I recently read the book Seveneves, so here I am talking about it! Long story short, it’s a good sci-fi book that I recommend. Specifically, it’s a hard science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. Be warned that it is a very looong book; given both its length and that the narrative has a big shift before the last third, it kinda feels like a trilogy collected into one binding. There are no aliens or advanced tech in the first two-thirds, which makes sense since the setting is very near future. However then there’s a huge time jump, and the book picks up again 5,000 years in the future.
So again, it’s a good book that I recommend for sci-fi fans. The rest of this post has discussion of specific plot points, so SPOILER WARNING
While I greatly enjoyed the book, it is far from perfect. There were occasional tidbits that didn’t sit right with me, and here are the ones that bothered me the most:
First off, the world after the time jump didn’t really feel 5,000 years in the future. The tech was advanced in a couple notable ways, but otherwise quite pedestrian. Plus I’m not sure Stephenson quite appreciated just how long that is, when he had stuff like sheets of paper or wood-handled tools surviving all that time. The relative lack of tech advancement does have some explanations (humanity was repopulating from almost nothing, plus there was a cultural bias reminiscent of the Amish) but the stuff surviving underground was just ridiculous.
Another huge problem I had was the handling of the character Aida. Frankly, I don’t understand why the other characters let her live. Indeed, Tekla clearly wanted to kill her, and I don’t get why she didn’t. Aida was literally a murderous cannibal, for chrissake! The only explanation I could come up with was that humanity’s situation was so dire that, in order to maximize the chances of survival, they really needed to preserve every healthy young woman that they could. Before her character was introduced, the book even explicitly explained that the male crew were doing all the most dangerous tasks in order to protect the precious wombs that would be needed for repopulating. However the book doesn’t actually state this explanation, leaving just an unsatisfying mystery to why Aida wasn’t executed for her crimes.
Another problem that stuck out to me was with the central premise of humanity accepting and cooperating against impending doom. This issue I gotta admit sticks out more from my perspective after COVID hit, versus the view in 2015, when the book came out. Reading it in 2023 though, well, it’s just darkly humorous to suggest that humanity will listen to a bunch of scientists predicting apocalypse. On the one hand, sure there’s a much more visible indicator that something is happening: anyone can look in the sky and see that the moon is broken. On the other hand, the impending apocalypse is still fairly abstract, predicted to occur two years later (than the beginning of the book). puh-lease
Anyway those were my biggest issues. There were other details that bothered me (eg. the guy who was checking email while drifting into oblivion) but mostly I enjoyed the book a lot. One last thing I want to mention wasn’t a problem, but rather a surprising theme that cropped up towards the end. In the last section of the book there was mention of a ban on social media1. Until then it hadn’t occurred to me, but a lot of the problems faced in the second section of the book were either caused by or significantly worsened by misinformation spread through social media.
Although in a book this large there’s room for a lot of criticism to go around, Stephenson is pretty even-handed about everything else (eg. is government or private enterprise going to save the day? actually, both). That even-handedness makes it pretty striking that social media is portrayed as a toxic influence that future generations straight-up prohibit.
- This part reminded me of a bit in Dune. Similar to that book’s prohibition on robots, here was see a prohibition on a problematic technology. But ironically the society in Seveneves used robots heavily, and their prohibition was elsewhere.
︎
