Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

It's been a while since I've had a book post here. Unless I'm forgetting something, all of the books that I'd read since Reamde were either left unfinished (I had multiple library books that I checked out, but ran out of time on) or just bad. So now it happens that the next book I post about is another Neal Stephenson novel. This was a coincidence, I think. I'm not on a Neal Stephenson kick. Today I'll be returning to Glen Cook's Garrett P.I. series, which I'll probably write about here eventually. I bought this book at the grocery store on a kind of whim while I was looking for something else. That being said, I am impressed. When I read Reamde I thought it was the best Neal Stephenson book I'd come across. Seveneves is better.

To put it simply, I love this book and think it's amazing. Others have had different reactions and if you want a more balanced point of view, I'm sure you can find one. I can do little more than heap praise on this one. It's an exquisitely detailed, carefully crafted examination of the end of the world as we know it and the aftermath of that. It conveys a compelling mixture of human bravery, ingenuity, and dedication, counterbalanced by cowardice, ignorance, and corruption. It's the best novel in recent years that I know of and one of my favorite books ever. My one qualm is that it should probably have been split into two books. It still works the way it's written and there's nothing itself wrong with the last portion of Seveneves in a way that ruins the book, but the sudden change of setting and the novella-like length of a story that comes immediately following the larger, earlier portion of the book gives the reader a weird feeling about the whole thing. I like all three sections, and the last one is, in many ways, the most interesting. But when we'd had continuity of characters and plot for over 500 pages, even when most of those characters are dead and the narrative arc for the remainder has reached a conclusive point, it's unsettling to jump to a new cast of characters in a new setting, knowing that they won't be around for much longer as there just isn't enough book left. Stephenson makes it work by tying it to the earlier parts of the book in a few different ways. Still feels a little weird.

Anyway, this book is great and you should read it now.