The Most Stephenson-esque Book Yet!
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| Stephenson, Neal. Seveneves. William Morrow: 2015. |
Neal Stephenson is the Gary Oldman of novelists—he can take
on practically any genre, and do it well. He went from straight post-cyberpunk
sci fi to quasi-historical to quite historical epic, followed by a dip into the
near-present, then veered into the murky realm of speculative fiction. His most
recent book, Seveneves, weaves
together his entire oeuvre (I can never remember how to spell the funny-looking
word for “body of work”, constantly getting it confused with the French word
for ‘egg’, so just in case I’m wrong this time, I mean the one that’s not an
egg!). It’s got plenty of speculation, a veritable mountain of hard sci fi
concepts and babble (more on that below), and takes place in two distinct
time-frames, the immediate future and the so-distant-it’s-almost-unrecognizable
future 5000 years hence.
If you, like me, love a mind-bending initial premise, then
you’ll take to Seveneves immediately:
its first sentence begins, ‘The moon blew up.’ This seemingly random,
unexplainable event sets in motion what amounts, we learn quickly, to the End
of the World. This is awesome! I was thinking as I read those early pages, a
cool ‘what if?’ premise that asks the hard questions about, for instance, what
actually has value if only the tiniest fraction of the human population is to
survive (genetic diversity, scientists and engineers, intrepid no-nonsense
types who can Get Things Done, etc.), and what has absolutely none (friggin’
politicians who interrupt messianic scientists constantly to talk incessantly,
almost everything and everyone on earth, cloak-and-dagger plotters
(=politicians), and also politicians and their sycophantic, cannibalistic lackeys.
Politicians!). Of course, if none of the latter list would have any value in a
high-pressure survival situation, one cannot help but begin to question their
value even in our day-to-day lives…
Yes, the beginning of Seveneves
is masterful and entertaining. And actually the ending, 5000 years in the future,
is fairly intriguing as well. Even the middle has its moments. But the story
definitely gets bogged down, or indeed bedeviled (the devil is, after all, in
the details), due to Stephenson’s almost obsessive need to explain the workings
of every single physics concept in excruciating detail. Ever wondered how orbit
adjustments are/might soon be made in low earth orbit? Prepare to have all your
questions answered, multiple times.
I’m probably even nerdier than Stephenson in most ways, but
even I was taken aback by the loving, painstaking effort he put into all such
descriptions. Trademark Stephenson, to explain the workings of thrusters or whatever
in lavish detail, yet deadpan though multiple romantic encounters. He’ll spend
dozens of pages on what amounts to background world-building, in a style that,
while always entertaining to read, flirts with an almost footnote-like “here’s
what you need to know about this physical process” approach, but skip through
anything with the barest hint of melodrama (the inevitable attrition of the
Cloud Ark population, for example, essentially isn’t described at all; instead
we lurch forward in time to the critical moment for that dwindling population,
skipping all the human drama in between).
As my previous reviews on this site will attest, I think
romance, melodrama, and human emotions are all super-awesome, but techno-babble
not so much. Given that context, you might be expecting me to “grade” Seveneves harshly. Expect again! (An
expression that, I just noticed, doesn’t really roll off the tongue like “Think
again”…) Midway through I was gearing up
to Go Negative due to all the descriptions of minute course corrections and the
near-zero discussion of how everyone felt about things, but before I could
bring my Guns of Negativity to bear, it suddenly hit me: all that emotional
stuff is ALSO more or less useless in a high-pressure, ‘survival of the species’-type
test. Who cares about a given character’s internal monologue about how much of
a bummer it is that they had to work hard? Or whether so-and-so is getting
married, or whatever? It’s all made irrelevant by the enormity of the challenge
facing humanity.
Seveneves is quite
an unsettling story, in that respect, much like the recent Australian apocalyptic
film These Final Hours. If there were
an extinction-level meteor strike whose atmosphere-igniting firestorm will
reach your country in twelve hours (or, in the case of Seveneves, a similar catastrophe in about three years), all of the
normal narrative logic fails to apply. Hey, it seems like Jimmy and Zoe will
get together after all—thank goodness he didn’t end up with horrid Vicki! Plus,
Zoe’s pregnant, so happily ever after it is! But wait a minute…none of these
relationships ultimately mean what we normally think they mean, because all
(or, in Seveneves, virtually all) of
the characters have been denied any chance at a future. Their ability to
influence things, whether through making a genetic contribution (having kids)
or by swaying the hearts and minds of others, is literally zero. If humanity
will soon cease, for all intents and purposes, to exist, does anything we normally care about matter
anymore? Stories such as these force the viewer to ask terrifying questions
about what has ultimate value, and we might be surprised by what we discover in
the night at the end of the tunnel.
So ultimately, Stephenson won me over with the unshakable
logic that hardly anything, including who shacks up with whom, is of any import
at all, and can safely be elided, whereas the physics of movement in space and
such things are suddenly of tremendous importance (and perhaps have been all
along, but we humans can only see this clearly when we are standing in our own
graves!).
There were things about the book that struck me as not fully
successful/satisfying, notably the transition from the present to 5000 years in
the future (I’ve drunk the cool-aid that the journey is more important than the
destination, but Stephenson clearly doesn’t rate how things came to be as of any significance compared to the simple
matter of what is, and thus decided
to skip ahead to the ‘good part’). Yet it was close to spell-binding
throughout, even during the long near-asides to describe the workings of a
thingamabob. Despite having only the faintest traces of melodrama about it,
even to the point that we pretty much know almost none of the characters have
any chance at a future at all, Seveneves
was quite emotionally satisfying nonetheless, at least to me. Any fan of
Stephenson’s prior work will likely find Seveneves,
to paraphrase Rick Blaine, “just like his other books, only more so.”
The Math:
Objective Assessment: 8/10
Bonuses: +1 for forcing readers to confront the bitter
reality that all the crap we spend our time obsessing about (who ‘ends up with’
whom romantically, etc.) is of questionable value
Penalties: -1 for taking the Battlestar Galactica gambit of
moving the story one year into the future, but multiplied by (literally) 5000,
thereby demanding readers just accept our solar system’s
future without any chance to see how things developed the way they did
Zhaoyun, Wearer of Rose-Colored Glasses and Reader of Dreams, has been keeping it real here at Nerds of a Feather since 2013.
