Paperback, 872 pages
English language
Published May 16, 2016 by The Borough Press.
When a catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb, it triggers a feverish race against the inevitable. An ambitious plan is devised to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere...
Five thousand years later, the survivors' progeny embark on another audacious journey into the unknown, to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
I hated less than I enjoyed. Could have been great if it were under half as long.
All of the positive raving for this book is true! All of the criticisms are also true! Stephenson is his own thing and he breaks all the rules of fiction. He breaks them in a couple different ways in this book. When it's great it's REALLY GREAT. When it's not so great, it kinda sucks. At different moments, I wanted to give this five stars. It's a hell of a book and I absolutely recommend it to any "hard" SF fans. Know that the exposition can really be a brick wall in the storytelling and it's not artfully done at all. But Stephenson has certainly earned himself a place on the hard-core SF shelf with this one (if he hadn't already).
Enormous and still a little unsatisfying but a place this full, one that demonstrates such a love of science, adventure, and the dark side of humanity has no other ranking than 5 stars.
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.
For a more in-depth review, check out my blog: strakul.blogspot.com/2019/07/book-review-seveneves-by-neal-stephenson.html
