This post contains spoilers of the book.
Sometimes I really enjoy a book overall, but never really think about it again when I'm done. Does that make it a good book or a bad one?
On the other hand, sometimes I enjoy a book, and I keep thinking about it afterward, but what I think about isn't the content of the book - the story, characters, language, etc. but rather the odd choices made by the author.
I think if you are reading a book and you wonder why the author made a certain choice, that that's a problem. Unless you're writing a book where the author is a character, then I feel pretty strongly that the author shouldn't be noticed while you're reading. It's kind of like watching a movie and having a weird moment where you say "That was a really weird scene break," or, "Is that actor wearing a different shirt than they were five seconds ago?"
Seveneves, by Neal Stephenson, is a book that I enjoyed while reading, but when I think about it now, it's almost always about what I don't like about how it was put together. Before I go any farther, I just want to say that the main audience for this blog post is myself - I'm not trying to get a secret message to NS or anything like that. It helps me to write my thoughts down, and I like to write my critiques in a blog, and there you go.
Let's start with the title. "Seveneves" is a palindrome, which is fun and cool. It's also a key thing in the book that you don't get until way far into it. "Seven Eves" could just as easily have been the title. The problem I have with clever titles like this, where there's a palindrome and a hidden meaning, is that it suggests to me as a reader that the author may have thought of it first, and then beat everything about the story into some awkward shapes so that he could in fact have 'seven Eves' as part of the plot. From the story itself, the number of Eves that help humanity bridge the gap between fleeing Earth and returning to Earth is mostly arbitrary. It could have been five or nine or twenty, and it wouldn't have affected the structure of the novel, the way it's currently written.
Speaking of that, let's look at the whole structure of the story: Part one is present day, and part two is 5,000 years in the future. You can read that much on the back of the book. After finishing the book, my thought was "is that it?" It seems to end in an arbitrary place, like Neal was tired of writing it and his editor was asking him for pages and so he was just like 'Fine, here, this is a whole book,' and sent it off, and started writing something else. Is it a book about humanity's fight to survive against certain extinction? If so, then there are at least two other epics to track. The fact that the vestiges of humanity that went into space survived for 5,000 years and flourished has a diminished meaning when you discover that humanity also survived underground and in the oceans. But all we learn about those societies are some really unfulfilling narratives about some of the mechanics of living a long time in those places. I think it's a bit silly to think that Dina survives the Epic as one of the Seven, and her family coincidentally survives to bring about the underground society. Given the quantity of fiction about long-term survival after an apocalyptic event, I was wondering how many other businesses, societies, governments, etc. attempted the same thing. I'm sure they did. Why wouldn't they? But there's no mention of any of them. There are certainly larger cave and mine systems, with deep water access, where something could have been established.
The underwater group was interesting, too, but there was even less information about how their journey unfolded. Very frustrating, and ultimately reducing the value of the effort of the space faring group. If they hadn't survived, life would still have gone on on Earth. Granted, the surface of the Earth only became habitable again after the spacers started re-terraforming it, so that's at least one key element of the story moving forward.
Forward? Oh right, there isn't anything moving forward. There's the story of the Seven, and then there's some fun exploration of how the technology of the Seven evolved over 5,000 years into fun and interesting chain-link and bolo technology, and there's some characters that look like they might be important, representing some underground society trying to bring about some unknown change, but then that guy gets killed, and I don't really care because I didn't really know him as a character. And then one of the 'good' guys betrays the rest, but no one is surprised because, you know, racism.
So.
If I were writing something like this, what would I do? I think I would have made it a series, first of all. It really lends itself to long-form sequential storytelling. It makes me think a little bit of Dune, in that, after the initial trilogy, each installment takes place at a vast separation of time from the previous installment. Here we have the place where everyone is starting - Earth. And we have doom coming. We have a Big Plan to keep humanity alive, and even though everyone involved knows it's just theatre, they're going to try and do it anyway. We've got Neal Degrasse Tyson reassuring the people of Earth that everything is going to be fine, while travelling up to the space station to help actually save humanity. On the ground, we have a couple of brief stories, but mostly nothing. At all. About anything. I think i would have changed that, and added narratives in which other characters on the ground are becoming invested and/or disillusioned in the space effort, and trying to put together their own plans for survival, either underground or underwater. That would have created at least 3 parallel narratives, as groups of people start to coalesce around their survival ideas, and crazy stuff happens that could make one or more of them fail. And someone who might be Hillary Clinton hijacks a rocket to go to the space station, but maybe she did that because the people on the Underground team manipulated her into thinking that would be her only real choice for survival.
Book One is at least a thousand pages long, and takes all three narratives up to the White Sky. In fact, maybe that's what I would call book one, at least as a working title. The White Sky.
In Book Two, I'd go all "Two Towers" meets "Foundation," on the readers, and focus my storytelling on one of the groups, and tell a series of short stories about how they get along over the next 5,000 years, with interesting and engaging characters telling a small story against a backdrop of an evolving society. Book Two would be in three chunks, telling about 5,000 years of evolution for each of the three narratives from the previous books, up until the moment when the space people finally, really return to Earth - essentially about two-thirds of the way into Seveneves. At that point, I'd have a rich and varied history for all of the players, and sympathies for a variety of perspectives. I'd probably want the Dinans to succeed, but I'd understand why the underground people would be so skeptical and dismissive of the spacers (well, in my book I would. In Seveneves it felt like that tension was manufactured out of nothing).
And then Book Three would involve the three groups nearly extincting each other again before they figure out a way to get along, in the face of the larger threat that comes along. What's that larger threat? Well, it could either be the force that blew up the moon in the first place, returned to harvest what it thinks will be a dead planet full of mineral resources, or it could be the Martians - the group that split away in the Epic to try and reach Mars and is never heard from again. Well, they survived, and they have key information about the Thing that made the Event happen. Or something like that. Honestly, I don't care about the Martians, except that it would have been nice in Seveneves if someone at some point had gone through the trouble of tracking that cluster of ships down and seeing what happened to them, to add their story to the epic.
Or...
Maybe I would have started Seveneves at 5,000 years in the future, and told more of the Epic through flashbacks. There are some really cool moments in the book where people are watching footage, quoting their favorite lines, stuff like that. I think it could have been really cool to cut out about 80% of the first 600 pages, and just interspersed clips of things that were officially and unofficially recorded.
I think that about summarizes it. Maybe next time I'll get annoyed with Reamde.
