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A review by gottstem
Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
3.0
An impressive epic that could've been better executed
With 2 parts "hard science" space exploration and 1 part "science fiction", "Seveneves" probably is too expansive to please anyone. Either people like the first two parts and don't care for the third, or like me, find the first two parts dull and unimaginative, and the only actual story and interesting plot is the third. It's not that I don't mind hard science, but if I feel like it was Stephenson wanting to show his research off. I never knew the end of the world could be so boring; with almost no dramatic impetus to continue and pain-staking descriptions that were difficult and uneventful to understand, I almost cut my losses after around 400 pages of rather dull sequences of events that for all reason should have been much more exciting.
Thus I think this could've been remedied by better framing. I understand what Stephenson was going for in how the sequences of events transform into something of a legendary character, but breaking things up also gives the reader an enjoyable task of piecing things together. Rather than laying it all out in normal order, interspersing the two portions between each other, and letting the reader see the corollaries, can be much more rewarding (think like the film "Memento").
Overall, I did almost put this book down because I found so much hard science so dull, but I struggled through to be rewarded in the third part with finally some imagination, some plot, some real characters, and a whole world-building that finally deserved the effort and scope being demanded.
3 stars for what was obviously a lot of work and a great after-glow of sheer scale, but wish the execution could've made it more of a page-turner story.
With 2 parts "hard science" space exploration and 1 part "science fiction", "Seveneves" probably is too expansive to please anyone. Either people like the first two parts and don't care for the third, or like me, find the first two parts dull and unimaginative, and the only actual story and interesting plot is the third. It's not that I don't mind hard science, but if I feel like it was Stephenson wanting to show his research off. I never knew the end of the world could be so boring; with almost no dramatic impetus to continue and pain-staking descriptions that were difficult and uneventful to understand, I almost cut my losses after around 400 pages of rather dull sequences of events that for all reason should have been much more exciting.
Thus I think this could've been remedied by better framing. I understand what Stephenson was going for in how the sequences of events transform into something of a legendary character, but breaking things up also gives the reader an enjoyable task of piecing things together. Rather than laying it all out in normal order, interspersing the two portions between each other, and letting the reader see the corollaries, can be much more rewarding (think like the film "Memento").
Overall, I did almost put this book down because I found so much hard science so dull, but I struggled through to be rewarded in the third part with finally some imagination, some plot, some real characters, and a whole world-building that finally deserved the effort and scope being demanded.
3 stars for what was obviously a lot of work and a great after-glow of sheer scale, but wish the execution could've made it more of a page-turner story.