Seveneves

A Novel

By: Neal Stephenson

Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal, Will Damron

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic - a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

What would happen if the world were ending?

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.

©2015 Neal Stephenson (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Odd narrator choice

Is there anything you would change about this book?

This is a tough one to rate. There are long stretches of the book that are fascinating and fast moving. And there are stretches that feel even longer that are dishwater dull. Stephenson is usually able to keep technical discussions interesting -- Cryptonomicon, for example, deals with heavily complex subjects but doesn't get boring. Seveneves does.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron ?

Not sure about who I'd have read it instead, but Ms. Kowal made some very strange choices for main characters' voices. The producer/recording engineer/whoever was sitting in the booth also wasn't paying close attention--there are more than the usual number of garbled and mispronounced words. I get it; it's a long book. But this is not anywhere close to the best of all possible recordings.

Good hard sci-fi with a human touch

Seveneves will rightly take its place in the sci-fi cannon as one of the best post-apocalyptic novels written. From the demolition of the moon, the abandonment of earth, settlement in space and the troubling re-claiming of earth, Stephenson's saga gives the hard sci-fi lover exactly what they crave in terms of exquisitely researched, cogently fictionalized detail of space-flight, orbital physics, and planetary geology while, at the same time, providing with fans of soft, social science-fiction with a nuanced glimpse into the personal, socio-political and even genetic and epigenetic ramifications of an apocalypse. Some may quibble about the science, or Stephenson's extrapolations, but no one can accuse him of not having expended serious levels of effort in gaming out all the possibilities.

That being said, Seveneves does suffer slightly from some long, dry bits of character introspection and some divergences that could have benefitted from an editor's pen. Nor can anyone accuse Stephenson of attempting much in the way of artfulness when it comes to the prose. But on the whole, it is a competently told story. Structurally, it might have benefitted from some timeline insertions. The first two thirds of the novel chronicles the expanded space-station's survivors landing on a suitable chunk of the fractured moon and then jumps five thousand years into the future, when the ancestors of those early exiles return to a revitalized earth. Although an attempt is made to fill in the gulf with some rather telling flashbacks in the third part, it does suffer a little from some rather blatant info-dumps that occur a little too conveniently to hide their necessity.

Seveneves provide the reader with some strong characters at both the beginning and in the later part of the story. One cannot accuse Stephenson of producing characters with great psychological depth, but neither can he be accused of producing altogether cardboard heroes or villains. Its fair to say that, sometimes, the choice of which characters he chooses to provide rounded portraits for are not always as narratively satisfying as they could be.

Stephenson takes on some very interesting social themes, from the uses, abuses and limits of power to the consequences of directed genetic manipulation. He also does a good job of extrapolating on the evolution of connectivity, social media and the part narrative plays in shaping our expectations of the future as well as the way we look at our histories.

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

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.

Narration: the female narrator's attempt at regional and foreign accents poor and sometimes a little frustrating, but it wasn't enough to put me off listening.

What happened to the end of the story?!?

This book was very interesting with great characters and plot. It's super long and you really get into it. However you get towards the end and all this development is still happening and bam it just ends. Maybe I missed somewhere that this was going to be a series. But if not this book ends like the author was tired of writing so he just quit. Hopefully it is a series and I'm just stupid.

A "mini trilogy" about the fate of mankind

Seveneves is an epic sci-fi story that is best experienced without knowing too much about the story. Know only that an unimaginable event occurs that results in a doomsday clock ticking down for planet Earth. This fact quickly becomes known around the globe and mankind must now face the real possibility of extinction in a short period of time. How will we as a race react to such devastating knowledge? In many different ways for sure and Neal Stephenson chronicles mankind's fate from multiple perspectives. From individuals to families, from communities to governments, and from science to religion all of the angles are explored as humanity is put to a test it was not prepared to handle.

Beyond the setup already mentioned I hesitate to go into too many specifics because I feel it would only lessen the experience of this epic tale which is told in three distinct phases. From the initial event forward each phase is compelling in its own way and different enough to be a standalone book, so you can almost consider this a mini-trilogy contained in a single novel. It is an excellent work of speculative fiction that grabbed me in a way similar to The Martian although this certainly has a larger dose of "fiction" injected into it. I consider this Stephenson's best work to date and definitely recommend it. If I was to knock it for anything I must admit that it does get a little long winded at times and even though it is epic in nature it still manages to end a bit too abruptly.  

This one is narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron and Will seems to handle his portion better than Mary, although I was not put off by the narration like some of the other reviewers. The story kept me engaged and I wouldn't shy away from listening if you prefer that to reading.

Bad Science and Worse Politics

This book pretends to be scientific, but what it is really is consists of endless technology

excerpts from Wikipedia shoved into a thin plotline with terrible characters lacking any depth.