{"id":10085,"date":"2015-07-04T09:05:13","date_gmt":"2015-07-04T13:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=10085"},"modified":"2015-07-04T09:05:13","modified_gmt":"2015-07-04T13:05:13","slug":"seveneves-by-neal-stephenson-library-of-babel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2015\/07\/04\/seveneves-by-neal-stephenson-library-of-babel\/","title":{"rendered":"Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seveneves<\/em> is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book– 700-something “pages” in electronic form– and contains yet another bid for “best first paragraph ever”:<\/p>\n

\nThe moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The rest of the book involves what follows on from that. Namely, the destruction of basically all life on Earth.<\/p>\n

I should say up front that this was, on the whole, a very enjoyable book. In a lot of ways, it’s what I wanted but didn’t get from The Three-Body Problem<\/em><\/a>. Stephenson writes some of the best infodumps in fiction, and this book is full of long discourses about various subjects– the physics of whips, orbital mechanics, space travel, epigenetics– that somehow manage to avoid being deadly dull. This is largely due to the fact that his characters are very well drawn, with clear personalities, and those personalities are reflected in the infodumping.<\/p>\n

For a 700-plus page book, this also moves along pretty briskly, and engagingly. It kept me up late a couple of nights, and one morning after reading the just-before-the-apocalypse bits, I turned my alarm clock off when it started beeping, on the grounds that the world was ending, so why get up to go to work? It took a little while before I recalled that was just really immersive fiction.<\/p>\n

So, I enjoyed it, and recommend it, and absent another year of stupid shenanigans would be very surprised not to see it up for a Hugo next year.<\/p>\n

That said, there are some odd aspects to thing.<\/p>\n

For one thing, it’s really two books awkwardly pasted together. The first section, about the apocalypse following the destruction of the Moon and the efforts to save something of humanity in space habitats is a complete and fairly satisfying story in itself. Had they packaged this and sold it as a single volume, people would even say that Stephenson had managed a satisfying ending for a change…<\/p>\n

The second section picks up in the very distant future, with (obviously) a completely different set of characters, and a very different plot. The earlier story obviously plays a huge part, but again, this could’ve been packaged up as a far-future sequel. The main in-story reason for putting the two together in one books (distinct from the marketing reason “people don’t buy short books these days”) seems to be that the second section is devoted to firing some guns that were ostentatiously placed on the metaphorical mantel in the first bit, but that’s hardly an insurmountable obstacle.<\/p>\n

As to the question of endings, the second part is much less successful in that regard than the first. It pretty much just stops, after setting up a couple more Big Questions that may or may not be hooks for a sequel (I don’t know if he’s said that he’s planning a follow-up). Which is fairly characteristic of Stephenson, really.<\/p>\n

Also characteristic of Stephenson is the tendency to lean very heavily on a handful of things that are either scientific “hot topics”– epigenetics being the main example here– or some cool thing that Stephenson apparently learned about between the last book and this one. In this case, it’s the physics of whips, which gets a long-ish infodump early on, and then becomes central to the technology of the future in a way that seems a little improbable, but just oozes panache.<\/p>\n

I also found it harder than usual to avoid matching characters in the near-future, pre-apocalypse section with real-world analogues– my mental image of “Doc Dubois” is pretty much Neil deGrasse Tyson, Sean Probst is Elon Musk, JBF is HRC, etc. I’m not sure whether this represents a general flaw, or was just because the central folks here happened to line up with people I’m more aware of than, say, possible analogues to Reamde<\/em> characters in the world of videogame development.<\/p>\n

Finally, there’s some not-all-that-subtle politics in there, but it’s fairly easy to skip past, at least for me. Others might not find it so; if you’re allergic to Stephenson’s brand of techno-libertarianism, well, consider yourself warned.<\/p>\n

Again, those quibbles aside, I enjoyed this quite a bit, and found it a very good antidote to the things that irritated me about The Three-Body Problem<\/em>. If the open questions in the later section of the book were, in fact, hooks for a sequel, I’ll happily read it; if not, I’ll add it to the “Not Good With Endings” column, and happily read whatever he decides to write next instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seveneves is the latest from Neal Stephenson, and true to form is a whopping huge book– 700-something “pages” in electronic form– and contains yet another bid for “best first paragraph ever”: The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12… Continue reading Seveneves by Neal Stephenson [Library of Babel]<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,18,37,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-booklog","category-books","category-pop_culture","category-sf","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}