Author | Neal Stephenson |
---|---|
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Subject | Space Travel |
Genre | Science fiction |
Publisher | William Morrow |
Publication date | May 19, 2015 [1] |
Media type | Print, e-book, audiobook |
Pages | 880 |
ISBN | 0062190377 |
Seveneves is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson published in 2015. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck.
In the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter. As the pieces begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that Moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a white sky and blanketing the Earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides, causing the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and the oceans to boil away, rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The world's leaders evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a swarm of "arklet" habitats called a "Cloud Ark" in orbit with the International Space Station (ISS), bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against Moon debris.
By the time the Hard Rain begins 701 days after the destruction of the Moon, approximately 1,500 people have been launched into orbit.
Human civilization, as well as nearly all life on Earth, is obliterated. US President Julia Bliss Flaherty manages to get herself up to the Cloud Ark despite provisions that members of government would not be launched into space. Flaherty persuades the majority of the Arklets to abandon the ISS and to move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, in the process causing ISS to be struck by a bolide and suffer catastrophic damage that kills 300.
Meanwhile, leader Markus Leuker and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie take a small crew to an ice comet fragment that billionaire Sean Probst has gotten into Earth's orbit for the purpose of providing propellant for the space station. Probst's crew has died of radiation sickness caused by nuclear fallout from his ship's nuclear reactor. They bring the ice to the Cloud Ark, though MacQuarie is the only survivor of this mission.
Using the ice comet, the remaining third of the Cloud Ark and the ISS (now dubbed Endurance) take three years to reach the Cleft, a Grand Canyon–sized crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the Moon. By this time, Flaherty's Swarm has been decimated, resorting to cannibalism to survive, while fallout from Probst's ship has killed most of Endurance's crew. The 11 Swarm survivors, led by a woman named Aïda, negotiate reuniting the Swarm with Endurance. However, fearing ostracism by the crew, Aïda starts a battle for control of Endurance that fails, but reduces the population even further.
When Endurance reaches the safety of the Cleft, there are only eight female survivors, only seven of whom (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) are able to bear children. Moira can still use her genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by automictic parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the seven "Eves" gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced.
Five thousand years later, there are three billion people living in a giant ring of different "habitats" circling the Earth. The population is divided into seven races, each of which descends from and is named after one of the seven Eves and carries distinct racial characteristics that harken back to the personalities and characteristics of the original Eves. Most of the iron core of the Moon has been used to build the habitats, while Cleft itself has been turned into the Cradle, an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth along the equator. This ring is divided into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a cold war. Efforts to terraform Earth for the past several hundred years have proven fruitful; although the process is incomplete, some have resettled the planet in violation of treaty agreements.
"Doc" Hu Noah forms a "Seven" with one member from each race to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. They discover that some humans ("Diggers") have survived the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines, and others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"); the latter group descends from a separate, secret underwater ark that had been created concurrently with the Cloud Ark.
At the end of Part 2, only seven women capable of bearing children remain. Using the genetics lab, each of these women infuse their descendants with modifications that they think will facilitate survival.
In addition to these Spacer races, there are two "rootstock" races that do not descend from the Seven Eves.
Stephenson first began planning his novel around 2006, while he was working at Blue Origin. He observed: "Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low Earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. Having been raised on the idea of 'Space, the Final Frontier', I was both appalled and fascinated by the possibility that it might instead become an impenetrable ceiling only a hundred or so miles above our heads." [2] Such a collisional domino effect of satellite destruction is known as the Kessler syndrome.
He would continue to develop Seveneves over the next eight years, as Stephenson tried to "stick to legit science as much as I can". [3] [4]
As of June 2015 [update] , critical reception for Seveneves has been mostly positive. [5] [6] [7] A review in the Chicago Tribune commented on the book's length, stating "when Stephenson finds a theme commensurate with his ambition, all those pages can speed by like a bullet train. Seveneves offers at once his most conventional science-fiction scenario and a superb exploration of his abiding fascination with systems, philosophies and the limits of technology." [8] Booklist also praised the work, writing "Well-paced over three parts covering 5,000 years of humanity's future, Stephenson's monster of a book is likely to dominate your 2015 sf-reading experience." [9]
The Guardian 's Steven Poole was more critical in his review, criticizing the work as being overly descriptive, and observing: "Once we arrive in the novel's snail-paced last third, there are lots and lots of lavish descriptions of imaginary machines: city-sized orbiting habitats, giant pendulums reaching down into the Earth's atmosphere, 'sky trains'. After scores of pages of this, my eyelids were succumbing to a powerful gravitational force." [10]
The Initiative for Interstellar Studies published a review in their quarterly online magazine focusing on the book's use of orbital dynamics as one of the main technology themes forming the backdrop of the book. [11]
Molecular biologist Jennifer Doudna praised the book as a "fantastic adventure across time and space, grounded in science but deeply thought-provoking about human nature and the future of our species". [12]
Bill Gates recommended Seveneves as one of five books to read in the summer of 2016, praising in particular its scientific accuracy. He writes, "Seveneves reminded me of all the things I love about science fiction". [13]
The book was nominated for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. [14] The book won the Prometheus Award for Best Novel of 2016, awarded by the Libertarian Futurist Society. [15]
In 2016 Skydance Media and Imagine Entertainment hired screenwriter William Broyles Jr., director Ron Howard, and producer Brian Grazer to adapt the feature film. [16]
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