Neal Stephenson has never disappointed me, but he sure has tried my patience, and that has never been more true than with his 2015 time sink, Seveneves, which novel I have had on Mount TBR since it was published but always kept misreading the title of. Lots and lots of sexy things distracted me from a big ol' chunk of text called Seveneyes.
At bottom, Seveneves, the first third or so anyway, is a generation ship story, with a twist, in that the ship doesn't go very far away from its point of origin.
Disaster has struck and is going to keep on striking for thousands of years and the good old blue marble of Earth will be uninhabitable long before those thousands of years are up. Humanity has been caught napping, in that it doesn't have any other stores of DNA in the solar system yet, as in nope, no colonies on the Moon (heh), not Mars, nobody in the asteroid belt, nothing but the good old International Space Station and a bunch of satellites and whatnot in orbit around the good old blue marble that's soon gonna be a good old red marble and look a bit bigger, but there was a very small window of time between the original disaster and the level of recurring disaster that means the end of the world as we know it, so humanity realized it had two options for survival: burrow deep underground and hope to survive as a subterranean population, or expand our presence in orbit. As things progress, some half-assed individual effort is done off-page about trying for the first, but Seveneves is about the second: expanding our presence in orbit, by expanding the International Space Station itself and also building a distributed swarm of little space-arks, holding like four or five people each, set up with basic life support and some possible capacity for growing algae for food and oxygen and whatnot. The "Arklets," as they come to be known, are thus not meant as individual arks but as parts of a scattered whole held together by the power of computation and based around the ISS, which is nicknamed Izzy. It's a cool and highly plausible scenario that I've not seen a lot of yet, so this is more than enough to grab and hold my interest, but...
Of necessity, when something is scientifically plausible, and being imagined by a writer like Neal Stephenson, there's going to be more passages explaining more math and science than most people are ever expected to page through in normal life. But we are Science Fiction Fans and normal standards do not apply, am I right?
But still, for every line of dialogue or description of actual things happening, there's about a paragraph of background information to put the dialogue or happenings in context, and I cannot advocate for its exclusion or reduction but, golly.
As you might expect, most of the characters are scientists, and they are unquestionably heroic as they get problem after problem thrown at them: how much can the ISS be modified and how can it be accomplished; how much raw material is needed to build how many Arklets and how fast can we get them made; who gets to fly on those Arklets; who gets to live on the ISS after all the Arklets are up and the Earth has gone from blue marble to red fireball; how can we keep everybody breathing and eating and pooping and not getting cancer from cosmic rays; how are we gonna keep everybody from going crazy; how are we going to keep everybody safe from micrometeorites and other space hazards; what are we going to do when all the propellant is used up... which of these problems need to be solved first; how many of them can be postponed until later; how can we make sure there is a later in which to solve them; what kind of stuff do we need to focus on making on earth to enhance the Ark Swarm's chances...
All of that is drama enough for a whole novel right there, but that's just one-third of Seveneves. Like my favorite Stephen Baxter novel that I will never read again (Evolution; it's an amazing book but I Just Can't), Seveneves is more interested in what can go wrong *after* the Anthropocene world we know is gone, and wants to extend that after way farther than most books do.
Anyway, as you might expect, all of this doesn't leave a lot of room for us to get to know characters beyond what their scientific or sociological specialty is, but Stephenson does at least try. Unusually for him, this time his greatest success at this is with his villain figure, and man, oh, man, in this villain figure and her effects he kind of perfectly prefigured our big socio-political dilemmas in the 2020s because his villain figure (in the first third of the novel) is the abruptly former President of the United States, a woman named Julia Bliss Flaherty (referred to as "JBF" most of the time), and it's a pity she's a cishet woman because she really needed a mustache to twirl. At first she just seems like the kind of tough but charismatic figure we wish we could have voted for in 2016 instead of the the choices we got, and she seems to handle the disaster on her hands with admirable clarity and honor, pushing for an international accord that includes in some of its finer print a very firm declaration that World Leaders Are Not Allowed On The Ark but hoo dogies, look at that: the very first major hazard post-red marble is an unexpected hunk of metal sort of lurching around in the middle of the ark swarm, causing near collisions and scrambling the algorithms that govern the swarm almost to the point of not being able to govern the swarm and who do you think is inside that hunk of metal? Armed with a gun, aka the single worst thing to have in an outer space scenario?
Yeah.
And JBF still thinks she's in charge of everything, despite not understanding anything except how to convince people she is in charge. And when she finds out she isn't in charge anymore, instead of accepting things as they are and just being grateful there was a Swarm for her to illegally escape to and looking for a way to maybe actually be useful in the Roslin mode***, she almost immediately starts stirring up shit and honestly, I was bracing myself for her to start convincing people that spacesuits aren't necessary, that's just a lie told by Big Spacesuit to keep us all dependent on them, man. But what she does is almost as bad.
Mary Robinette Kowal, by the way, had *way* too much fun delivering JBF's lines, which without exception made me want to reach through my soundbar and knock out some teeth or something.
JBF's presence in the Swarm puts the reader in an interesting and uncomfortable position. While she is shit-stirring, the person whom the governing bodies of the Earth actually did put in charge, a German scientist, has had to declare what amounts to martial law in the days immediately following the complete destruction of everything left on Earth, because in the early days of a disaster cooperation is more important than feelings even when the conditions are not as extreme as they are when there's just a few millimeters of metal between the people with feelings and hard vaccuum and the feelings are every human left alive (amounting to just over a thousand; almost exactly the size of my little hometown) mourning the billions of dead left behind. The realities of physics and biology give compelling reasons to demand the kind of control that is established in these early days (as all the former goverments and the scientific community of Old Earth understood and codified in the Swarm's constitution) and the reader's rooting interest is thus pulled toward the side of the tightly-controlled soft martial law society the German and the rest of the scientists aboard the ISS have established, at least temporarily. Which, look, it feels really, really weird in January of 2022, just a few days after the first anniversary of the biggest coup attempt in American history, which aimed to establish a right-wing authoritarian government in place of the pluralism we've always strived for, to be rooting for the authoritarians and against the people who are opposing it and claiming that the majority of the population is not getting its fair say in decision making, OK?
Dammit, Neal!
But all of this is just build-up, really, to the big question that Stephenson wants to pose to us. Uh, big spoilers ahead for this seven year old book, Seveneves (whoa).
All that prologue just explains how a genetic bottleneck comes to be. And it's a hell of a bottleneck. Break the book's title into two words: Seven Eves. That's right, the human race gets narrowed down to just seven fertile women, heiresses to the failures of every attempt to establish genetic diversity in whatever version of the human race survives to recolonize a future Earth.**** Fortunately they still have the equipment and the know-how to use it to create children via parthenogenesis. But wait, there's more. Because the know-how and equipment also come with the ability to screen for the kind of genetic disorders that become such a big problem when a population gets inbred, screen for and correct it. Like, way beyond CRISPR, or at least CRISPR plus a lot more specific knowledge about the human genome and how it's expressed in bodies than we have now.
But so then, what do we want to screen for and eliminate from the future human race, ladies? What heritable medical conditions count as diseases and what are just traits? What about mental illnesses? What about the autism spectrum? What about hairiness? And what genetic babies are we willing to throw out with the genetic bathwater, given how little we still understand about what genes code for what traits -- but we do know that it's not a simple one gene to one trait ratio there, and what if it turns out a gene for an undesirable thing is also linked to a desirable thing or carries the potential to develop a favorable trait in a future environment that we just haven't imagined yet?
These questions matter a lot to me as I continue to cope with one of those disorders that has both a genetic and an environmental component but may also be related to exposure to viruses. It's left me semi-crippled and, due to a whole passel of medication allergies, unable to do much about it and so virtually unemployable. The Nazis would definitely have euthanized me. I'm sure a lot of my neighbors in a blood red state will be eager to do so if certain scenarios they dream about come to pass and that sort of thing becomes possible and acceptable again (which, it kind of already is, as any casual look at what horror stories the disabled community routinely share online about dealing with the U.S. healthcare system, insurance companies, physicians who are trained to blame patients for all of their problems especially if they're fat, etc.). But the genetic component is actually a very common one in the Northern European gene pool and has persisted for so many generations. It must have some survival value, not to have been eliminated long ago by Natural Selection, right? Yet here I sit, reaching for my cane to go back to bed to try to get some sleep after having been wakened in the middle of the night like I always am when the one weak-ass pain medicine that doesn't make me projectile vomit or go straight into anaphylactic shock wears off and all the joints in my body take turns setting off the kind of alarm bells that are really kind of meant for only the dire injuries like a limb having been hacked off or crushed, but in my body just means "hey, we're still alive, I guess."
But I digress.
But so, you can see why that scene smack dab in the middle of the book where seven women have the power and responsibility of deciding what genes the future human race can and can't have but only the really bitchy psychotic cannibal (who just sort of appears in this part of the story but whose back story I really wish I could have gotten in at least as much detail as I got about the evolution of Every Kind of Robot) among them is really making any argument about how maybe some genes we think are bad because of how they're expressed now might not be bad in future scenarios and how it's the potential for new combinations that's the important thing we are going for in trying to assure genetic diversity in the first place and...?
Egads. I listen to a lot of audio books when my body won't let me sleep. Usually I catch myself drifting off, rewind about 15 minutes or so to reset the bookmark, and turn over to conk out for a while. But ending Part 2 of the audio book on that note, that scene, had me lying miserably awake the rest of the night just appalled and terrified and unable to get the scene out of my head.
That's a new achievement for Neal Stephenson, in my personal experience anyway. I mean, bee tee dubs, I had already been up way past my (gigglesnort) bedtime just listening because, you know, the book has lots of good stuff in it and I wanted to find out what was going to happen next and stuff.
Unfortunately, what I most wanted to see as far as what was going to happen next and stuff takes place off the pages. While I am no stranger to and sometimes a fan of books that stretch out over eons of time a la Olaf Stapledon's First and Last Men, a 5000-year-leap between the Meeting of the Seven Eves and the next section of the book robbed me of what I'd really been looking forward to: seeing how these seven women (actually eight, but one of the eight survivors of the Swarm was already past menopause) would rebuild a whole civilization from the products of their own wombs and the genetics lab. We get glimpses of this in the form of flashbacks, but not nearly enough and I spent a good part of the last third of the novel, one big undifferentiated mass (even moreso in audio book form, in which it's a 10+ hour slog of a "chapter" simply called "Five Thousand Years Later", narrated by drowsy-voiced Will Damron instead of Kowal), resenting that Stephenson had skipped the most interesting thing in the book.
But Stephenson was more interested in extrapolating what humanity would be like divided into seven "races" according to the heredities established for them by the Seven Eves, and, of course, Neal gotta Neal, in describing in minute detail all of the fancy futuristic technology these races develop for living and thriving in space and for slowly recolonizing the Earth.
But about these "races"... The descendants of JBF and a nasty piece of work who is the only other survivor of JBF's dumbest plan named Aida are basically in a cold war with all of the other kin-groups, 3 billion strong after 5000 years and living in Stephenson's version of Alastair Reynold's famous Glitter Band -- a ring of habitat satellites circling the Earth, waiting for it to become habitable again. The "Julians" and "Aidans" have dominion in about 1/4 to 1/3 of the habitats, conveniently contiguous, while the "Moirans" and "Teklans"**** and "Dinans" and "Kamalans" (or whatever her descendants are called; rotten thing about audio books is you don't see how names are spelled) and "Ivans" try to give them a wide berth but now that Earth is almost ready for resettlement, the question basically becomes just how much of humankind's worst ideas and tendencies are going to accompany it back down the gravity well.
But really? If I wanted to re-read Clans of the Alaphane Moon, I would just do that, am I right?
At least there's some neato technology to enjoy, like gliders that are basically inflatable suits that ride the thermals up to "hangars" in the upper atmosphere that lift passengers up into orbit without burning any chemical or nuclear fuel, to say nothing of giant orbital habitats that can house, e.g. complete ecosystems including things like 800 year old fir trees. I mean, this is the future we want, kind of? Maybe? Except for all the dumb factionalism, which I thought is what the original Seven Eves really meant to do away with, didn't they? Or did they?
Oh, and there's kind of a plot to this last section, involving the assembling of a working group including one member of each race, to take on a mission that is kept secret from them and us for far too long; by the time the characters found out what they have been sent to earth to do (it involves problems that have arisen since bands of "Sooners" jumped the gun on resettling the earth and the discovery that some of the undergrounders survived and have their own ideas about who should get to do what with New Earth and zzzz) I really didn't care. I came very close to not finishing this one, my friends. I really liked the first two-thirds but this last part couldn't end fast enough for me. If had been anyone but Stephenson, I probably would have just marked this DNF. The sunk cost fallacy is losing its hold over me as I age, but it's Neal Stephenson, man! He's never let me down!
Except, he almost did. To the point where I kind of want to give the Battlestar Galactica advice to anyone considering reading this who hasn't yet. Stop when you hit "Five Thousand Years Later." Like with BSG, you'll feel this is a horrible thing to do and you'll be so curious about how all of this is going to end but just let your own imagination end it for you instead. Stop watching BSG after the first half of season three; stop reading Seveneves after the Council of the Seven Eves. Maybe even just before the Council. You'll have enjoyed two-third of a terrific story without losing your faith in the guy what made it.
*About which, sigh. While not quite as irritating as when male narrators put on a breathy falsetto for female characters and make them all sound like Bambi the Big Busted Brainless Blue-eyed Bimbo, the reverse strategy of Elizabeth Holmes-ing it up is pretty damned close, and sounds painful. I wish more narrators would just let the dialogue and its tags do the job -- and that their producers/directors/etc would let them. It would be fine, really. As long as the author did their job.
**I haven't read his new book yet, either, so I may be wrong.
***For those who don't click through and haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, Laura Roslin is a head of civilian government on a space fleet who, when a new planet is settled by its population, steps down and resumes her original work as a schoolteacher.
****And oh, get this: Moirans and Teclans are understood to share a special bond because the original Moira and the original Tecla were lovers. That's right. Five thousand years later, we're to understand that generations and generations of a couple's parthenogenic children are still mostly attracted to one another. Eyeroll.
****And holy mother of fuck, I wonder if Neal Stephenson is a Gene Wolfe fan because wouldn't this be a bang-up prequel to the Solar Cycle?
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