A Review of Seveneves

Neal Stephenson's Seveneves is a vastly entertaining novel. It also has a few problems that almost made me stop reading right from the start. The premise is that a mysterious agent blows up the moon into seven pieces. Neal Degrasse Tyson stand-in Doc Dubois, an astronomer, figures out that the moon's pieces are going to smash together and create bolides, which will bombard the surface of the earth en mass in two years, destroying all life. Other world governments reach the same conclusion, and all of earth unites to build the Cloud Ark, a transformation of the International Space Station into a habitat capable of sustaining the remnants of the human race for thousands of years. The Casting of the Lots takes place, where only a handful of viable young people are chosen from every country on earth to be sent up to join the working crew of Izzy (the space station; Stephenson loves nicknames) and aid the Cloud Ark project. Humanity takes the news of their imminent destruction rather well; people start coming together to launch vital supplies into space and perform research. Stephenson published this novel in 2015, but I think the idea that world governments would come together in the event of a world-ending catastrophe to be just as improbable then as it is today (can you really see Trump or Putin endorsing the Cloud Ark?). The Cloud Ark project, after all, is a pretty stupid idea--the characters of the novel even believe it to be a PR stunt designed to prevent mass rioting--namely, because humanity wouldn't have much of a chance in space. The novel, of course, explores the difficulties of survival to a degree--characters die of radiation poisoning and bolide strikes--but it never tells the reader how they create a sustainable food system, which would be the number one issue. It seems incredibly unrealistic that one of the big space capable states like the US or China wouldn't proceed unilaterally with a plan to at least attempt to save the planet. The population of earth would demand such an action, and there's no way people would be satisfied with the half-assed Cloud Ark project surviving them. They have two years so why not try to redirect some of those moon pieces? Hell, launch the entire nuclear arsenal of earth up there and try to vaporize the moon before the bolides form. That's probably a dumb idea, but I guarantee some state would try it. Also, it makes more sense to try to burrow underground and wait out the Hard Rain (what the novel calls the thousand-year bombardment) than to launch up into space. This actually happens in the novel, but the Diggers as they're called act independent of any government, and they're a surprise to the survivors of the Hard Rain.

Eventually, due to a rebellion called the Swarm as well as bolide strikes, the population of the human race is reduced to eight females, seven of whom are fertile, the titular seven eves. One of the survivors is the geneticist Moria (perhaps a nod to Moria Mactaggert, who was a geneticist in the X-Men Universe) who agrees to use her skills to create seven distinct human races, each of which will be specialized in some manner to aid human survival. Tekla, the athletic, stoic Russian, creates a race of soldiers; Camila, who disdains violence, makes her descendants passive. Let me add that until this point, Seveneves presents itself as hard science fiction. I wouldn't object to this genetic nonsense in an episode of Star Trek, but Seveneves made me read through pages and pages discussing orbital mechanics, and the back cover categorizes the novel as hard sci-fi. Moria somehow synthesizes a y chromosome, which is pretty crazy, but the real kicker is that she has identified which genes pass on specific traits like "discipline" and "heroism." Apparently this is complete nonsense, since even something like height is hard to pin down to just genes. This also seems like a dumb strategy in general, because why would you want the survivors of the human race to be at odds with each other? Aida, one of the eves, specifically engineers her descendants to counter the others. Why did Moria go along with this? Earlier in the novel, Aida and her gang tried to take over the space station, killing many people. They also resorted to cannibalism when their food supplies dwindled. Why did she get any say in how her descendants turned out? The novel also kind of skips over how Moria would ensure genetic variation with just eight survivors.

The final part of the novel skips ahead five thousand years, during which the seven distinct human races have constructed a habitat ring around earth and engaged in a project called TeraReform to make earth habitable again. This part of the book was pretty standard sci-fi, and too speculative to called hard science fiction, which was fine. I actually enjoyed the latter part at least as much as the earlier chapters, even if it seemed like it was from another novel.

Despite my nick-picking, I really enjoyed Seveneves. If you ignore the incredulity of the initial premise as well as the hard sci-fi designation, then it's a true page-turner. This is the third Stephenson book I've read, and these problems crop up in his other work, so a fan might not even notice.