Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Part I - The Moon tries to kill all humans
The book opens with Stephenson taking us through where every single person on earth was when the moon blew up, all seven billion of them. Ok, possibly it was only four or five (including one character who does not appear in the entire rest of the book - what was the point of that?) It fairly quickly moves onto the central plot of this section which is that there will be an extinction event in two years and the only hope of humanity is to move as many people as possible to space.
The plan is so ridiculous Stephenson tries to sell it as "the only plan that could possibly work" - I guess he thinks he has mind control powers or something. Anyway, the plan is to build a load of "arklets" small spacecraft which will be inhabited and piloted by teens. Yes, their plan is like having a highway filled with cars only driven by teens, only in three dimensions. As is this weren't a recipe for disaster, trade between the Arklets will what I like to call "Libertarians in Space" or as Stephenson put it "market driven, without any central command and control mechanism." So that was always destined to go well.
About a hundred pages later Stephenson states that the whole plan is fatally flawed and everyone involved always knew it, but luckily Elon Musk is coming to the rescue by mining an ice meteor. Anyway, eventually everyone on earth dies, but not before the Hilary Clinton stand in steals a rocket and cravenly joins the plucky spacefarers (including Neil FauxGrasse Tyson because we needed a character to do some voiceover) on the ISS.
All but a couple thousand people die.
Part II - Humanity tries to kill all humans
The leader of the ISS wakes up one day and realizes that sitting between all the moon fragments that are heading for the earth and the earth is going to make them go splat. Good thing Elon Musk left the party to go buy more ice. Meanwhile, HRC is stirring up trouble trying to reclaim power. And how is she doing it? Through Facebook. She causes a rift between the Arklets and the ISS staff and all the people on the Arklets run away and start to starve to death (yes, there will be gratuitous cannibalism) Disaster strikes again and again and again until there are only eight people left alive.
A very racist interlude
At the very end of Part II, the remaining characters sit around and discuss how people's natures are determined by their genes. You know, the sort of racism that gets you shunned. But in the future this is totally science. Also, why do they not give the eighth woman hormone therapy?
Part III Stephenson implausibly extrapolates his very racist premise or Why did this book turn into a plot-coupon fantasy quest?
Part III jumps 5000 years in future but feels about 50 years in the future. Everyone fetishizes the Seven Eves in much the same way Tom Brokaw fetishizes the Greatest Generation. Anyway, our new heroine starts a plot coupon quest where she makes her way around the orbiting habitats and picking up her questmates before heading down to the surface where she meets two more verities of humans - mole people and selkies. The end. Seriously, that's the end. It's like Stephenson got bored and wandered off so his secretary slipped the manuscript in an envelope and sent off to his publisher and no one noticed that the third section goes nowhere.
Anyone who has been listening on twitter will know that I did not enjoy this book.
The Heavy Hand of the Author
Intellectually, I know that everything that happens in a work of fiction is the product of a decision by those who created the work. But for a work to be successful, it needs to feel like events happen organically arising out of the decisions of the characters and the environment they live in. If the stressors affecting the characters feel too artificial then the book feels contrived.
I'll even give Stephenson his ridiculous inciting incident. It's far from the first book where a moon catastrophe destroyed civilization. After that, you need to make me believe things would actually happen this way. So we get the whole ridiculously implausible arklet/libertarian trade scenario, no one thinking they ought to move the ISS to a safe orbit before the start of the hard rain, the leader who Captain Kirks himself to death, Elon Musk warning people the hard rain is about to begin via Morse code and so many other things that happen only because it feels like Stephenson wants them to happen.
I can enjoy a movie where ridiculous thing after ridiculous thing happens if the ride is enjoyable, but this was just a slog.
The Myth of Those "Hard SF" Info dumps
Everyone has always assured me that reading Stephenson is all about the infodumps and they are supposed to be awesome. So lets look at a couple of things he says:
Seen from a distance, Izzy consisted almost entirely of solar panels. Structurally, these were to the space station as the wings of a bird were to its body, in the sense that their purpose was to have as much surface area as possible with minimal weight[sic].
Leaving aside that Stephenson says weight when he means mass, do I think this is a good comparison? No, not really - It ignores that fact that the solar panels are basically static structures and wings are dynamic ones that are going to be subject to entirely different sorts of forces which will drive the structural requirements.
Wings generate lift, thrust and also control. The shape (and area) of the wing is dependent on which of these it's been optimized for - an albatross and a hummingbird have very different wings. Sure, an albatross does look like the surface area has been maximized, but a hummingbird does not. Their wings are rather stumpy looking and don't have a large surface area - they've been optimized for maneuverability which requires a small aspect ratio which limits the area.
So moving on a bit -
The solar panels-as well as some other, vaguely similar-looking structures whose function was to radiate waste heat into space-were held in place by the Integrated Truss Assembly. The word “truss,” when used by structural engineers, just meant something that looked like a radio tower or a steel bridge: a network of struts joined into a lattice, giving maximum stiffness with minimum weight.
It feels like here Stephenson is trying to big up his authority by using the words "structural engineers" rather than just saying structure. The word truss has a very specific engineering definition - a truss consists of members which are either in pure axial compression (struts) or pure axial tension (ties). What Stephenson is doing is giving an example of a truss - they can form domes and other shapes providing they meet the structural requirements of a truss.
The radio tower as an example is ok, but the bridge is less so as there's more than a few types of bridges that are not made out of trusses like suspension bridges and I think they are rather more common. So what about the last bit? Strut is a technical term relating to a truss, which by not including the complementary term (tie), it appears that Stephenson does not know he's incorrectly defining a truss to exclude members in tension.
There was this howler-
It was like the mechanical works on the roof of a skyscraper, exposed to the elements and rarely visited by humans.
I'd like to introduce Stephenson to the concept of routine maintenance. I design buildings, and Stephenson is just plain wrong.
One more and then I promise to stop:
With any normal plastic bag material, the cosmonaut will suffocate or the bag will pop, because plastic bags aren’t strong enough to withstand full atmospheric pressure. So, fill the bag with only as much air as it can handle-some fraction of one atmosphere-and then place another bag inside of it. Inflate that bag with air at slightly higher pressure. That’s still not enough air to keep a cosmonaut alive, so put a third bag inside of the second bag and inflate it to higher pressure yet. Keep repeating, like with Russian nesting dolls, until the innermost bag has enough air pressure to keep a human alive-then put the cosmonaut inside of that one.
The concept which Stephenson is rather poorly attempting to explain is called differential pressure. The stress on the surface of the bag is generated by the difference in the pressure inside and outside. Nesting the bags allows them to control the differential pressure. Without actually saying this key item, I think the explanation comes off as confusing.
All of this gives me the feeling that Stephenson doesn't really understand the things he pontificates about, doesn't really care if he uses technical terms correctly and basically relies on a lay person not really having enough information to call bullshit on what he says and assuming that if it sounds complicated it must be right.
Racism and sexism, oh my!
Things that bugged me: The part where the crew is glad one character is sleeping with the leader and not "on the prowl." The female president who is evil because of course she is. The unbelievably offensive characterization of not-Malaya Yousafzai. The one character with a mental illness is the other villain (and a cannibal.) The fact that the post-menopausal woman isn't asked to be a surrogate. Oh, and shooting a gun makes Katthree really, really horny. And pretty much the entirety of the third section, but especially the mole people.
Will this be apearing below no award on my ballot? Yes, of course.