It's minorly in the deciding of which few among the multitudes are going to be flung up into space in tin cans in an attempt to weather the apocalypse, but more in the ability of a scrappy, over-smart maker society to mobilize the entire earth in an effort to fling those tin cans skyward. The drama of the first two-thirds of Seveneves is all in orbital mechanics and bolide fragmentation rates. Once upon a time, the moon blew up, and then. The experience of reading a modern Stephenson novel is like going out drinking with 20 or 30 of the smartest people on earth, and them all deciding to play that game where someone starts a story, tells one sentence of it, ends with a conjunction, and passes it along to the next person. Neal Stephenson's previous books include Snow Crash and Anathem. It's a drier world, a rigidly mapped and exhaustively cataloged one where the first 565 pages read less like the script for an awesome moon-wrecking Michael Bay blow-em-up than a primer on global disaster preparedness. Everything that comes after matters, but none of it will ever be the same.īut then, this is a Neal Stephenson book (a modern Stephenson book, meaning post- Snow Crash/Diamond Age and, therefore, kind of post-fun) which means that the world as presented, moon or no moon, isn't really the same as ours anyway. Which is apt, I suppose, since every following action on every following page (all 900 of them) over the course of the 5,000 years of human future history that Seveneves covers (from the wonder of the moment, through the panic of realizing that earth is doomed, to the desperation of flight and survival and, finally, in a weak part three, a jump into the future to see what has become of humanity) is spawned by that opening line. No, Stephenson goes old-school mad scientist - straight for the pulp main vein and buried Saturday morning memories of Thundarr the Barbarian still ticking along in the heads of his audience, and blows up the moon. I mean, he isn't destroying LA or merely reducing some single nation to slag. And in terms of opening hooks, it's up there. That's the beginning of Neal Stephenson's newest epic, Seveneves. "The moon blew up with no warning and with no apparent reason." Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Seveneves Author Neal Stephenson
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