Seveneves, Neal Stephenson
Things Neal Stephenson is good at:
• World building
• Technical complexity
• Social complexity
• Getting away with info dumps (sometimes)
Things NS is not so good at:
• Pacing
• Endings
• Character development
Seveneves is either a 600 page hard sci-fi novel about how to survive the end of the world with a 280 page epilogue about what happens to the survivors' 250x-great grand children, or it is a 600 page prologue to the 280 pages of speculative fiction main action. It reminds me of Kill Bill, volumes one and two, not for content but for abrupt change of style.
NS wastes no time getting to the point. The first sentence of the novel reads "The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason." This is good news for a reader like me who barely made it through the first 200 pages of Crytonomicon before things got interesting, but it is bad news for 99.99999% of the novel's human population in a rather Late Heavy Bombardment sort of way.
I thought NS's description of how the doomed population rallied for the cause was a bit Roddenberryesque, but once the main action got underway, the story was a mostly satisfying social/political/technical puzzle. However, it could have been improved with some judicious editing. Scores of pages were devoted to things like the six-point parameters of orbital mechanics and the compounding effects of delta vee, and how to leverage those effects in successive orbital apogees. I am a hard sci-fi geek and I loves me this shit, but even I found myself skimming and looking for NS to get to the point. These passages reminded me of Tyrion Lannister's trip down the Rhoyne in a Dance with Dragons or Elmore Leonard's advice to writers to "try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."
The culminating crisis in the first part of the novel is okay, if a bit abbreviated. Then turn the page and it is 5,000 years later. Main characters become historic figures and their new main character descendants are distinct human subspecies. There is a lot of backstory and info dumping, but it works better here than the physics lessons in part one. The political, social, and human evolution NS posits all worked for me. I liked his vision, the world he described, and the plot the new characters engaged with. Unfortunately, it ended too abruptly. Unlike the first story that I was well ready to leave behind, I wanted to spend more time in this world. It would have been better if NS had spun off the second story into its own novel and given it room to breathe. Either that or shave 100 pages of low value physics exposition from part one and give those pages over to the more interesting story.
Not NS's best, but even an average Stevenson is better than the competition. Alas, he never does get around to telling us why the moon exploded.
• World building
• Technical complexity
• Social complexity
• Getting away with info dumps (sometimes)
Things NS is not so good at:
• Pacing
• Endings
• Character development
Seveneves is either a 600 page hard sci-fi novel about how to survive the end of the world with a 280 page epilogue about what happens to the survivors' 250x-great grand children, or it is a 600 page prologue to the 280 pages of speculative fiction main action. It reminds me of Kill Bill, volumes one and two, not for content but for abrupt change of style.
NS wastes no time getting to the point. The first sentence of the novel reads "The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason." This is good news for a reader like me who barely made it through the first 200 pages of Crytonomicon before things got interesting, but it is bad news for 99.99999% of the novel's human population in a rather Late Heavy Bombardment sort of way.
I thought NS's description of how the doomed population rallied for the cause was a bit Roddenberryesque, but once the main action got underway, the story was a mostly satisfying social/political/technical puzzle. However, it could have been improved with some judicious editing. Scores of pages were devoted to things like the six-point parameters of orbital mechanics and the compounding effects of delta vee, and how to leverage those effects in successive orbital apogees. I am a hard sci-fi geek and I loves me this shit, but even I found myself skimming and looking for NS to get to the point. These passages reminded me of Tyrion Lannister's trip down the Rhoyne in a Dance with Dragons or Elmore Leonard's advice to writers to "try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."
The culminating crisis in the first part of the novel is okay, if a bit abbreviated. Then turn the page and it is 5,000 years later. Main characters become historic figures and their new main character descendants are distinct human subspecies. There is a lot of backstory and info dumping, but it works better here than the physics lessons in part one. The political, social, and human evolution NS posits all worked for me. I liked his vision, the world he described, and the plot the new characters engaged with. Unfortunately, it ended too abruptly. Unlike the first story that I was well ready to leave behind, I wanted to spend more time in this world. It would have been better if NS had spun off the second story into its own novel and given it room to breathe. Either that or shave 100 pages of low value physics exposition from part one and give those pages over to the more interesting story.
Not NS's best, but even an average Stevenson is better than the competition. Alas, he never does get around to telling us why the moon exploded.
