What would happen if the world were ending?
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. But unforeseen dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain...
Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown, to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.
A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is at once extraordinary and eerily recognizable. He explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
***
You certainly can't judge a book by its cover, but its first sentence, I find, can be tremendously telling—and so it is with Seveneves, the latest doorstopper of a novel to bear Neal Stephenson's name, and his greatest since Cryptonomicon in 1999.
It starts simply: with eleven ordinary words arranged in such a straightforward way that the eye absorbs them almost automatically. It's only when the significance of said sentence registers that the eye tracks back to take in its content more carefully. Still, it takes a few seconds to make sense, for as easy to read as these words may be—as indeed is the entirety of Seveneves—their meaning is a world away from mundane.
This is a sentence so shocking, so appalling, that the brain demands a double-take. But even a second look later, the song remains the same:
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. (p.3)In this way, the extraordinary and extraordinarily complex content belied by the seeming simplicity of Seveneves is revealed, and the fate of something like seven billion human beings is sealed.
In short, Seveneves startling first sentence sets the tone for much of what's to come, but in a novel approximately a thousand pages long, there's just so much to come that it's hard to know where to start, and when to stop. I won't be giving the game away, that much I can say. Nobody's going to hold it against you, however, if you opt to stop reading this review right now—so long as you immediately start reading Seveneves instead.