There are not many authors who have the front to start their book with “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason”, but Neal Stephenson’s new hard sci-fi epic Seveneves (2015. 863 Pages) jumps right in with its end of the world apocalypse.

Having been blown into several large chunks, the world moves from its initial shock, to a form of acceptance, after all the bulk remains and it continues to orbit the earth, so the overall effects will be spectacular, but minor. It’s pretty certain, for the reader, as this is a book which depicts the end of the world that this cosy situation will not remain static.

The greater part of the book is split into two locations. On the ground Dubois Harris, a scientist who has a great following as a friendly face for hard science on Twitter and television is one of the first to realise the horrible truth. The chunks are colliding with each other, creating smaller chunks, which in turn collide with more, the whole thing being dragged down by Earth’s gravitational well. In two years the material will impact the atmosphere, sterilising the planet.

Floating about all of this is the space station ‘Izzy’ manned by people who can now never come home, but who will go on to form the nucleus of a rescue, for the race if not the planet. The first two thirds of the book deal with converting the station from holding a handful of people to being, not only big enough to have a sustainable population, but diffuse enough in its design that it can get out of the way of any falling moon rocks. Well, that’s the plan. The last portion of the book jumps forward five thousand years and the repopulation of the Earth.

Stephenson has chosen to write the story in a very particular manner; the book contains many pages of detailed information of what would be required to create a sustainable habitat outside of the Earth’s protective atmosphere. His research comprehensively covers all the minutia of such a project. I’m not going to pretend that these sections do not slow the pace of the book, or that similarly providing character biography by infodump, within the body of the story does not also work as a break, but the author is both trying to connect the reader to people who are going to die, but also trying to explain why the rescue plan is so precarious.

The style can make the book heavy going at times, but the effort is rewarded with a science fiction novel of high concept and flawless execution. That said, it is not going to be to everyone’s taste.

9

Charles Packer