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    Seveneves
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    Seveneves
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    Seveneves
    Audiobook32 hours

    Seveneves

    Written by Neal Stephenson

    Narrated by Peter Brooke

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    The astounding new novel from the master of science fiction

    President Barack Obama’s summer reading choice

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMay 21, 2015
    ISBN9780008132552
    Unavailable
    Seveneves
    Author

    Neal Stephenson

    Neal Stephenson is the author of Termination Shock, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Zodiac and the iconic Snow Crash, named one of Time magazine's top one hundred all-time best English-language novels. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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    Reviews for Seveneves

    4/5

    1,674 ratings127 reviews

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    • 4/5
      So interesting, though a bit slow/long winded in parts. Loved its epic scale and it was very thought provoking.
    • 5/5
      "Five Thousand Years Later" (569).Stephenson is no stranger to epic stories. Consider his three volume, eight book, 3,000 word Baroque Trilogy! Still, how do you write a unified story that hinges on the words, "five thousand years later"? Stephenson accomplishes it with style.He begins the story with these words:"The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason" (3).The book tells the tale of what that explosion would entail and how humanity would respond in the ultimate survival situation.Seveneves is a science-fiction book with a strong emphasis on science. Much of the sprawling page-count is devoted to explaining theoretical technology. Don't let that dissuade you, though. Stephenson instructs in the context of the narrative without making the dialogue feeling forced or artificial.This is simply the best science fiction book I have read in over a decade. (I don't say that lightly either—I checked my archived reviews!) Seveneves is a page-turner with enough substance to hold the readers mind over many late nights.
    • 4/5
      The moon explodes. A handful of carefully chosen humans make a mad dash to space to ensure the long term survival of the species. 5,000 years later, their descendants return.
    • 4/5
      Good book , Scribd player not so much! Too slow in loading and way too glitchy!
    • 5/5
      https://www.bitesh.org/i-robot-issac-asimov/
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    • 5/5
      Wow what a great book. I love Neal Stephenson. He is one of those authors that just seems to write in a way that really flows for me. I completely understand the criticism some people have of him when they say he is long winded and spends too much time writing about things that do not move the story along (science information in this book), but I love all of it.

      The best part of this book was thinking about how peoples and cultures get along with one another and the incredibly neat idea of what it might look like if the human race had to start again. There were many fascinating parts of this book that kept me up thinking about it long after I put the book down each night. High recommended.
    • 2/5
      this book seemed to drag on so much, i understand that they have put 3 books into one here but by the end of it all I felt overwhelmed
    • 1/5
      The literary equivalent of smelling your own farts.

      I like Neil Stevenson, or at least I was willing to overlook the things I didn't like and that lead me to listening to this in its entirety, expecting a payoff... The isn't one.

      Seriously, this is so self indulgent, so without purpose, so meandering and slow paced that you'll wonder what you're listening to at times.

      The worst thing is that any good idea is repeated three or four times so you know just how clever the author is, ruining the few decent parts...

      Don't waste your time!

      (spoiler






















      THE end is 5k years in the futer there's fucking underwater people descended from nuclear submarine people, diggers from people who went underground and 7 tribes of space people from the ISS who are all clones, some of whom are NEOsnderthals (see what he did there? ).

      Imagine that and whatever you came up with just now in that one second of thought will be deeper and better thought it than this book!
    • 2/5
      Honestly, I wanted to love this. Great story concept with an incredibly solid amount of research that's gone into developing the world. But I would actually have loved to listen to the story written from that research, not the research itself. This is the background notes, a mixture of spaces where plot and character details were to be added later, and physics lecture notes. If you can follow the frequent ten minute lectures enough in this form, then they're mind numbingly boring. Otherwise, they'd be incomprehensible. Basically, anyone knowing enough of the terminology to follow along would probably want a more in depth discussion, and if you didn't know the terminology he doesn't define you'd have no hope working it out from this. So I don't know who the target audience is.
      On my third attempt to listen to it without going to sleep, I started skipping the lecture segments. Without them I was left with bland unbelievable characters and an implausible sequence of remarkable coincidences subbed in for narrative progression.
    • 4/5
      Impossibly long and in places detailed , but also rich in beautiful imagination. I loved it!
    • 5/5
      Epic. Tolkien in the stratosphere maybe. Great read. Thank you
    • 4/5
      Epic in scale but lacking in detail where it really needed it
      A good listen on the workday drives
    • 5/5
      It's not perfect and I would have liked more of the world 5000 years post-Zero, but it's really damned good. It's a big book, set mostly in a very small space. It's smart, woman-centered )dare I say "feminist"?) science fiction. It would occasionally get bogged down in scientific detail, but even that is something that will appeal to a lot of people. (It just made me feel out of my depth.) I would recommend this book to anyone who likes smart science fiction with intelligent, sympathetic characters (mostly) and solid world-building.
    • 3/5
      The book opens "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." From then on, humanity is on a desperate race to find ways to survive the coming meteor storm, which will bombard Earth for centuries, leaving the Earth's surface a desolate wasteland. Their primary tactic: create a space station that will hold a few thousand people and sufficient technology and biological samples to recreate Earth's biome after the meteor bombardment. The book follows various scientists and engineers as they strive to create this haven. The effort takes 566 pages, and is by far the best part of the book. In fact, I wish it had been the entire book, because pages 567-851 follow characters who are far less interesting, in a context that I find far less believable. I did not buy for a second the society that thrives in space five thousand years after the bombardment; aside from a little slang, it's almost indistinguishable from twenty-first century Western civilization. They've been living in space for five thousand years, under incredibly difficult conditions! Even worse than a future that I didn't buy, it's boring. There are mole people! Mer people! Robot swarms fighting each other! And yet, because Stephenson is bad at writing humans and human activity at the best of times, and loves stopping in the midst of action scenes to explain how every little weapon works, and the precise physics of how someone fell down a hill, the second part of this book is pretty dull.

      Stephenson has a tendency to do astounding amounts of research and then showcase alllll of it. Every single scientific concept and every single invention is described in exhaustive (and by the end, exhausting) detail. This is a perfect book for people that like that sort of thing. I'd have preferred more characterization and more plausible social movements.
    • 2/5
      Disappointed ..... my least favourite of his books - three sections, notwell connected - lef tme feeling flat
    • 4/5
      Stephenson’s epic is – as ever – multi-faceted and fascinating. The first sections tend to be very hard sci-fi and could have been boring and tedious, but are kept moving by the story which is rip-roaring and hair-raising. Keep going through and you will come out into the last sections – filled with bliss. The only way I can describe it. The story glistens at the end. "Each enhancement is an amputation."
    • 3/5
      This book is 861 pages. The plot, however, can be boiled down to a mere 150 - 200 pages. The rest is filled with "hard science facts" that is either plain boring or unneeded in some cases. For most of the book, there is little to no character development. Characters are added, and later killed, with the reader caring very little about it. In some instances, Stephenson interrupts characters in mid conversation to spew science for six pages. All in all, it leaves the reader with a sense of a much greater book lurking behind the intriguing premise of the story, if only it could be uncovered from the barrage of facts buried on top of it.
    • 4/5
      It makes sense this was one of Obama's recommended reads. The science and optimism are good but about 2/3rds of the way through the book the plot takes a real sharp right turn and the ending never really feels complete. It's almost like Stephenson paused and realized he'd already written 800 pages and was like "well that should be long enough" and wrapped it up in 20.
    • 1/5
      I DNFed at page 281 (only around a third of the way through) and resorted to Wiki.The story concept is completely my cup of tea. The world is ending and we know it's coming. Once I realized the basic plot, I was excited to have 900 pages to examine how we plan for it, how it falls apart, how people are coping with being a chosen survivor, how people are coping with a slow doom, how we are going to save the species, etc. Even the portion I read on Wiki sounded like a great story. And when Neal was telling me a story, it was glorious.Unfortunately, far too much of Seveneves wasn't a story. The narrative took a backseat to the science. By all means, it's good for science fiction to be realistic. You need that if you're going to be able to lose yourself in the tale, but fiction shouldn't read like a textbook. When reading a novel, I don't want to read a dozen pages in a row with absolutely no progress to the story because those pages are dedicated to explaining precisely how the science of a single action works. When I want to read about physics, DNA sequencing, or any kind of scientific topic, I get a non-fiction science book written by a scientist. When I pick up a novel, I want to read a story. This was a huge disappointment for me because I know what kind of a storyteller this author can be, and I could see such a strong glimmer of that here. Not enough for me to finish it though.
    • 3/5
      I might have given this book four stars had it not dragged on for an unnecessary 300 pages. If you haven't read this book and want to, do so. But don't bother reading the last part (it's divided into three parts). It serves no actual point, it drags on, and it's dull.
    • 3/5
      The first two-thirds are a brilliant exploration of the engineering, te chnology, and adaptability required to save a sliver of humanity from global disaster by building a "Cloud Ark" centred on the ISS. The character development and narrative drive are lacking, but the technological wizardry is excellent. This would have given it 4/5 stars but.... the final third is a sudden jarring jump to 5000 years later, with new characters, a whole slice of genetic determinism, and a dated Cold War vibe that made it unreadable for me.
    • 4/5
      This book finally answers the burning question about what would happen if you sent Malala Yousafzai, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Elon Musk, and Clair Underwood into space in a three-part somewhat unrelated series that probably should have been two (or more) books. O, it was also a good metaphor for Donald Trump's rise in America at one point but that was like 600 pages ago so I forgot it. Really though, the book is classic Neal Stephenson (i.e. good and interesting), but it's definitely not my favorite effort by him. It actually may be my least favorite book of his but it's nonetheless enjoyable if a bit of a slog. There's also some weird anti-US government bureaucracy/pro-Communist dictatorship flavor for a bit but I'll chalk that up to my hyper-awareness of such things and also relative lack of countries who can reliably fling things into space.
    • 2/5
      Like so many people, I enjoyed the first 2/3rds of this book. I wouldn't say I loved it, for I'm not particularly attached to hard-edged sci-fi like Seveneves. I found the story fascinating and did learn some things about orbital mechanics, but it did drone on and on and I found myself begging for the abridged version more than once.

      Once I hit the turning point around the 2/3rd mark, any connection I had with the story that was pulling me along was suddenly gone. I tried for another 50 pages or so to keep it up, but my interest had vanished. This one is a did-not-finish.
    • 3/5
      Not his best/
    • 3/5
      This book is an entertaining hot mess. It's the literary equivalent of what I imagine Lady Gaga would be like after a month long bender.

      The premise is decent, the setup is good, Stephenson has clearly thought out a bunch of the problems involved. Then it goes off the rails, exponentially, much like the lunar explosion it describes.

      Stephenson has always had a tendency to get bogged down by exposition and backstory. At first, I thought perhaps the issue was that I find physics less entertaining than cryptography, but as the book progressed, I increasingly thought the problem was not wholly me. The book requires backstory and exposition--this isn't the Interstellar take, where Nolan has clearly decided he doesn't care if it all hangs together so he'll only explain exactly enough to keep the plot flowing. The problem is that Stephenson can't resist the desire to riff and show off how clever he is. This gets progressively worse as the exposition begins to overwhelm the story, particularly in part 3, where so much backstory is required to catch you up on the 5,000 intervening years that you get one page of plot per 3 pages of explanation. It's as if he spent 3 years building the world in notebooks before actually writing the book, and darn it, he doesn't want that all to go to waste!

      And, ah yes, the politics. I won't attempt to package the politics of he book up with a neat bow, but the main thrust of the first 2/3 is "technocrats are great! Politicians screw it all up." Which, yawn, hardly the first SF author and for that matter typical of Stephenson. Part 3 is where it really goes haywire. My real reaction would need to be in a series of increasingly puzzled GIFs, but for lack of same, I will attempt to verbalize. It is a seemingly logical and yet impossibly wacky concoction of racial/social theory including one "Eve" explicitly basing her breeding plans on pseudoscientific ideas about different racial capabilities. This must all have sounded a lot better in his head when he was just playing out the possible endings of biological experimentation than it actually came across on the page. It's internally consistent, so every "why didn't this..." question has an answer, and yet when you stand back and look at it, the overall "but why?" Fails to satisfy. Why have permanent races who rarely or don't interbreed? It's explained and yet I still ask. What statement is he making? I have no idea, even after 900 pages.

      Despite the length, the final third starts slowly--thanks to all those info dumps--and then hits up to warp speed, leaving a final 150 or so pages that feels far too short, introducing major new concepts and groups with little time to delve into them. It almost would have been preferable to have separated the book: clean up the first sections, publish them as one book, and then expand the final 300 pages and turn it into a sequel. The problem with that idea is that Stephenson is notably weaker when dealing with sociology and biology than when talking about engineering, astronomy, and physics. Perhaps it's partly the consequence of space: he creates a vastly complex world with its own inner workings that really exists almost independently of the first 2/3 of the novel, but 300 pages is simply not enough space to fully realize it. I think there are some fundamental problems that Stephenson hasn't worked out, and I don't know if more space would have helped him solve them. I was left wondering if he's considering a sequel.
    • 2/5
      This book was ambitious, incredible in scope, and thought provoking. However, the first two of the book's three parts were depressing, bleak, horrifying, frustrating, and full of dull technical details. The last third was more fantastical, optimistic, and exciting.

      The character who was basically a Neil deGrasse Tyson caricature threw off every scene he was in for me, and some of the other characters grated on me. I can't name one I particularly liked, because the ones who weren't despicable had little personality.

      In my opinion, Neil Stephenson hasn't written anything which came close to "Snow Crash", but it could just be that the novelty of reading his style for the first time made that book more enjoyable.
    • 2/5
      Not my flavor. Too much technical detail. I don't care how the ship is built. I care how the people are interacting. I have stayed with longer than I might have because Stephenson is an excellent writer.
    • 4/5
      This book is so very strange. Upto about two-thirds of the way in this was one of the better science fiction books I have read. But then the book kind of fell on its face.

      The premise of this book is phenomenal. The moon explodes, condemning life on earth to an untimely death. The rest of the book is about how the human species ekes out a precarious existence in space.

      I loved the characters, particularly empathising with Dinah and Dubois. But this isn't really a book about characters. Its about events, decisions, ideas and of course science.

      It is extremely clear that the author had planned to devote large sections of this book to the science of space habitats - their conceptualization, construction, maintenance and transport. I will freely admit that not being particularly well versed in the sciences, some of this went over my head. But the overall impression created was one of last-ditch crazy innovation that just might work. I think this is the effect the author was trying to create.

      About four chapters in, I had a fairly major grievance against the author. This book seemed to be devoid of humanity. The end of the world had been announced. Where were the politicians in denial? The religious apocalypse crowds? The panicked rioting crowds? Instead the narrative consisted of scientific people engaging in reasonable discussions about technological innovations. Why were people being so mature?

      Gradually I understood that all of that was there, but it happened off-screen. I think the author consiously decided to focus on the science while hinting about other events. It was actually a pretty accurate representation of the reality of the space station. And of course the politics did return with a vengeance in the second part precipitating the chain of events leading to the Seveneves.

      This brings me to the third and final part.

      Warning: Major Spoilers

      The book could and should have finished with the Seveneves. A long prologue could have accounted for the 5000 years in the future narrative and the rest of it could have been a second book. Instead we get a semi-book - the third part presents the seven distinct races 5000 years in the future, and what they find on Earth - something that had been hinted about since the beginning - underwater and underground survivors. There is some initial conflict, some meetings, a hint at a larger narrative and the book ends in a very bad way.

      Frankly it would have been much better to write this story in a separate book rather than tacking it on and ruining a perfectly good book

    • 4/5
      It was so obvious, at a particular point in the story, that the thing to do was clearly for the characters to see who and what was on the other side of a door and say "Uh, yeah, no.", close the door, and go on their way. But nope. Because then, well, not no story, but a very different one.

      I dunno, I read this at standard Stephenson speed, but still I wasn't quite as engaged as with his other ones. Was that me, or the book? Can't be sure.

      For sure it has one of the best beginnings ever, and that momentum runs for a long time. My recommendation is to not be reading reviews like this. It's worth it, just go read it.
    • 3/5
      Remember Lucifer's Hammer? Like that only less plausible and full of Neal Stephenson's fetishes, like chains and butch women.