Seveneves is a giant sci-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. I use the term novel loosely here.
It isn’t so much a novel as a history textbook about an event that didn’t happen: the moon exploded. I say this because there isn’t really story or characters in the traditional sense.
On the Textbook Style
The sense in which these elements exist is the same as a history textbook.
The facts are presented in a sterile, detached fashion. The main characters exist in the same way that the Founding Fathers of the U.S. are “characters” in a history textbook.
History texts don’t really have character development, but the figures still go around doing things.
Another parallel is that the story often completely stops for huge, in-depth descriptions of important inanimate objects.
I think of this as similar to how a U.S. history text might go into great depth on how a cotton gin, or some machine from the industrial revolution, worked. These might be important in preserving certain historical moments, but it is a terrible way to write a novel.
My Tastes
There was a time in my life where I would have praised this type of thing.
I would have talked about how brilliant it was for him to break with standard novel writing conventions to record this alternate history of Earth in history textbook form.
I would have actually considered this harder to do than to write a more traditional novel.
Oh, the pretentiousness of my youth.
On Worldbuilding in Seveneves
Nowadays this novel strikes me as a huge ego trip by the author (or laziness; I’m not sure which is worse). He’s written the first step of an SF novel and now expects everyone to read it just because he’s famous enough to get away with it.
Every great SF writer produces 250,000 words worth of material about their world and story as the first step. It is such a common thing to do that it even has a name: worldbuilding.
Check out my Ultimate Guide to Worldbuiling post here.
What Stephenson doesn’t seem to realize is that when he reads a 90,000-word novel that doesn’t contain all 250,000 words of excessive detail about every little thing, it isn’t because the author didn’t think of it, it’s because that author actually did the hard step of writing and producing a novel from their worldbuilding notes.
You don’t publish the notes to the novel just because you wrote them.
The reason I say this is ego rather than just laziness or confusion about what writing an SF novel entails is that he breaks other golden rules of SF “just because he can.” (I don’t know why I put quotes there. He didn’t actually say this.)
Breaking SF Conventions
If you go to any of the famous print SF magazines, you’ll usually find a list of terrible things that will get you an automatic rejection.
One thing that appears on all of these lists is basing a story on a random, major, unexplained event. In this case, the moon explodes. And what caused this? Eh. He seemed to want to write the book, needed this to happen, but couldn’t come up with a reason, so he left it out.
The reason this golden rule exists isn’t arbitrary.
Stephenson is writing hard SF. To put some mysterious event in like this turns the genre into paranormal or supernatural or worse.
He may as well use as his starting sentence: And Sauron came out from hiding and told the inhabitants of Earth that he would, in two-years time, bombard the surface of the Earth with fireball spells for thousands of years.
Then write a hard SF novel after that.
It is deeply unsatisfying and lazy. The Sauron start would change absolutely nothing. It is effectively equivalent to the opening we actually get, except more honest.
To use the moon exploding feels like a shady trick in an attempt to pull one over on the reader into thinking it is an explainable event.
On the Publishers: Shame on You
For some reason, he thought he was above this (hence ego) and went ahead and wrote a book that wouldn’t have any chance at being published if by a lesser name.
I can almost see the board meeting where the publishers are talking about this.
“Should we tell him this isn’t okay?”
“No. He might go with someone else. Seveneves will make us tons of money. Who cares if it violates standards we’ve set for other writers.”
“Okay, I guess you’re right.”
Ugh.
I didn’t mean to bash the book this hard, but while I’m at it, I may as well continue to air my complaints.
On the Science
The second most important event is also weakly justified. The moon fragments keep colliding until there are millions (billions? irrelevant to this discussion) of them. At some point, their orbits will decay and start pummeling the Earth, killing everyone on it.
So much of this is left a mystery, despite the fact that smart minds in the book have all worked out these calculations. This is hard SF. I want this explained better.
I couldn’t care less about a several page description of how treadmills work on the International Space Station.
The fact that anyone predicted this is astonishing. The insane accuracy with which their models predict it takes this out of the realm of SF for me (they were within a few days).
It was only a model.
First rule of science: all models are wrong.
Surely, some of the parameters they thought they had nailed down were really wrong. I actually kept expecting a major twist of the book to be that the hard rain never came. That would have been cool.
But it did come, just like the models predicted.
Where are the important explanations?
To go into more detail about this.
Why did these billions of chunks of moon orbiting Earth mysteriously start to fall to Earth?
How small are the chunks at this point?
Clearly they aren’t so small that they burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but they’ve crossed some critical size that they lose orbit. This, again, just strikes me as something Stephenson wanted to happen, couldn’t figure out why it would happen, and so just left it a mystery.
I think what’s frustrating about this is that if Stephenson had just written a 90,000-word novel that drew out the story, it would be a much more compelling read and simultaneously fix every one of these complaints.
As I pointed out in a previous article, tonal consistency is important in SF. Stephenson goes into painful depths of science on some things but then glosses over highly improbable other events.
This inconsistency would be fixed if he let go of all the excessive description and focused on the story.
Final Thoughts
Now that the rant is over, I will say that the book isn’t that bad.
It’s an interesting thought experiment that goes on way too long. Prepare to be bored to tears by some excessive, irrelevant descriptions. Prepare to be frustrated to tears by other things that have no (or implausible) explanations.
You won’t connect to any characters. It isn’t really a novel.
Once you get over all that stuff, you can start enjoying it. I never felt like quitting for any of the reasons I’ve given, and that’s more than I can say about some books I’ve read recently.
Check out my other articles on giant novels:
