SevenEves

Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Two-thirds of this book was riviting. The moon has been been broken into seven pieces that will exponentially crash into each other and cause such a shower of meteorites that will burn the atmosphere and catch the world on fire. The only choice mankind has is to go into space. But this is a book rooted in our day...we don't have warp speed, cryogenics, or transporter beams. We have a space station that must be retrofitted to be an ark to save humanity until the earth cools down...in 5,000 years. It is The Martian on steroids, taking real science and coming up with plausible solutions. The characters in this part are well-drawn, the action exciting, the technology, politics, and psychology believeable. In the end notes he explains where he got real-life information for makeshift space habitats, asteroid mining, and orbits. Several people have mentioned a real-life alter ego for Doob, the astronomer/publicist. He also borrows from mythology and Bibical stories to create the story of the Epic ancestors. There is even a theory that all European/Caucasian ancestors can be traced back to seven lines (or Eves).
Part 3, however, could have (should have?) been another book in a duology. Stephenson gets a little carried away with describing alien technology in the first 50 pages of part 3 without the interjection of character development and little action so it becomes ponderous to wade through. The characters in this part are very underdeveloped and the themes of race and colonization feel different from the earlier part of the book ( though the theme of using media to placate/persuade the masses does shine throughout the whole book). He brings up some very good questions and situations that are the direct effect of parts 1 and 2, but they don't get fully see developed, and feels more like a 200 page epilogue than an actual continuation of the story. I would have loved to see the civilizations and characters in part 3 be more developed and their histories explored more deeply ( sequel?) because the first 2/3 was quite engrossing.

View all my reviews