All of that concentrated devotion on things and processes, and so little concern for the people served by all that technology. Second, so much of the book is spent describing hardware that even 1,000+ pages aren’t enough to get to know more than one character in any depth. Here, we learn so much about orbital mechanics and space engineering that we could all get jobs with the Chinese space program.Įnough, already - the first part of the book, all 650 pages of it, details something like five key events, involving characters who, even the literal handful who actually make it to page 650, have only remotely historical influence on the 400 pages of the last section. I get it that Stephenson is an uber-geek, someone who can’t imagine what too much detail could possibly be, especially on one of his favourite subjects. Then we go away for a few millennia and come back to cover a week or two of action in another 400 pages. More than 650 pages to establish a space colony and raise an orbit. A very, very long story worked pretty well in Cryptonomicon, less well in Reamde, and not very well at all in Seveneves. With as few “spoilers” as possible, here are the main reasons why I didn’t like Seveneves very much.įirst, I’ve become quite tired of Stephenson’s penchant for length.

So I hoped that Seveneves would be almost as good. Unfortunately, for me it wasn’t. Stephenson’s Anathem is my pick for the best contemporary sci-fi/futuristic/whatever genre book. I’ve read a lot of Neal Stephenson, from short books like Snow Crash to the 3,000+ page, eight-book trilogy that is The Baroque Cycle.

Seveneves book 2