- William Morrow
I’m still reading Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves. I finished it a month ago but I’m still reading it. I’ve been going back over different sections—like the engineering wank parts I skipped the first time through. There are people who will read Seveneves primarily for these wank parts (I see you, technocrats) but the real achievement of this book is that, unlike Stephenson’s more recent works (Anathem, Cryptonomicon), you can just skip that jargon and the story still works. If you get caught in a quagmire description about micro-robots working cooperatively on an asteroid, you can just flip ahead until you see a human again. Welcome back. Here are things that are happening to humans. P.S. It’s the end of the world.
So the moon gets hit. It splinters into seven clean pieces. Everyone on Earth is like, “WHOA,” and they spend a week trying to figure out what happened before they realize they need to get their priorities straight. Asteroids falling into the atmosphere after the collision are about to render the planet uninhabitable. At this point I would give up and sit in the dirt, but that’s not what these people do. These science people get busy, moving as much of humanity into outer space as viably possible.
