Seveneves

The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason.

That's not a spoiler – that's the first sentence of Seveneves – but there will be spoilers along the way here. What an interesting concept: the moon explodes (the cause of which is only guessed at because, in the end, it just doesn't matter), and within a week of watching its seven fragments more or less stabilise into a familiar lunar orbit, scientists realise that it's anything but stable. Eventually, these massive chunks will start to collide with each other, and as more pieces break off, more pieces will start to collide with each other in an exponentially growing rate of bolide fragmentation, and analogous to when Blake Shelton sings The more I drink, the more I drink...the more I drink, it can't end well. 

Seveneves happens in the not-too-distant future. The International Space Station is the only habitation in space and its only unfamiliar features are an enormous asteroid that it has attached itself to and an assortment of programmable robots that are being manipulated to mine the asteroid. With an approximate timeline of two years before the Earth is expected to be bombarded with a Hard Rain of moon chunks – which will catch fire as they enter the atmosphere and burn off the lands and boil the oceans – an unprecedented level of international cooperation is put into effect in order to put as many people and resources into orbit as possible. This is the hard science fiction aspect of the novel: everything that happens during this operation is possible with today's technology – there are no Star Wars troopships or Star Trek transporters – and the believability of this section made for a fascinating read; it's easy to identify with what you can imagine. 

On the other hand, author Neal Stephenson often went off on pages-long tangents about the details of orbital mechanics (and the difficulties of coordinating movements through six dimensions) and the arcane study of the physics of moving chains. I was once intrigued to learn that the shape of the St. Louis Arch was based on a configuration from chain mechanics (it's a catenary) and also completely enchanted by that “gravity-defying chain trick” , and so was interested enough to see the energy of a whipping chain being used in weapons and transportation. But too often, Stephenson described his sciencey bits to a boring degree, and when he would combine orbital and chain mechanics, there would be head scratching moments when I was trying to imagine plane changes and apogees and delta vees – and, unfortunately, what I can't imagine, I have trouble identifying with.

Absolutely, the best part of Seveneves was the science fiction and it was intriguing to me that in this telling, the destruction of the Earth and the decimation of the human race are beyond our control; it just happens and we can skip over any notions of blame or shame. As the Hard Rain begins:

In places it took on a cellular structure as curved detonation fronts spread, contacted others, and merged into lacy foams of white arcs. It had an austere, monochromatic beauty about it. There was no fire and no light other than what cold sunlight the rocks bounced back to the eye. Later, when they began to enter the atmosphere, there would be fire and plenty of it. But for now the world was ending in a fractal blooming of dust and gravel, an apocalypse in a gravel quarry.

This was about as poetic as the writing got, and as for the characters, they weren't really the focus: indeed, some of the most developed characters seemed to have been based on real people, with Doc Dubois being a thinly veiled portrayal of Neil deGrasse Tyson; the billionaire space-tech-cowboy Sean Probst an obvious Elon Musk; and in a telling Rorschach Test of political affiliation, I've seen reviewers identify the conniving and manipulative US President Julia Bliss Fletcher as obviously being either Hillary Clinton or Sarah Palin. Other characters who survive the Big Ride – who seem to have equally little emotional reaction whether considering the loss of seven billion people or some of their own shipmates – have their flat personas explained away since, as nerds, they're all “on the spectrum”. One even refers to himself as an “Asphole” – is that a thing? No matter. After this exciting and epic survival story, on page 549 we finally learn what the title means – that out of all of humanity, there are seven fertile women left – and their mission is immediately defined:

We need brains is the bottom line. We're no hunter-gatherers anymore. We're all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn't bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It's our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds.

And I have some complaints about the breeding decisions these women make. If Moira has adequate lab facilities to design boutique babies at the genetic level, surely she would have been able to implant multiple embryos into the mamas – why would they have been satisfied, with a short window for reproducing, for having single babies at a time? If there was a need for genetic diversity, even though Luisa was post-menopausal, surely Moira could have created an embryo or two based on her genetic code and implanted them into someone else? Having Luisa's empathic skills in the new world would have been totally worth someone else carrying a child for her – especially if they were having multiple embryos implanted – which is the norm today anyway. And if at least two men made it to the Cleft, why did no one think to...um...harvest...their sperm before they died? And lastly, I'm going to assume that Neal Stephenson is familiar with Doris Lessing's The Cleft – about an all-women society who live in an obviously vagina-shaped rock formation known as “the cleft” – so if he's going to put an all-women society into a similarly shaped rock formation and grant them the technology for parthenogenesis, why would they ever even consider making men in the future? Maybe Aïda would have tried to seek power through eventually creating brutish sons, but Stephenson isn't thinking like women if he can't imagine them having this no-men-ever conversation. 

Then Seveneves skips ahead five thousand years, and again, the parts that I liked best were the descriptions of the world that had been created – and again, this is hard science fiction, with no new and futuristic technology introduced; we could presumably build the cradle and the sockets and the habitat ring ourselves. I loved this stuff. In the endnotes, Stephenson even says, “I came to understand the fact that the atmosphere contains all the energy we need to fly, and that the only thing preventing us from implementing something like Kath Two's glider is commitment of resources to development of sensors and software”. That's pretty cool. On the other hand, I was again underwhelmed by the characters. And Stephenson doesn't get a pass on this by saying that cliched behaviour is by design; that by initial genetic manipulation and countless generations of social shaping, the descendants of each Eve would have only one or two personality traits. 

Obviously, Stephenson can stretch this world out into sequels – I'd love to know more about the survival experiences of the Diggers and the Pingers and to hear back from those who left on Red Hope – and so long as he sticks to the hard scifi, I'm on board. I would have enjoyed better characters and more emotional development, but taken as what it is, Seveneves is a fun ride.