Book review: Seveneves, Neal Stephenson

No one writes like Neal Stephenson. Few people attempt stories as vast and as strange.

Neal Stephenson's new novel opens with a sentence I love dearly. I am shortly going to quote it. I would rather not do this. I would rather tell you nothing about the book except that it's flawed, fascinating and well worth reading and arguing about.

No one writes like Stephenson. Few people attempt stories as vast and as strange. Even a lesser Stephenson novel repays attention, partly for its capacity to surprise; reading Seveneves with zero prior knowledge of its plot was a mind-bending experience, and one I recommend.

To back up this recommendation, some final pre-spoiler remarks. Like every other book of Stephenson's, this one uses formal language to position itself a small, strategic distance from its readers, like a speaker standing behind a lectern. It wields this frost-tinged language with uncommon precision, creating a picture of the world so detailed as to seem fantastical; the cost is that the story frequently approaches the threshold of Asperger's-style over-elaboration, a danger Stephenson offsets with a wit so deadpan that after a while even the driest descriptive passage starts to feel potentially hilarious.

If the above piques your curiosity even a little, stop reading now, avoid all other reviews and commentary, and go give the book a try. (Or perhaps try Reamde, Stephenson's propulsive and easy-to-love immediately previous novel, or the brilliant, toweringly ambitious Anathem, the one before that.) Spoilers now.

Seveneves' first sentence: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason."

A little way further into the book, a scientist has to explain to the American president what this is going to mean. "A thing I am calling the Hard Rain. Not all of those rocks are going to stay up there. Some of them are going to fall into the Earth's atmosphere. By 'some', I mean trillions."

Thus, the super-heating of the atmosphere, and thus, the Earth rendered uninhabitable for a period of about 5000 years; and thus, an all-out attempt to create a sustainable space-based human culture in a very small amount of time. The book is at once a disaster novel on a grand scale and a space procedural adventure, featuring strong characters, some intensely grim moments, and more information on orbital dynamics than you ever imagined finding interesting. (It's pretty interesting.)

Then the twist. About two-thirds of the way through its length, the book executes a plot shift which is announced by one of the great section headings in all of fiction: "Five thousand years later." This leap forwards is at once the most exciting and the most frustrating aspect of the book, amounting to the wholesale abandonment of the entire cast and the abrupt introduction of so many new elements that your head will spin.

I had many and mixed reactions to this final third, but the main one was that it felt far too short. This is not Stephenson's best work by any means, but it has to count as a positive that after more than 800 pages, I was left hungry for more.

Seveneves
by Neal Stephenson
(Borough Press $36.99)

- Canvas