions. When they arrive, they discover they are not alone. Those members of Earth who burrowed beneath the surface were able to reproduce and sustain themselves. These form two additional races, “Diggers,” who mined beneath the Earth, and “Pingers,” who lived in submarines in ocean trenches. Stephenson first began planning his novel around 2006, while he was working at Blue Origin. He observed: "Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low Earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. Having been raised on the idea of 'Space, the Final Frontier', I was both appalled and fascinated by the possibility that it might instead become an impenetrable ceiling only a hundred or so miles above our heads." [2] Such a collisional domino effect of satellite destruction is known as the Kessler syndrome. Technology Porn: Well over 50% of the narrative is dedicated to describing the science and technology that allows humanity to get into, survive and move around in space. At the Council of Seven Eves, Dinah gets fed up with the arguing, goes outside, and then slaps an explosive on the window with a 10-minute countdown. Ivy notes that, apparently, Dinah has decided if the women can't resolve their differences and figure out how to move forward in that time, the human race doesn't deserve the chance. They come to a decision in less than three minutes.

The novel is set sometime in the near future, though the exact date is not specified. An unknown phenomenon causes the Moon to shatter into seven pieces. The fragments collide with each other, and astronomer “Doc” Dubois Harris explains that the collisions will increase. Soon, smaller fragments of the Moon will enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Within two years, those fragments will form what he calls a “Hard Rain” of meteors that will burn up in the atmosphere. The Earth’s atmosphere will become so hot, the oceans will boil away and the planet will become inhospitable to life.The Ymir expedition and the group sent to recover them both sacrifice themselves provide the Ark with water resources. Ariane Casablancova: A quarantine agent. Julian and secretly a mole for Red. She ensures the creation of a Red-Digger treaty. She is a descendant of Eve Julia. Shown Their Work: Whatever aspect of space migration and orbital mechanics you're curious about, one of the infodumps probably has it covered. Creating deep, resonating characters is not Stephenson’s strong point, though they are interesting people who are existing in this spectacular set of circumstances that showcases how creative a writer can be and still stay within the bounds of known science. This is an epic, post-apocalyptic book made more scary because there is no place in the shattered remains of humanity for people like me.