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Sep. 25th, 2015 11:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretSeveneves by Neal Stephenson
Seveneves is a massive, nearly 900 page long book, and I plowed through it in a week. I probably read it too quickly, honestly- there's enough depth that it would reward a reread. But the speed with which I read it testifies to the clarity of the prose and the excitement and enjoyment of the reading experience. Seveneves is pretty fucking awesome.
The title carries (at least) two meanings, both Biblical: On the one hand, Seven Eves is a reference to the time creation took (And it was evening and it was morning, seven days). As Seveneves records an apocalypse of mankind, it is in Northrop Frye's double mirror structure an antitype of creation. The other meaning has to do with the post-apocalyptic second half of the book, wherein Genesis is repeated after humanity is reborn from the wombs of seven women- seven new Eves. Otherwise the book is full to the brim of Genesis references, allusions to arks and Noahs, characters named Dinah, objects named ONAN, and so on and so on. This is, obviously, catnip to me.
As far as style goes, Seveneves is pretty singular. In a way it is Stephenson's version of The Martian, overloaded with intensely geeky explanations of orbital mechanics and janky space engineering projects, and for this lover of engineering porn it is delightful in the same way, but it is a shallow way of reading Seveneves to see it as being only about engineering porn. Neither is it right to think of it as a competence porn narrative about humanity's ability to use brains to solve problems. Rather, I think most of the actual words in Seveneves are distractions for a colossal act of literary sleight of hand... What I think Seveneves is actually about is not the micromanagement of massive engineering projects by brilliant minds, but about what happens when those minds look away.
I'm hesitant to discuss in too much detail the later events of the book, which best confirm this thesis. Seveneves is not a book that is very dependent on twists and spoilers, and those that do happen are typically telegraphed miles in advance, but the twists are nonetheless effective. So instead I'll discuss one of the earlier twists.
The basic structure of the plan to save humanity is to construct a 'Cloud Ark' capable of sustaining humanity through the figurative 40 days of rain caused by the destruction of the moon. This consists of the ISS as a central skeleton and hundreds of 'arklet's swarming around the ISS as cheap, efficient, and importantly, redundant habitats for those who can't fit on the ISS. Because if ISS is hit by a rock, a lot of people die. If an arklet is hit, only a few people die. So the bulk of the population of the escapees from Earth live in arklets. They are mostly young, brilliant men and women selected for their potential rather than for their competency, and so they are not capable of the engineering, leadership, and decision-making that is handled by the general population of engineers and scientists on the ISS. Why are they there if they cannot immediately contribute? Because they are believed to be capable of being trained to be the next generation, and because they are reproductively fertile with long lives ahead of them.
The tension between the engineers, whose lives are overfilled with the stress of ensuring the survival of mankind, and the arkies, who have little to do but maintain a yeast garden and hang out on space facebook, is magnified by the fact that all are suffering from the PTSD of seeing the rest of humanity destroyed. And this tension ought to be the proper subject of Stephenson's narrative, except that he instead focuses on the engineering porn up until the point where it boils over in lethal rebellion. And even as the rebellion is happening, he keeps flashing over to a small set of engineers that is trying to steer an icy asteroid back to the ISS to provide fuel.
If Stephenson did this once, we might accuse him of missing the human drama for his astro-nerdiness, but he does it six or seven times over the course of the novel, leading one to suspect instead that it is the point. And he does it most spectacularly at the novel's midpoint, when he does a "5000 Years Later" time jump that is one of the braver novelistic tricks I've seen in ages. Stephenson is interested in how interconnected the world is both vertically and horizontally. He's interested in how the influence of those whose actions we weren't paying attention to influence our lives, and he demonstrates this interest by not recording those actions, so that all we can see is the consequences. The effect is pretty startling- you are sucked deeper and deeper into the retro-rockets, and then with jarring suddenness he reveals how the social milieu has shifted underneath you.
The actions of the last survivors on mankind before the 5000 year jump were recorded on video in extreme detail. In the post-5K world, this video, thousands and thousands of hours worth, studied by historians and mystics for millenia, has coalesced into a quasi-Biblical text known as The Epic. Its protagonists lend their names to proverbs and cautionary tales. In other words, the post-5K humanity has the opposite problem that we have with our Bible- we wonder if our Biblical heroes are real, wonder what the circumstances of their lives really were like, wonder what kind of conversations they had before they made world-changing decisions. For the post-5K humanity, they can watch and rewatch the actions of the heroes of their Epic, and they live in the enormous, shadows left by their actions, shadows that Dinah and Doob and Ivy and Markus and Julia and Aida barely had any awareness of projecting.
Seveneves is a deceptively colossal undertaking for this reason, and the result is mesmerizing and thought-provoking in the way we demand of our great science fiction.
Seveneves is a massive, nearly 900 page long book, and I plowed through it in a week. I probably read it too quickly, honestly- there's enough depth that it would reward a reread. But the speed with which I read it testifies to the clarity of the prose and the excitement and enjoyment of the reading experience. Seveneves is pretty fucking awesome.
The title carries (at least) two meanings, both Biblical: On the one hand, Seven Eves is a reference to the time creation took (And it was evening and it was morning, seven days). As Seveneves records an apocalypse of mankind, it is in Northrop Frye's double mirror structure an antitype of creation. The other meaning has to do with the post-apocalyptic second half of the book, wherein Genesis is repeated after humanity is reborn from the wombs of seven women- seven new Eves. Otherwise the book is full to the brim of Genesis references, allusions to arks and Noahs, characters named Dinah, objects named ONAN, and so on and so on. This is, obviously, catnip to me.
As far as style goes, Seveneves is pretty singular. In a way it is Stephenson's version of The Martian, overloaded with intensely geeky explanations of orbital mechanics and janky space engineering projects, and for this lover of engineering porn it is delightful in the same way, but it is a shallow way of reading Seveneves to see it as being only about engineering porn. Neither is it right to think of it as a competence porn narrative about humanity's ability to use brains to solve problems. Rather, I think most of the actual words in Seveneves are distractions for a colossal act of literary sleight of hand... What I think Seveneves is actually about is not the micromanagement of massive engineering projects by brilliant minds, but about what happens when those minds look away.
I'm hesitant to discuss in too much detail the later events of the book, which best confirm this thesis. Seveneves is not a book that is very dependent on twists and spoilers, and those that do happen are typically telegraphed miles in advance, but the twists are nonetheless effective. So instead I'll discuss one of the earlier twists.
The basic structure of the plan to save humanity is to construct a 'Cloud Ark' capable of sustaining humanity through the figurative 40 days of rain caused by the destruction of the moon. This consists of the ISS as a central skeleton and hundreds of 'arklet's swarming around the ISS as cheap, efficient, and importantly, redundant habitats for those who can't fit on the ISS. Because if ISS is hit by a rock, a lot of people die. If an arklet is hit, only a few people die. So the bulk of the population of the escapees from Earth live in arklets. They are mostly young, brilliant men and women selected for their potential rather than for their competency, and so they are not capable of the engineering, leadership, and decision-making that is handled by the general population of engineers and scientists on the ISS. Why are they there if they cannot immediately contribute? Because they are believed to be capable of being trained to be the next generation, and because they are reproductively fertile with long lives ahead of them.
The tension between the engineers, whose lives are overfilled with the stress of ensuring the survival of mankind, and the arkies, who have little to do but maintain a yeast garden and hang out on space facebook, is magnified by the fact that all are suffering from the PTSD of seeing the rest of humanity destroyed. And this tension ought to be the proper subject of Stephenson's narrative, except that he instead focuses on the engineering porn up until the point where it boils over in lethal rebellion. And even as the rebellion is happening, he keeps flashing over to a small set of engineers that is trying to steer an icy asteroid back to the ISS to provide fuel.
If Stephenson did this once, we might accuse him of missing the human drama for his astro-nerdiness, but he does it six or seven times over the course of the novel, leading one to suspect instead that it is the point. And he does it most spectacularly at the novel's midpoint, when he does a "5000 Years Later" time jump that is one of the braver novelistic tricks I've seen in ages. Stephenson is interested in how interconnected the world is both vertically and horizontally. He's interested in how the influence of those whose actions we weren't paying attention to influence our lives, and he demonstrates this interest by not recording those actions, so that all we can see is the consequences. The effect is pretty startling- you are sucked deeper and deeper into the retro-rockets, and then with jarring suddenness he reveals how the social milieu has shifted underneath you.
The actions of the last survivors on mankind before the 5000 year jump were recorded on video in extreme detail. In the post-5K world, this video, thousands and thousands of hours worth, studied by historians and mystics for millenia, has coalesced into a quasi-Biblical text known as The Epic. Its protagonists lend their names to proverbs and cautionary tales. In other words, the post-5K humanity has the opposite problem that we have with our Bible- we wonder if our Biblical heroes are real, wonder what the circumstances of their lives really were like, wonder what kind of conversations they had before they made world-changing decisions. For the post-5K humanity, they can watch and rewatch the actions of the heroes of their Epic, and they live in the enormous, shadows left by their actions, shadows that Dinah and Doob and Ivy and Markus and Julia and Aida barely had any awareness of projecting.
Seveneves is a deceptively colossal undertaking for this reason, and the result is mesmerizing and thought-provoking in the way we demand of our great science fiction.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-26 01:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-30 03:24 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-29 07:04 pm (UTC)I was also really irritated with Stephenson's choice to have Probst's ship leaking nuclear fuel into the habitat areas, and then contaminating the remaining Izzy and Arklets. Nuclear power is not the same as thrust, you can't give a ship more thrust by building more nuclear reactors. There is no reason for nuclear power closer to the Sun than the asteroid belt, they could've gotten by on just solar panels, so I didn't see an explanation within the book for why it had this big powerful nuclear time bomb. The Wikipedia page says the nuclear power was to melt the comet for thrust, but if so, that wasn't sufficiently explained in the book for me.
And not to mention, it drove me nuts that the book never explained the Agent that destroyed the Moon.
(no subject)
Date: 2015-09-30 03:13 am (UTC)I find this a really cynical way to read Seveneves. As I said in my review, as I see it the book is about the way choices have consequences that ripple down the generations... and that includes those grim legacies you talk about, how the tensions and divisions among the seven Eves perpetuated through the generations. But it also includes much more beautiful legacies: Moiran reinvention, Ivyan dedication to history and logic and reason and self-questioning, Dinan heroism, Teklan discipline, Julian self-reflection, Camillan accommodation, Aidan guile and will to survive. The whole reseeding of the Earth narrative I found really beautiful and inspiring, even as it reawoke the spectres of Rufus and Cal and the complicated legacies they entailed.
the nuclear power was to melt the comet for thrust, but if so, that wasn't sufficiently explained in the book for me.
That seemed reasonably clear to me. The rocket principle- to move forward, you need to send equal and opposite amounts of mass backward. There were slower, safer methods that could have EVENTUALLY brought an icy asteroid to the Ark, but in order to get it there in time to be of use in saving the Ark from the Hard Rain, Probst felt he needed to use the fastest way possible, and that meant using the largest heat source possible to propel the largest amount of fuel as quickly as possible.
In general, as an engineer, I felt like Stephenson was consistently good at presenting the tradeoffs between engineering choices and showing why humanity would make inferior choices on the occasions when they did.
And I was unbothered by the lack of explanation for the Agent because it's completely besides the point. It doesn't matter one whit- the whole gambit is for Stephenson to make up a story about what would happen if the Moon did, for whatever reason, break up.
For me the big inexplicable plot hole is why JBF would try to go to space at great personal risk if there were a US undersea plan that she presumably also knew about.