Discusses his new novel, and the role of science fiction.
He is one of the few authors whose books I always look forward to reading, though I was a little disappointed with Anathem. But this looks like a fun read.
I should also note that one of the points I make in my book (and in op-eds) since, is that our unwillingness to use the hardware we have on hand to get into space is an indicator of how utterly unimportant human spaceflight is (a point that is accentuated by the relatively poor sales of a well-reviewed book). Stephenson describes a scenario in which it suddenly becomes very important to become as spacefaring as possible, as soon as possible, and how society reacts.
They all die before propagating, but it does sound like a fun read.
I’m really looking forward to reading this one. Just need to finish all of David Weber first.
I just finished Seveneves a few days ago; no Cryptonomicon but pretty good still. Verges on Niven / Pournelle hard SF territory but slightly less convincing. I had trouble believing the amount of materiel that went up to LEO, but maybe my calibration is off. Also, the robots have a strong whiff of deus ex machina about them; I’ve done some work on highly autonomous systems, including swarming, and these robots are just a little too farfetched for the rest of the story. A biologist would probably have the same bones to pick with the genetics technology too. Otherwise the science seems pretty solid. It’s unclear if Stephenson got any help from Blue Origin folks (he has a long relationship with them and Bezos), but clearly somebody spent a lot of time on the orbital mechanics in the story.
The biggest problem is that it gets bogged down in too much expository text, especially in the last third. Seems to be clearly set up for at least one sequel. Mostly keeps the reader curious about what happens next, like any good tale should. I give it 3.5 out of 5 stars.
I got so wrapped up in the science I didn’t mention the characters: mostly pretty good, although the Neil DeGrasse Tyson surrogate is WAY too knowledgeable; if only the real one were that good. I think Stephenson is a little bit too optimistic on the overall lack of conflict on the Earth though. Kudos to him though for blowing up the notion that races don’t exist and don’t matter; that aspect is well done and quite believable.
Mild SPOILER ALERT- some implications of the novel are hinted at below.
I finished Seveneves on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, and my willing suspending of disbelief repeatedly died. A Kessler Cascade is fundamentally different from a disrupted body; the disrupted body has an initially thermal energy distribution with a power law mass distribution and is heavily damped, collisions reduce the total number of bodies as small objects get captured by larger ones. Like an earthquake, the greatest violence would occur at the first event and decay from there- no long build up.
A Kessler cascade, on the other hand, is in some ways like the population inversion of a laser: many bodies of similar size, weakly interacting, with a nonthermal energy distribution. Collisions are rare, but release great energy and produce more fragments than were originally present.
If you do postulate an environment with trillions of power-law distributed lunar fragments in Earth-crossing orbits a Kessler cascade of all manmade objects follows immediately and EVERYTHING in Earth orbit quickly gets reduced to dust. Again, no story.
Oh, and by the way, how did that megaton lump of nickel-iron get delivered to LEO in the first place? Deus ex machina? Whatever propulsion system that got it there should be able to help move it elsewhere.
Other things make the WSoD die- incoming spacecraft needing to do a capture burn at perigee can trivially adjust the perigee altitude by doing a very small (single digit m/s) transverse burn. (For example, 1m/s dV 100,000 s before encounter should shift the perigee about 100km, just VxT.) Thus no dramatic aerobraking and crazy tugboat maneuvering with an overpowered crew transport vehicle.
The only reason that vehicle was overpowered in the first place was to be the Chekov’s gun to enable the later dramatic rescue. Puh-lease.
If you have enough impacts of sufficient magnitude to ablate away earth’s atmosphere and oceans, the result is a pasteurized planet with no man-made objects surviving at any depth. Hell, after 5000 years there might be a skin forming on the magma….
Other things just pile on from there, why would one particular population at +5000 years be genetically adapted for an environment that was only created at +4700 by another group that didn’t know of the existence of the first one?
If you need artificial lighting (geothermally powered) to grow crops underground for 5000 years for a few hundred people, just stockpile enough damn LEDs, not tungsten for artisanal lightbulbs, for carnot’s sake. That’s just absurdity for absurdity’s sake.
A literate, technical population with lots of “100% cotton acid-free paper” has no need of rote memorization. Certainly not to the point of tying up 10% of their adult working population as idiot savants.
I could rant on some more, but suffice to say I’m disappointed. Stephenson could have done far, far better.
I’m about 33% into Seveneves. It did cause me a little sleeplessness about the energy being delivered to the Earth’s surface over 5000 years until I did the numbers and came up with about 200 times the solar radiation input power so that part at least is believable (that assumes all the gravitational potential energy of the moon arrives at the Earth) . Not sure about the cascade effect of the broken up parts of the Moon.
Maybe they should have had a bunch of Orions on a South Pacific Atoll, launched them and shepherded the bits of the Moon away from collisions with each other. Now there’s an idea for a novel.
Spoilers a plenty…strap in.
The book starts our great, well written piece into the technical aspects of the moon being splintered and the ensuring chaos…
And then it falls apart. The book fails the first idea “if the Earth is going to be bombarded, wouldn’t anything in between the Moon’s original orbit and LEO be an easy target”. The book alludes to it, but it doesn’t pass the sniff test of “lets throw everyone up there”.
What starts out as a nicely paced book slows to a crawl spending more time in societal development and, in the process, killing off the Y chromosome.
The best part of the book though, happened in the middle where all of humanity was almost destroyed because they were squabbling and well, humanity might have been better off if she let it happen. Alas.
The book then goes into a Hubbardesque “5,000 Years Later” and spends an inordinate amount of time developing the social classes of the various Blue/Red groups. I ended up skimming this part until towards the end where…well, it became bearable but not by much.
A solid two star book. What started out with great promise delved into ongoing social blase and left from the technical and common sense issues in surviving the moon turning into a rubble pile and turned it into a wandering story looking for direction towards the end.
Knock out about 200 pages of the middle and it’s a better story overall.
Good, but not the Cryptonomicon, or the Baroque Cycle by any means. I also had doubts about producing the necessary genetic diversity for human survival from just seven people. Three out of five just because I like the guy.