Seveneves

Since Maxwell & Zara where on Srping Break this week we decided to go camping. The original thought was to perhaps do a backpacking trip, which is how I happened upon Fiery Gizzard and why we ended up spending a long weekend at South Cumberland State Park. Since I was taking the day off Friday too, I felt like it was time to bite the bullet and read Seveneves. I'd read Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash a few years back and really enjoyed it. Well, the ideas were interesting if some of the science and the human societal development was a little ridiculous.

Seveneves, weighing in at almost 900 pages is a somewhat larger undertaking. Being that I am often unable to rip myself out of a fictional universe until I have completed reading about it, this book really required more than an evening to read. I was not disappointed with that decision. While at some points Stephenson slips into some Tom-Clancy-esque descriptions of the technology, for the most part the book keeps up a reasonable pace. As someone who really enjoyed Tom Clancy in my teen years I may not be the best judge though...

*** SPOILERS AHEAD ***

The book opens with the destruction of the moon, an event that is never fully explained, which sets off a chain of events that leads to the surface of the earth becoming basically uninhabitable. Fortunately humanity sees the "Hard Rain" coming and sends a remnant into outer space, below ground, and below the seas to survive. Most of the story follows those in space, because, well, space is cool.

Stephenson's use of physics at a plot device channeled some of Clarke's best work and I ate it up. Using an asteroid as shield to protect the ark was reminscent of The Songs of Distant Earth, while the human side of the story brought to bear all the frailties and violence of the rebooted Battlestar Galatica - an homage he makes explict at one point by having a character sarcastically enjoin "so say we all". And that is the trait of great artists, right? They steal.

After setting up camp Thursday evening I started the book and had a bit of time Friday morning to read, but then we spent the afternoon wandering down the Fiery Gizzard Trail. We gawked at the climbers and tried some climbing ourselves. Foster Falls was pretty swollen from the recent rains and the "Hard Rain" which in Seveneves was to cook the atmosphere and pummel the surface had yet to happen. It was a short ~4 mile hike but we took our time and were quite tired afterward.

By the campfire cooking dinner and chatting I didn't get much reading done until the kids had gone to bed. I would say Part 1 is pretty upbeat, being that all of humanity is coming together. Stephenson also steals pretty blatently from real life for his characters. There is a Niel Degrasse Tyson character: Doc Dubois Harris. There is a Malala Yousafzai character: Camila. There is a Hillary Clinton character: Julia Bliss Flaherty. There is an Elon Musk character: Sean Probst. And others where the similarities are not so striking.

Then humanity gets wiped out on the surface of the Earth. One Eve, Ivy, says goodbye to her fiance who is in the submarine survival program which (she does not realize) is a secret government project. Another Eve, Dinah, says goodbye to her father who has built a private underground project. The surface is to be rendered uninhabitable by millenia of "Hard Rain", so they know they will never meet again.

Then comes part 2, where everything gets really, really dark. The vain, self-centered Hillary Clinton character, J.B.F., goes full BSG and in her quest for power kills something like 20% of what remains of humanity and splits the space survivors into two factions. The Elon Musk character, who has his own space progam and asteroid mining operation, selflessly saves the day by fetching a watery comet for them to make water with. The Niel Degrasse Tyson character saves the day time and again with his physics. But it isn't enough. The main group on the expanded ISS (called Izzy) using an asteroid as a shield is slowly decimated. An even worse fate befalls the J.B.F. led group that broke off. They fight amongst themselves for power, and are eventually driven to cannibalism. The second act ends with the cannibals killing off the last men as they attack Izzy as it is landing on a big chunk of the moon where there is a Cleft to hide in.

So Saturday we did a roughly 13 mile hike. That was fairly tiring. It was late when we got back, but we saw waterfalls and a river (the Collins) that disappears underground and comes out later only to disappear again. Ascending into a cave with stalagites hanging from the ceiling out of which the river flowed was a highlight. It was a day well spent with the kids. Although it may have killed Zinny. She's still wobbly on her feet and licking her footpads today.

Seveneves in a twist, doesn't refer to the 7 pieces of moon right after it broke up as we all thought! It's actually the 7 women who survived. But how can they rebuild humanity with only women, and only 7 of them? Let the hand-waving begin! I had to just pretend that this part wasn't in there, because Stephenson went into way too many technological leaps ahead here to be believeable.

Part 3, naturally, is millenia later. While this makes sense from a technological advancement and simple reproductive math standpoint, Stephenson is a poor student of history if he thinks culture, language, and memory will change so little in that time period. But, he needed the time to get to the cool advanced technology he wanted to showcase. And it is cool. The plot here is a little hokey though, as a group representing each of the 7 human races (because the descendents didn't mix in 5000 years) set out on a secret mission to meet up with survivors that have now come out on the surface. When the submariners walk out of the waters in Alaska with grey skin and folds over everything, the silliness reaches it's apex. Fortunately it ends there. Except an epilogue where Stephenson randomly decided to get preachy about "the Purpose" of life.

Today the rain came, so I ended up reading the last bit at home. Now Cara & I are at Starbucks - another kind of camping as our internet is out again. Reading the above it might sound like I didn't like Seveneves. Quite the contrary! Everyone should read it.