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Oh, Seveneves! I once listed it as the book that disappointed me the most [1] and seeing cool stuff like this simulation reminded me why again. I think my expl

Oh, Seveneves! I once listed it as the book that disappointed me the most [1] and seeing cool stuff like this simulation reminded me why again. I think my explanation still reflects my opinions on the book and might be relevant here: > I didn't know it before I started reading it, but the book plot is divided in 2 (very different) acts. > The first one just captivates you in a way that makes it very hard to stop reading or even thinking about it when you are reading. > Little did I know when the second act started and oh man, it was a complete struggle. It seems that the pace changes completely to an almost stall and the book just became complete unreadable for me. > While the first act took me days, the second took me weeks and weeks to go further in the book and even with my kindle saying I still had 15% to finish, I got so frustrated that I just quit and never even had the curiosity to know how it ends. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/65z04t/what_book_disappointed_you_the_most/dgg7nts/?utm_content=permalink&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit&utm_name=frontpage https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/65z04t/what_book_dis...

magic_beans 9y ago
What was so different between the two acts?
- eric_h 9y ago
  The first act is about how the present day human race survives the moon being destroyed. The second takes place 5000 years in the future and is essentially about the return to earth. I don’t share GP’s opinion, I quite enjoyed both acts. I do agree that the pace of the two is quite different - the first being a bit more sci-fi thriller pace and the second is a bit more contemplative.
  - Jemaclus 9y ago
    There's actually three acts: Earth, Space, Moon. It's really a trilogy smushed up into one book. I agree, though. The first two acts were great, and the third fell flatter than the earlier two. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's nice to imagine what would happen, and it's pretty hard scifi throughout, albeit greatly accelerated.
    - eric_h 9y ago
      Fair enough, but I lump the first two together in my head simply because they occurred in the same time frame, at least compared to the third act
    - rtkwe 9y ago
      Yeah, though I tend to like breaking it into 'the end of Earth and our efforts to survive that end' and 'what happens to a society that's been through that trauma and their return home' split. The time jump really makes the jump feel more solid between book/acts 2 and 3 to me.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    It's two separate books that were put under the hydraulic press and smashed into one tome. Keep that in mind when reading it, otherwise the second act is jarring.
    - eric_h 9y ago
      Yes, well said. Honestly it's kind of like reading "The Diamond Age" immediately after reading "Snow Crash" and expecting them to be similar since they're set in the same universe.
- vkou 9y ago
  Act 2 is Neal Stephenson's re-imagining of the Fellowship of the Ring - complete with the cast that makes up the fellowship, and roughly 500 pages of walking to places, so that they can walk to other places, so that they could walk to other places, without doing much of anything. Beautiful worldbuilding, but very much not like the rest of the book.
  - mjd 9y ago
    I said very much the same thing in my review: “[The characters] spend most of the third part literally doing nothing. They are assembled into a team of seven by a nebulous authority for some secret purpose; neither they nor we are told what it is. They go from place to place to investigate something or other, making several pointless stops and excursions and wondering, as I did, what was going on and when something was actually going to happen.” https://blog.plover.com/book/Seveneves.html https://blog.plover.com/book/Seveneves.html
    - jrockway 9y ago
      Literally doing nothing seems to be a valid literary technique. The part I remember most from Cryptonomicon is about some guy eating cereal.
      - sevensor 9y ago
        Funny, that scene stuck with me too. With UHT milk. Extra cold.
      - mjd 9y ago
        I have no problem with that in general. The cereal-eating was focused and vivid (it was Cap'n Crunch), and anyway it was over in a couple of pages. Nicholson Baker's entire novel The Mezzanine is like that, and it's just fine. But so much of my time was spent reading about those people going from A to B to C on their way to D, and for what? There was a similar episode in _Anathem_, which I generally liked. But for some reason the characters had to go from A to B and the best way to get there was to go over the North Pole, and the book stopped for fifty pages until they got over the Pole and everything could continue. In a different world some editor would have persuaded Stephenson to cut the whole thing out, and I used to hope he would one day meet that editor and we would live in that world, but by now I've given up.
- codemac 9y ago
  The first part is a race against time to survive. The second part is a war between humans for scarce resources in space. The third part is about humans, who are largely doing fine, finding out stuff about the past and themselves. There are some deadlines & urgency in the last part, but I think it's a tall task to try and create urgency when the previous sections were about the entire human races being extinguished.
- joshrivers 9y ago
  Myself, I enjoyed the entire book, but I understand the let down feeling some here are expressing. The first part is immediate, gripping, intense, and hard to go through it (but you don't want to stop, because it is so good). After all of that resolves, it's pretty hard to emotionally connect with the rest of the story, since you are exhausted from all that came before. The final act is worthwhile and interesting, it's just a pretty big change in direction.
- loeg 9y ago
  The first part is "real time" and very intense and nerve-wracking. Then in Act 2 it skips forward 5000 years and tries to tell you what happened later. It feels like an extended epilogue and none of the original characters are alive for you to care about. I liked it, but I can totally see the criticism.
comicjk 9y ago
I agree - I recommend Seveneves to anyone, but I say stop as soon as Act 1 ends. I think Act 2 spoils the ending of Act 1 by undermining the high stakes that made it impactful. I can tell Stephenson enjoyed writing Act 2 as an act of fun semi-hard sci-fi, but I think it should have been in its own setting, not tacked on to a dark hard sci-fi survival novel.
linsomniac 9y ago
I have loved Stephenson's work in the past, up until about Cryptonomicon. Everything I've read since has been a great short read, bundled up in a thousand pages. Seveneves started off strong, but then turned into a real slog. It could have been a great 200 page book, but at 600 pages I was just glad to be done with it and expect it to be the last thing of his I read. The Baroque Cycle felt similar, even though it contained many of the characters I loved from Cryptonomicon, but I just couldn't make it through it. I see there are people here who like or love it, which is great. I am not surprised to see others here echoing my feeling that it was quite a slog to get through. Stopping at Act 2 is probably not a bad idea, though I feel like Act 1 is a lot of setup that pays off in Act 2 so I wonder what the point would be.
- Ar-Curunir 9y ago
  But Anathem is his best work!
  - finnh 9y ago
    It's funny how personal all of these preferences are. I, personally, thought that "Diamond Age" was tepid, and "Zodiac" pretty stupid (but an early work, so forgiveable), but I've pretty well loved everything else that Stephenson wrote by himself. On the shared-author side of things, the DODO book is terrible - dropped after about 2 pages - and the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too. Anathem and Seveneves are among my favorites. And I really liked the entire Baroque Cycle! (after consciously avoiding it for years).
    - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
      > the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too It's not like Stephenson's other works but I found it to be perfectly competent historical-ish fiction.
  - Florin_Andrei 9y ago
    If the thing that most deeply interests you is Knowledge (with capital initial, and understood in the broadest sense possible), then Anathem is like catnip for your brain. It's the book that shows how deeply the author understands what motivates knowledge geeks - be they active in science, technology, or any other field. Reading it, nearly at every page I was like "wow, this guy gets it!"
Bedon292 9y ago
I had the exact same experience. I absolutely chewed up the first act (or two depending on how you look at it) in the matter of a few days, and it was awesome. But I never finished the final act. It was just not interesting enough for me to finish it.
btown 9y ago
Many of Stephenson's books, particularly Seveneves and Diamond Age, have amazing worldbuilding, but simply fall apart from a plot coherence perspective about 2/3 of the way through. We on this thread aren't the first to notice this: https://www.google.com/search?q="neal+stephenson"+ending https://www.google.com/search?q="neal+stephenson"+ending It's not easy: when you build "mysteries" into a well-built self-consistent world (and Stephenson's worlds are excellent in this regard), it becomes increasingly hard to reconcile them all. As soon as you allow yourself to explore emergent phenomena during a creative process, you run the risk of writing yourself into a corner. I tend to read most fiction with an approach of "imagine the stories you wish happened in this well-thought-out universe" rather than worrying too much about the way an author actually writes a plot.
- pebers 9y ago
  I found Seveneves felt quite different to his other work in that it seemed that the first 2/3 was setup for the last third which was the story he really wanted to tell. Unfortunately I enjoyed the setup much more than the payoff - didn't help that it had a much more powerful climax. Conversely in many of his other books he's having fun describing the world early on but drawing it back together at the end doesn't work as well - Diamond Age is probably the clearest example. In the end the experience is very broadly similar but it seems to come from different causes.
- baddox 9y ago
  I don’t think it has anything to do with writing himself into a corner. I think he’s just an insanely ambitious author and I’ll pretty much always give mad props to any author that is that skilled and ambitious, even when things don’t quite work out (like the last act of Seveneves). I also found the last act jarring and weaker than the rest of the book, but I still came away thinking “woah, an individual human not only set out to write this whole book, but then actually WROTE it.”
- mirimir 9y ago
  It's my theory that he tends to get bored, or runs out of time. I love Seveneves, but the last part seems rushed. And cries out for a sequel. Diamond Age too, but less so. And I found its ending to be quite satisfying. Ditto for Anathem. The Baroque Cycle trilogy is actually a counterexample, being an extended followup and backstory to Cryptonomicon. That's also one aspect of the Mongoliad trilogy. And even D.O.D.O., in a way. But I can't say how, without major spoilers.
arthurjj 9y ago
I initially felt similar. But once I realized that Seveneves is actually two RPG novels [1] it gets much better. Part 1 & 2 are universe backstory. Like the Horus Heresy in 40k or the story of Lilith in Vampire. Part 3 is just to advance the plot of the univers. Like the Dragonheart Trilogy in Shadowrun or when the clans get introduced in Battletech. [1] http://arthur-johnston.com/essay/2015/10/03/seveneves.html http://arthur-johnston.com/essay/2015/10/03/seveneves.html
- marzell 9y ago
  The first parts (and also Anathem a bit) reminded me a bit of Isaac Asimov... in the sense that his sci-fi is often more about exploring society and human plight over long time periods, rather than focusing on laser beams and teleportation devices and specific characters who die off in a short galactic timeframe.
  - felipesabino 9y ago
    Yes, totally! Never thought about it on this terms, but totally agree and I guess that similarity was what made me like the first parts so much
coverband 9y ago
I enjoyed Seveneves, but found it to be the one of the most depressing books I've ever read, right up to the final act. Not only because of the dark underlying theme, but also because you get invested in so many characters who then end up dying in a myriad of ways. The ending feels like the setup of a sequel book which I doubt will follow.
- baddox 9y ago
  That’s an interesting take. I found it one of the most optimistic books I’ve ever read, so much so that given how I see real humans behave I find the optimism perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of the book.
- lowbloodsugar 9y ago
  You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy[1]. Fantastic sci-fi. Utterly depressing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I really enjoyed the first book, liked the second one, and wish I could unread the third one.
    - radicaldreamer 9y ago
      The problem with the third book was that it rapidly expanded in scope and grandeur but was the same number of pages as the previous books, so concepts and scope and scale which had enough exposition in the previous books simply fell short in the third.
      - pavel_lishin 9y ago
        Kind of, but I think even so, it just wasn't consistent enough. It felt like his publisher demanded, "Ok, you owe us a third book. Let's go for Stephen Baxter's scale, with Greg Egan's mathematical prowess." That's not a reasonable goal to shoot for, unless you're Baxter or Egan.
ajr0 9y ago
> I still had 15% to finish, I got so frustrated that I just quit and never even had the curiosity to know how it ends. I hope you will finish. I understand the gap was both abrupt and left quite a bit to be desired. I was shocked and disappointed as well, felt like it was the easy way out of telling a storyline that was becoming increasingly complex. In the end I very much enjoyed the great parts of the book and thought provoking dialogue between characters. That being said, I could nitpick on the parts I do not like but I prefer to celebrate the parts that were incredibly enjoyable.
foreigner 9y ago
That's funny I liked the second act much better. I found the study of human nature in the first act too depressing.
knodi123 9y ago
> I got so frustrated that I just quit and never even had the curiosity to know how it ends. lol, then you missed the brief Act 3!

magic_beans 9y ago

What was so different between the two acts?

eric_h 9y ago
The first act is about how the present day human race survives the moon being destroyed. The second takes place 5000 years in the future and is essentially about the return to earth. I don’t share GP’s opinion, I quite enjoyed both acts. I do agree that the pace of the two is quite different - the first being a bit more sci-fi thriller pace and the second is a bit more contemplative.
- Jemaclus 9y ago
  There's actually three acts: Earth, Space, Moon. It's really a trilogy smushed up into one book. I agree, though. The first two acts were great, and the third fell flatter than the earlier two. But I enjoyed it nonetheless. It's nice to imagine what would happen, and it's pretty hard scifi throughout, albeit greatly accelerated.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    Fair enough, but I lump the first two together in my head simply because they occurred in the same time frame, at least compared to the third act
  - rtkwe 9y ago
    Yeah, though I tend to like breaking it into 'the end of Earth and our efforts to survive that end' and 'what happens to a society that's been through that trauma and their return home' split. The time jump really makes the jump feel more solid between book/acts 2 and 3 to me.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  It's two separate books that were put under the hydraulic press and smashed into one tome. Keep that in mind when reading it, otherwise the second act is jarring.
  - eric_h 9y ago
    Yes, well said. Honestly it's kind of like reading "The Diamond Age" immediately after reading "Snow Crash" and expecting them to be similar since they're set in the same universe.
vkou 9y ago
Act 2 is Neal Stephenson's re-imagining of the Fellowship of the Ring - complete with the cast that makes up the fellowship, and roughly 500 pages of walking to places, so that they can walk to other places, so that they could walk to other places, without doing much of anything. Beautiful worldbuilding, but very much not like the rest of the book.
- mjd 9y ago
  I said very much the same thing in my review: “[The characters] spend most of the third part literally doing nothing. They are assembled into a team of seven by a nebulous authority for some secret purpose; neither they nor we are told what it is. They go from place to place to investigate something or other, making several pointless stops and excursions and wondering, as I did, what was going on and when something was actually going to happen.” https://blog.plover.com/book/Seveneves.html https://blog.plover.com/book/Seveneves.html
  - jrockway 9y ago
    Literally doing nothing seems to be a valid literary technique. The part I remember most from Cryptonomicon is about some guy eating cereal.
    - sevensor 9y ago
      Funny, that scene stuck with me too. With UHT milk. Extra cold.
    - mjd 9y ago
      I have no problem with that in general. The cereal-eating was focused and vivid (it was Cap'n Crunch), and anyway it was over in a couple of pages. Nicholson Baker's entire novel The Mezzanine is like that, and it's just fine. But so much of my time was spent reading about those people going from A to B to C on their way to D, and for what? There was a similar episode in _Anathem_, which I generally liked. But for some reason the characters had to go from A to B and the best way to get there was to go over the North Pole, and the book stopped for fifty pages until they got over the Pole and everything could continue. In a different world some editor would have persuaded Stephenson to cut the whole thing out, and I used to hope he would one day meet that editor and we would live in that world, but by now I've given up.
codemac 9y ago
The first part is a race against time to survive. The second part is a war between humans for scarce resources in space. The third part is about humans, who are largely doing fine, finding out stuff about the past and themselves. There are some deadlines & urgency in the last part, but I think it's a tall task to try and create urgency when the previous sections were about the entire human races being extinguished.
joshrivers 9y ago
Myself, I enjoyed the entire book, but I understand the let down feeling some here are expressing. The first part is immediate, gripping, intense, and hard to go through it (but you don't want to stop, because it is so good). After all of that resolves, it's pretty hard to emotionally connect with the rest of the story, since you are exhausted from all that came before. The final act is worthwhile and interesting, it's just a pretty big change in direction.
loeg 9y ago
The first part is "real time" and very intense and nerve-wracking. Then in Act 2 it skips forward 5000 years and tries to tell you what happened later. It feels like an extended epilogue and none of the original characters are alive for you to care about. I liked it, but I can totally see the criticism.

comicjk 9y ago

I agree - I recommend Seveneves to anyone, but I say stop as soon as Act 1 ends. I think Act 2 spoils the ending of Act 1 by undermining the high stakes that made it impactful. I can tell Stephenson enjoyed writing Act 2 as an act of fun semi-hard sci-fi, but I think it should have been in its own setting, not tacked on to a dark hard sci-fi survival novel.

linsomniac 9y ago

I have loved Stephenson's work in the past, up until about Cryptonomicon. Everything I've read since has been a great short read, bundled up in a thousand pages. Seveneves started off strong, but then turned into a real slog. It could have been a great 200 page book, but at 600 pages I was just glad to be done with it and expect it to be the last thing of his I read. The Baroque Cycle felt similar, even though it contained many of the characters I loved from Cryptonomicon, but I just couldn't make it through it. I see there are people here who like or love it, which is great. I am not surprised to see others here echoing my feeling that it was quite a slog to get through. Stopping at Act 2 is probably not a bad idea, though I feel like Act 1 is a lot of setup that pays off in Act 2 so I wonder what the point would be.

Ar-Curunir 9y ago
But Anathem is his best work!
- finnh 9y ago
  It's funny how personal all of these preferences are. I, personally, thought that "Diamond Age" was tepid, and "Zodiac" pretty stupid (but an early work, so forgiveable), but I've pretty well loved everything else that Stephenson wrote by himself. On the shared-author side of things, the DODO book is terrible - dropped after about 2 pages - and the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too. Anathem and Seveneves are among my favorites. And I really liked the entire Baroque Cycle! (after consciously avoiding it for years).
  - aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > the Mongoliad stuff looks tripe too It's not like Stephenson's other works but I found it to be perfectly competent historical-ish fiction.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  If the thing that most deeply interests you is Knowledge (with capital initial, and understood in the broadest sense possible), then Anathem is like catnip for your brain. It's the book that shows how deeply the author understands what motivates knowledge geeks - be they active in science, technology, or any other field. Reading it, nearly at every page I was like "wow, this guy gets it!"

Bedon292 9y ago

I had the exact same experience. I absolutely chewed up the first act (or two depending on how you look at it) in the matter of a few days, and it was awesome. But I never finished the final act. It was just not interesting enough for me to finish it.

btown 9y ago

Many of Stephenson's books, particularly Seveneves and Diamond Age, have amazing worldbuilding, but simply fall apart from a plot coherence perspective about 2/3 of the way through. We on this thread aren't the first to notice this: https://www.google.com/search?q="neal+stephenson"+ending https://www.google.com/search?q="neal+stephenson"+ending It's not easy: when you build "mysteries" into a well-built self-consistent world (and Stephenson's worlds are excellent in this regard), it becomes increasingly hard to reconcile them all. As soon as you allow yourself to explore emergent phenomena during a creative process, you run the risk of writing yourself into a corner. I tend to read most fiction with an approach of "imagine the stories you wish happened in this well-thought-out universe" rather than worrying too much about the way an author actually writes a plot.

pebers 9y ago
I found Seveneves felt quite different to his other work in that it seemed that the first 2/3 was setup for the last third which was the story he really wanted to tell. Unfortunately I enjoyed the setup much more than the payoff - didn't help that it had a much more powerful climax. Conversely in many of his other books he's having fun describing the world early on but drawing it back together at the end doesn't work as well - Diamond Age is probably the clearest example. In the end the experience is very broadly similar but it seems to come from different causes.
baddox 9y ago
I don’t think it has anything to do with writing himself into a corner. I think he’s just an insanely ambitious author and I’ll pretty much always give mad props to any author that is that skilled and ambitious, even when things don’t quite work out (like the last act of Seveneves). I also found the last act jarring and weaker than the rest of the book, but I still came away thinking “woah, an individual human not only set out to write this whole book, but then actually WROTE it.”
mirimir 9y ago
It's my theory that he tends to get bored, or runs out of time. I love Seveneves, but the last part seems rushed. And cries out for a sequel. Diamond Age too, but less so. And I found its ending to be quite satisfying. Ditto for Anathem. The Baroque Cycle trilogy is actually a counterexample, being an extended followup and backstory to Cryptonomicon. That's also one aspect of the Mongoliad trilogy. And even D.O.D.O., in a way. But I can't say how, without major spoilers.

arthurjj 9y ago

I initially felt similar. But once I realized that Seveneves is actually two RPG novels [1] it gets much better. Part 1 & 2 are universe backstory. Like the Horus Heresy in 40k or the story of Lilith in Vampire. Part 3 is just to advance the plot of the univers. Like the Dragonheart Trilogy in Shadowrun or when the clans get introduced in Battletech. [1] http://arthur-johnston.com/essay/2015/10/03/seveneves.html http://arthur-johnston.com/essay/2015/10/03/seveneves.html

marzell 9y ago
The first parts (and also Anathem a bit) reminded me a bit of Isaac Asimov... in the sense that his sci-fi is often more about exploring society and human plight over long time periods, rather than focusing on laser beams and teleportation devices and specific characters who die off in a short galactic timeframe.
- felipesabino 9y ago
  Yes, totally! Never thought about it on this terms, but totally agree and I guess that similarity was what made me like the first parts so much

coverband 9y ago

I enjoyed Seveneves, but found it to be the one of the most depressing books I've ever read, right up to the final act. Not only because of the dark underlying theme, but also because you get invested in so many characters who then end up dying in a myriad of ways. The ending feels like the setup of a sequel book which I doubt will follow.

baddox 9y ago
That’s an interesting take. I found it one of the most optimistic books I’ve ever read, so much so that given how I see real humans behave I find the optimism perhaps the most unbelievable aspect of the book.
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
You should try Liu Cixin's Remembrances of Earth's Past trilogy[1]. Fantastic sci-fi. Utterly depressing. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_of_Earth%27s_Past
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I really enjoyed the first book, liked the second one, and wish I could unread the third one.
  - radicaldreamer 9y ago
    The problem with the third book was that it rapidly expanded in scope and grandeur but was the same number of pages as the previous books, so concepts and scope and scale which had enough exposition in the previous books simply fell short in the third.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      Kind of, but I think even so, it just wasn't consistent enough. It felt like his publisher demanded, "Ok, you owe us a third book. Let's go for Stephen Baxter's scale, with Greg Egan's mathematical prowess." That's not a reasonable goal to shoot for, unless you're Baxter or Egan.

ajr0 9y ago

> I still had 15% to finish, I got so frustrated that I just quit and never even had the curiosity to know how it ends. I hope you will finish. I understand the gap was both abrupt and left quite a bit to be desired. I was shocked and disappointed as well, felt like it was the easy way out of telling a storyline that was becoming increasingly complex. In the end I very much enjoyed the great parts of the book and thought provoking dialogue between characters. That being said, I could nitpick on the parts I do not like but I prefer to celebrate the parts that were incredibly enjoyable.

foreigner 9y ago

That's funny I liked the second act much better. I found the study of human nature in the first act too depressing.

knodi123 9y ago

> I got so frustrated that I just quit and never even had the curiosity to know how it ends. lol, then you missed the brief Act 3!