Review of: “Seveneves"
Seveneves (2015)
Writers: Neal Stephenson
Release Date: May 19, 2015
Awards: 2016 – Nominated, Hugo Award for Best Novel. Won, Prometheus Award for Best Novel.
Film Adaptation: 2016 – Skydance Media and Imagine Entertainment own the rights with screenwriter William
Broyles Jr., director Ron Howard, and producer Brian Grazer attached to the
project.
2024 – No updates other than the 2016 announcement.
Audiobook Runtime: Roughly 38 hours.
Spoilers Ahead,
You Have Been Warned...
Plot:
Set in a near-future Earth facing
imminent destruction due to a catastrophic event: the sudden disintegration of
the moon. The story follows humanity's desperate struggle for survival as they
race against time to escape Earth's impending doom. The novel is divided into
three parts: the initial effort to preserve human civilization in orbit, the
struggle to rebuild society after the cataclysm, and a distant future where
humanity has evolved and adapted to life in space.
This audiobook was 30+ hours of technical babble, and while a good book and idea, I ultimately did not care for how the story flowed. I oftentimes blanked out while listening to this over long stretches. It has some really great stuff in it, but lacks decent characterization. Four major plot holes that many other reviews keep saying is “ambiguous,” but I argue, “no, these are plot holes…”
Plot hole – 1) The Agent – The event that shatters the Moon. They do not know what caused it or what it really was, but all the book is willing to dive into and was willing to discover was something very small, moving very fast. struck the moon at the core and shattered it. The book states it was heavily investigated, but they couldn’t really figure it out if it was an act of malice by an outside the Earth influence or not, (aliens or act of GOD/god)… To me, this just doesn’t work. I just fail to understand how humanity just gives up on the search of the cause but uses the reality of what comes next to just write that problem away.
Plot hole – 2) The Mars Mission – A small group of humans break off the swarm of human survivors and attempt to travel to Mars to start anew there. It’s never mentioned again. We do not know what happened to this group. They take a few lines to discuss it but come to the conclusion they do not have the resources to make the trip and will die out due to all of this in short order. As I said, it is never mentioned again, even after the third part of the book that takes place 5,000 years later.
Plot hole – 3) JBF not being punished for war crimes against humanity – Julia Bliss Flaherty, mostly referred to as ‘JBF’. She is President of the United States during the early parts of the story. A combination of Trump/Biden/narcissistic-sociopath, who is guilty for nuking a country and responsible for the deaths of 99.5% of all surviving humans. She violates the international accord, that no world leaders will save themselves, by saving herself, fleeing to the ISS aboard a stolen Boeing X-37, along with Pete Starling, her science advisor. JBF attempts to reassert her leadership and persuades a large number of Cloud Ark survivors to abandon the ISS/Swarm. JBF loses control fast and a war ensues among the dissents. This leads to JBF directly being responsible for the death of nearly all of what is left of the human race, beside the handful of survivors. The second she started to become a social problem she should have been ejected out of the airlock. It was agreed nothing of the old world was to rule over this new one.
Plot hole – 4) The Purpose – Basically, it is the spacer’s religion but it isn’t really clear as to what the purpose is and what it is all about. It’s just left open to interpretation which is what is wrong with this whole plot.
The most interesting aspects are left, not even to the imagination, but rather briefly talked about as if they are uber-important; then just left unanswered, nor do the main characters even care about answering those questions, which, like I said, are the most interesting aspects of the book.
This book would be perfect for the modern-day woke-feminist, with most of, if not all, the character leads being female and all of them being extremely one dimensional and hypersensitive (modern-day woke-feminist). I am not even saying that to be disrespectful. I am saying it because that is what the females act like in this book. They are all full of crap about how they perceive each situation and how their decision making is based on subjective feelings, which would be the worst thing to do while working in space in the real world. You do not have time to get emotional working on and living on the ISS for real and this book tries to be based on a real reality. So just calling a spade a spade there. I immediately related these characters to these attributes. Granted this book was written in 2014-2015. Its 2024 now. It is easy to retrospectively say this and it make sense now, but then, I might have saw the characters in a different light. We live in different times and it isn’t even that long ago.
I do not know if I would ever trust Neal Stephenson again with another story. I mean, the book isn’t terrible. It is good. There is a story about the struggle for survival there. It has some really great stuff going on here. I just think it wasn’t executed very well from a storytelling point of view. Others have read this and loved it. I did like it but thought it was wordy, slow and poor characterization. These issues were deal breakers for me. If a movie ever does comes out. I hope they leave all that messy stuff out of the story and tackle the things that were actually interesting about the story. Tackle these four plot holes to make better sense. Make us care about the characters. Give them some real backstory. Also, who the FK blew up the Moon to begin with?