Books I Didn't Finish: Seveneves
I’ve never read any of Neal Stephenson’s books before Seveneves, but I’ve been aware of the guy for a long time, always as a titan of sci-fi who writes very intelligent smart-guy books for smart-guy people. Snow Crash, the Baroque Cycle, Anathem—these and more have a reputation as being big, dense bricks full of science and cryptography and philosophy. Something like a sci-fi Umberto Eco, in other words.
So I was surprised when I cracked open Seveneves, read a few pages and then asked myself “Is the whole thing written like this? Are all of Neal Stephenson’s books written like this?”
I can’t say for certain because I didn’t finish the book, but what I did read was enough to tell me that Neal Staphenson is not the sci-fi version of Umberto Eco. He’s somewhere between Andy Weir and Joss Whedon, a location otherwise known as the Hack Zone. Let’s dip our toes in, shall we?
Seveneves is about the moon exploding, which sounds like the kind of premise that couldn’t possibly be boring, but somehow this book finds a way. After an unknown force destroys Earth’s satellite, scientists realize that in two years the cascading fragmentation of the resulting pieces will end in a ten thousand year period of “Hard Rain”, during which a constant micrometeorite bombardment will sterilize the planet’s surface.
The only hope for humanity’s survival is for a tiny cohort of survivors to live in space—but with the countdown to the Hard Rain looming, the governments of the world find themselves scrambling to jury-rig the requisite technology together. Apparently the book time-skips forward to show how this spacebound society evolves after the rest of humanity dies, but I didn’t get past the part where they’re building the space arks.
Where to start with this? How about the opening paragraph:
“THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.”
Now, you may think I’d be jumping the gun a bit to write a book off after only four sentences, but in my defence I was quickly proven correct by the following chapters.
To be fair, maybe I came into this with the wrong expectations. I guess I expected a book about the impending destruction of human civilization to focus on the emotional and cultural impact of that event, and not on the type of docking mechanism used to expand the International Space Station, or the logistics of how a cosmonaut gets in and out of an inflatable habitation modile. But it turns out this was foolish of me, as Seveneves is far more interested in Beep-Boop Science Machine Does Things than it is with the end of the world, or the emotional or inner lives of its characters, or anything else at all. At least for the chapters I read before I got bored, the story could have been about a zero-stakes training exercise–or two engineers LARPing–and it would have changed surprisingly little.
A while ago I read a book called The Last Policeman, which is about a detective trying to solve a murder six months before an asteroid hits the Earth and kills everyone. It’s not a masterpiece by any means, but it evocatively captures the grief and despair that grips the world, and the ways society begins to crumble long before the asteroid actually hits.
Notably, one of the big differences between Seveneves and The Last Policeman are its viewpoint characters. The Last Policeman is about ordinary people who have to wait for information about the asteroid—like its impact location—to be filtered through governments and media outlets, and who have no power over how society prepares for its end. By contrast, Seveneves is like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie: our viewpoint is centered on presidents, leaders, and influential scientists who do calculations and then say things like “My god…it’s starting!”
Now, a hypothetical contrarian could counter that The Last Policeman is about the end of the world, whereas Seveneves is about Fuck Yeah Science Engineer Lady Makes Machine Do Thing Boop Boop. And that’s fair. But the thing is, the book isn’t very good at that either.
I’ve already referred to the fact that the writing is extremely bland, and that isn’t just in the opening pages (although quite frankly, if you’ve made the moon exploding seem flat and unengaging then there’s really nowhere else to go but down). Despite being a book about Fuck Yeah Science, Seveneves has remarkably little trust in its reader to figure anything out for themselves. Everything, whether it be fairly advanced scientific concepts, primary school-level general knowledge, or basic character motivations, is bluntly explained with all the artfulness and creative flair of a blog post (a bad blog post, not one of my blog posts, which are good).
For example, here’s two of the initial moon fragments slamming into each other, as viewed from Earth (the fragments have stupid names because this book shares that odd tendency in American genre fiction for unbearable tweeness):
“Scoop’s sharper edge slammed into the divot that gave Kidney Bean its name and split it in half. It all happened, of course, in quiet super-slow motion.”
In quiet super-slow motion. Of course.
The characters meanwhile are the usual parade of stereotypes that American authors dig out when forced to acknowledge that the rest of the world exists: there’s an English guy named Rhys who talks and acts like an English guy named Rhys, there’s a bunch of Russians who are stoic and stern and very Russian. Not that the Americans are any better, whether we’re talking about the down-home midwest farm girl turned astronaut who is down-home, and from the midwest, or the characters who are clearly just famous real-life people wearing masks (there’s a pop astronomer who’s pretty blatantly Neil DeGrasse Tyson). Early on the book introduces the current–and by extension last–American president, a woman who we are laboriously told is the ultimate centrist, which essentially means she has no interesting qualities whatsoever.
And then a lot of the character writing can only be described as hacky. For example, the book does this at one point, when discussing a Russian cosmonaut facing apparent death:
“Tekla could communicate with Fyodor, and Fyodor only, and that was for a reason. It was a reason that the defenders of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow would have understood and accepted perfectly well.”
You see, she’s Russian, so therefore her personality is shaped entirely by the events of the German invasion of the western USSR, which occurred during WWII, aka the point where American history stopped advancing. This is the hackiest shit in the world, but American authors keep fucking doing it.
Oh and the Russians talk like this:
““Pioneers arrive in two weeks, this is still true? Then I need more Scouts yesterday, as saying goes.””
THE NUCLEAR WESSELS, AS THEY SAY IN YOUR AMERICAN ENGLISH
To be honest, I’m glad I stopped reading before more nationalities showed up because I don’t want to see how the book would handle someone from Africa or South-East Asia.
But the really devastating flaw when it comes to the characters is how none of them react to the impending apocalypse in a way that’s at all realistic or verisimilitudinous. There’s some perfunctory mention of people in the ISS weeping or feeling stressed, but then the book becomes as disinterested in their emotional state as it is in the society-wide reaction to the Hard Rain. We can’t dwell on our characters emotions, we need more room for Beep-Boop Science Calculations and annoying Joss Whedon dialogue.
““Sort of like Ben Grimm?” she asked.
It was a throwaway reference to a comic book character, the armor-plated member of the Fantastic Four. She didn’t expect him to pick up on it. But he shot back: “To name another cosmic ray victim, yes. But without the alienation and self-pity.”
“I always wanted skin like the Thing.”
“It wouldn’t suit you nearly as well as the skin God gave you. But as a way for you to protect your robots from cosmic rays, while giving them the freedom to roam around—”
“I think I’m in love,” she said.”
These people just found out, days earlier, that all of their friends and loved ones are going to die and that they’ll spend the rest of their lives in a cramped space station.
You know that old stereotype that fans of capital-L literature like to wheel out about science fiction, that it’s all paper-thin characters pontificating about the fuel consumption of spaceships and it’s completely lacking in commentary on, like, The Human Condition, or whatever True™ literature is meant to be about? Seveneves is exactly the kind of book they’re talking about. Never mind all of its other flaws, I’m honor-bound to resent it for the sin of proving some of the most irritating people in the world of literary commentary correct.