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Comment by BillSaysThis | Hacker News Reader

Seveneves by Neil Stephenson

I read Seveneves this year as well but came away disappointed. Some of the science was good (orbital mechanics, genetic engineering) but the rest of the science and engineering was fairly poor[0]. Couple that with the questionable decisions routinely made by many characters and it's a very weak novel overall.

[0] In particular, they did not (and physically could not) have launched a broad enough manufacturing capability for the remnants of humanity to have had a realistic chance of long-term survival. The practicality of the Seveneves themselves did was also at best dubious from a biological and other standpoints.

That universe seemed to have a much more developed space industry than we have, indicated by the fact that they attached a whole asteroid to the ISS.

Stephenson does seem to have a history of fudging a bit of the realism to drive the plot, like anybody, but he seems to do it in a way that says "wink wink, I know this couldn't happen but work with me people ;)"

This is by far the most Stephenson book that he's written. Hopefully without giving away any spoilers, the Engineer-types are the most enlightened good guys, the Soft-Sciences folks are about as evil as it's possible to get, and the book ends very abruptly not once, but twice.

If you like Stephenson, read this, but if you've never read one of his books before, I would not recommend this as a first.

The first 2/3rds of the book is just too heavy duty and depressing to be much fun for me. I wish that were some kind of brief initial thing so that the rest of the book could be in the 'new world' part which is fun and interesting and barely explored.

> barely explored

That's what I hated about the second half. It's like inverse Ringworld - you know how the world was built, and why, but you don't know much about the inhabitants, and your tour guides aren't very interesting, either.

I liked the first half - it was interesting to read about them solving problems, even though the problems - and sometimes the solutions - were atrocious.

> the problems - and sometimes the solutions - were atrocious. reply

I find the real world has enough of that - I want my fiction to be more escapist and fun and uplifting.

I would have liked a bit more fleshing out in the "second" part as well, but it does seem to get the point across, and at that point he would have had to write two volumes if that book was going to get any bigger.

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