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I greatly enjoyed some of Stephenson's other works, but I was actually a bit disappointed with Seveneves. The narrative is well crafted, but unfortunately I jus

I greatly enjoyed some of Stephenson's other works, but I was actually a bit disappointed with Seveneves. The narrative is well crafted, but unfortunately I just got stuck on the whole space ark concept and couldn't suspend disbelief enough to continue. Maybe someone else can explain why it made sense to focus on an orbiting refuge, right in the path of the Moon's fragments, rather than dig a bunch of underground cities that would have saved many times more people. Midway through the first unit, I basically decided they should have dug tunnels ten miles long, one mile deep at bottom, lay tracks, and just go full steam carting rocks out while digging massive caverns. They could move entire hospitals, schools, factories, labs, etc. into these places, store tons of food and supplies, lay pipes to connect to underground water supplies, set up parks, farms, and animal preserves using artificial solar lighting. Makes so much more sense to me than this nutty space station idea. And with gravity, access to minerals, oxygen, etc. I love space as much as the next geek, but if you want to save millions of humans, you've got to dig.

p_eter_p 10y ago
You might like Hugh Howie's "Wool" series...
- huslage 10y ago
  I read this series right after I read Seveneves. The connections were impressive.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  Yup, loved Wool.
aetherson 10y ago
Well...... You'd clearly be right if you were looking at a timeframe of a few years, or a few decades, or maybe a century or two. But if you successfully establish a long term presence in space, you've got access to a lot of resources. If you're stuck in a hole in the ground for 5,000 years, and the surface is considerably more hostile than space, I think there's at least a colorable argument that space is the way to go. Spoilers for the end of the book follow. As it happens, remnants of humanity survive in space, underground, and underwater. This was the part of the story that broke my suspension of disbelief. I just couldn't really buy the end-third societies. It's like Stephenson couldn't get his mind around how long 5,000 years actually is. Just as a for-example, language: In 3,000 BC, there might have been an unknown language that we designate proto-Indo-European because we don't actually have any texts that reference it. Proto-Indo-European might have begat another language that is still so ancient that we can only guess at it that we designate proto-Germanic which begat a family of West-German languages that begat Old English that begat Middle English that begat modern English. Meanwhile, in 7,000 AD, apparently they speak a light pidgin of modern English that's pretty understandable to modern English speakers. I get Stephenson's argument for why his far-future cultures are so directly related to the action in the first two thirds of the book, I just can't quite buy it.
- usrusr 10y ago
  Humanity has little experience with the speed of language evolution in presence of audiovisual recording technology. The Quran did not prevent Arabic dialects from diverging, but it sure slowed down evolution compared to other languages that did not have their own religious texts or got translations only much later. I think it is quite reasonable to expect an even lower amount of change with a vast, well studied corpus of audiovisual material. (My personal illusion breaker was thermal management of the off-screen survivors: I usually would not dare to nitpick on such a thing, but when the topic has been elaborated so deeply for the ark-dwellers, I just can't switch back to the default mode of happy ignorance that quickly, in the same book)
- pavedwalden 10y ago
  I enjoyed thinking about why language might not change as much in the next 5000 years as it has in the past 1000. For one thing, widespread literacy and a relatively stable canon of literature should keep successive generations mutually intelligible. In the case of the novel's space society, I find it at least plausible that media archives from earth and thousands of hours of The Saga being viewed by all educated humans would freeze the spoken language in its current state.

p_eter_p 10y ago

You might like Hugh Howie's "Wool" series...

huslage 10y ago
I read this series right after I read Seveneves. The connections were impressive.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Yup, loved Wool.

aetherson 10y ago

Well...... You'd clearly be right if you were looking at a timeframe of a few years, or a few decades, or maybe a century or two. But if you successfully establish a long term presence in space, you've got access to a lot of resources. If you're stuck in a hole in the ground for 5,000 years, and the surface is considerably more hostile than space, I think there's at least a colorable argument that space is the way to go. Spoilers for the end of the book follow. As it happens, remnants of humanity survive in space, underground, and underwater. This was the part of the story that broke my suspension of disbelief. I just couldn't really buy the end-third societies. It's like Stephenson couldn't get his mind around how long 5,000 years actually is. Just as a for-example, language: In 3,000 BC, there might have been an unknown language that we designate proto-Indo-European because we don't actually have any texts that reference it. Proto-Indo-European might have begat another language that is still so ancient that we can only guess at it that we designate proto-Germanic which begat a family of West-German languages that begat Old English that begat Middle English that begat modern English. Meanwhile, in 7,000 AD, apparently they speak a light pidgin of modern English that's pretty understandable to modern English speakers. I get Stephenson's argument for why his far-future cultures are so directly related to the action in the first two thirds of the book, I just can't quite buy it.

usrusr 10y ago
Humanity has little experience with the speed of language evolution in presence of audiovisual recording technology. The Quran did not prevent Arabic dialects from diverging, but it sure slowed down evolution compared to other languages that did not have their own religious texts or got translations only much later. I think it is quite reasonable to expect an even lower amount of change with a vast, well studied corpus of audiovisual material. (My personal illusion breaker was thermal management of the off-screen survivors: I usually would not dare to nitpick on such a thing, but when the topic has been elaborated so deeply for the ark-dwellers, I just can't switch back to the default mode of happy ignorance that quickly, in the same book)
pavedwalden 10y ago
I enjoyed thinking about why language might not change as much in the next 5000 years as it has in the past 1000. For one thing, widespread literacy and a relatively stable canon of literature should keep successive generations mutually intelligible. In the case of the novel's space society, I find it at least plausible that media archives from earth and thousands of hours of The Saga being viewed by all educated humans would freeze the spoken language in its current state.