Seveneves

I was hesitant to pick up this book. Previously, I had enjoyed several of Neal Stephenson’s novels while finding others a bit of a slog. I was skeptical of the premise of Seveneves (the Moon is mysteriously destroyed with disastrous consequences for Earth) because it seemed too simplistic and apocalyptic. Oh boy, was I wrong!

This book delves into the politics of hard choices, the costs of survival, and the small and large-scale tragedies that come during the unrest. The science in this book is astounding: orbital mechanics, genetic engineering, space construction, geophysics and biology, and on and on. But… show more.

I love it when a book shows me the real consequences of something I’d never considered, such as this book’s breakup of the moon. It creates true fear that hooks me into a story because once I see the truth, I find it hard not to believe it. 

Everything that follows feels exactly the way Earth scientists would really deal with an apocalyptic event…and the way humans would, too, as they jockey for superiority and power. (Psychology is a science, too!) Exciting events are always grounded in the consequences of physics and biology…including the book's name, which took most of… show more.

In Seveneves the crises start coming and never stop coming.

The sudden, inexplicable destruction of the Moon and the resultant catastrophic rain of debris destroys habitability on Earth. A small population of refugees escapes into space to keep the flame of humanity alight.

Naturally, the inhospitality of interplanetary space and conflicting factions of survivors plunges the journey into resource depletion, rampant cancer, attempted coups, and a population bottleneck, but I found that the ending concludes a surprising story of human connection, even when the definition of human has radically changed. 

The time is the present, the moon explodes, and the people of earth have just a year to figure out a way to escape using current technology. A fascinating deep dive into the limits of what we can accomplish today with current-day engineering if we put the whole world’s mind to it, with loving detail put into explaining orbital mechanics and reproductive biology. But I’m most interested because as the catastrophe causes all of our institutions to start to dissolve, forcing humanity to rebuild them, the novel recapitulates a lot of the themes of trust in institutions across human history… show more.

This is an intriguing foray into the potential evolution of our own species into many sub-species. We are taken on a journey of evolutionary discovery. I was absorbed in understanding the characteristics of the sub-species Neal Stephenson wove into the story. Whilst very different, in terms of exploring evolutionary offshoots of our own species, Seveneves reminded me of HG Wells’ The Time Machine.