The book is also about the new cultures and societies that have sprung up after five thousand years have passed. The book is about the fate of those first human colonies in space. Now, I’m normally not that kind of guy, but in this case I’m inclined to say that Stephenson could just as well have used twice or thrice that amount in order to fully explore what he wanted to explore in this book.įirst things first: without spoiling too much, I should say that the book is about an apocalypse, and the sudden struggles of humankind to escape from Earth and preserve itself out there for the next few thousand years, for only then will the Earth be safe to return to. The book feels like it's written by some game theory nerd who can't look past the first order equations.Few things stuff your bookshelf quite like a new Neal Stephenson novel his latest, Seveneves, is no exception, weighing in at a hefty 869 pages.

It's self defeating, and logically they should be able to figure that out. The entire reason given that alien species can't coexist is due to limited resources, but the Dark Forest mindset means they'll never be able to use those resources in the first place and at the end of the day they end up destroying all of them anyway. The logic that 'if you see someone, you must kill them' is kind of like 'the first country that develops nuclear weapons must immediately deploy them against every other country, even thought that dooms the world to a nuclear winter.' It's super-villain logic that ignores all of the other potential solutions-like diplomac-and ignores the MAD component of being able to easily destroy solar systems. It doesn't even protect you from attacks! If that isn't threatening I don't know what is. That's another thing I found insane, in order to prove to the universe that you are not a threat you alter the speed of light in a solar system sized area in a way that the entire universe can easily see.

Except of course you can escape from the Light Tombs using the pocket dimention door thing from the end of the book.

Seveneves pages