A review by tygaribay
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

4.0

I am a big fan of Neil Stephenson's work, but I am often put off by the sheer size of his works. I finally got around to investing the time into chewing through Seveneves, and I found it to be extremely uneven. This volume is actually two books, each a manageable 4-500pages. The first half about the events following the unexplained destruction of Earth's moon is one of the best hard SF books I have ever read. I highly recommend this part. The second half takes place 5000 years later, after humans have survived, near extinction, created a ringworld around the earth and developed great new technologies to rebuild the Earth almost like it was before. This section suffers from being a collection of individually interesting digressions into how all of these things could be accomplished. The story and the characters of the future are uniformly depressing, as it is clear that one our greatest imaginations can only picture humans being so very human, more interested in status, war, and power than ever. Stephenson is still a great writer, but if these were two separate books, the first half would be a 5 star and the 2nd half would get about 2.