Book Review: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

I can't remember when or why I picked up Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. It was published back in 2015 and I've read and enjoyed some of his other works, but by the time I started reading this I had forgotten the details on what Seveneves was about. Nevertheless, it ended up being an incredible book with so many interesting details. I went back and looked at the blurb and realized how much is promised in it:

What would happen if the world were ending?
A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .
Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

Below follows my review for this book with only minor spoilers (that are also in the blurb above).

Overall Impression
This was quite a good book, with lots of grand topics and epic feats as ordinary people struggle against the forces of nature. It has a decent set characters, though it changes part way, and there is no single main character across the whole story. In typical hard-scifi fashion, a lot of time is spent describing scientific concepts, such as orbital mechanics or genetics. I was OK with this, but your mileage may vary.

Plot
If I were to describe the pacing of the plot, I'd saw it was a bit of a seesaw. What I mean is that at times it feverishly moves forward with intense actions scenes, but other times a large amount of time is devoted to describing the physics behind some concept or the general history of a people or idea. While this can help break up the pace, it can also make some parts drag. In general, though, I felt the story was always moving along decently.

When reading through this, I had first thought this would be mainly a story of "man vs nature" in the sense that the main conflict would be resolving what to do when faced with the indifferent power of nature itself and all it can offer, from the void of space to earthquakes and volcanoes. However, it quickly becomes apparent that when there are people there is conflict and you realize that a fair part of the book, and certainly on the second two parts, the conflict is more of a "man vs man" in the sense that it is people in conflict with each other.

The book has three main parts. Without spoiling too much, the first concerns itself with the discovery of the catastrophe and the preparations for survival. The second part focuses on people struggling with surviving in space amidst rising tensions with each other. And the final part feels almost like a separate book, since it catapults us thousands of years into the future so we can see how humanity has changed in the intervening span of time. The last part feels a bit rushed in the sense that after a considerable time is spent catching us up to thousands of years of history, we get some very interesting developments on the surface but have to wrap up the book before we get to see what comes out of them.

Characters
There are a lot of characters in this book, and some of them only appear in the last third of the book as well. For the first part, we have prominent engineers and scientists, many of which are aboard the re-purposed International Space Station (ISS), which include people like Dinah, Ivy, Tekla, Moira, Dubois and even politicians like the US President, Julia Flaherty. In the last third, we have the descendants of some of these people with unique quirks as a result of genetic engineering and their long time spent in space. The main character here is Kath Two as we follow her through some startling discoveries and the developments that lead from it.

Setting / World Building
Some books are all about the plot, others are about the characters, I feel that this is one of the books that's about the setting. This is certainly the case whenever we have long portions dedicated to going over some concept of orbital mechanics, robotics, or genetics and when we shift to the later stage and have lengthy discussions on the history of humanity in space. These serve to paint a fascinating tale of human survival and ingenuity in the face of impending extinction.

While some of the construction and work around the ISS drives the imagination, it isn't until we reach the third part that we see the full scale of how life in space could be accomplished. We see thousands of space habitats and learn of all manner of engineering feats to navigate among them and to and from the surface of the Earth. Some of these are staggering to think about, but really fascinating. It's also at this stage that we learn about how one could re-engineer a planet, which is another really interesting topic. There's also some intriguing, foreshadowed developments towards the end of the book that I won't spoil, but left me wondering and thinking for a long time afterwards.

Final Thoughts
This was an excellent science fiction book and among my favorite from Stephenson (in fact, it made me want to go back and re-read Anathem). I like the grandeur of the story telling, how simple humans struggle against catastrophe and triumph against all odds. While it starts of near-future, I appreciated the far flung envisioning of what could happen to such as society after thousands of years. The ending, though, was a bit abrupt. It was fine as a close to the main arcs, but it opened up a lot of questions. Character-wise I was always able to identify and emphasize with them despite there being plenty of switches as to who the main character is, but this is the sort of book where I'll remember the setting and plot more than the individual characters.