Words&Dirt

Three years ago, my father pointed me toward a frightfully thick book called Cryptonomicon that permanently rearranged my relationship with modern fiction. Since that first taste, Neal Stephenson has challenged me in every way an author can (including nearly boring me to death). Stephenson looms larger in my literary pantheon––and weighs more heavily on my bookshelf––than any living writer. Even so, I’d never read one of his novels that I considered “perfect,” at least insofar as it aligned with my personal tastes and interests.

Then came Seveneves. I am certainly no authority on the genre, but this is the best piece of science fiction I’ve ever read. It is, in every way I can think to use the word, a masterpiece. If you’re already a Stephenson fan and/or scifi enthusiast, stop reading this right now, go get a copy, and start reading. I wouldn’t want to spoil even the tiniest detail. That said, I will go out of my way to avoid major spoilers.

Still reading? Okay, well, I’ll do my best to describe why I think this book is so damned good. My praise comes with the usual Stephenson caveat: the book is quite long, containing many discursive tangents on a huge range of topics real and imaginary, human and technical. Seveneves, however, offers a considerably higher degree of narrative coherence than much of Stephenson’s previous work––a welcome change. The narrative is primarily character driven, providing plenty of motivation for less technical readers to get through the denser sections. And the prose is simpler than usual, too, demonstrating a concerted effort to convey information clearly without sacrificing Stephenson’s hallmark erudition and wit. All in all, Stephenson’s weaknesses as a writer are minimized while his strengths are in full bloom. Seveneves is a window into the mind of a mature literary genius at the very top of his game.

Imagine that, sometime in the near future, humanity finds out that climate change has reached a point of no return so extreme that within two years, Earth will no longer be able to support human life––for at least five thousand years. That’s pretty much where Seveneves gets started, except that the moon is the source of existential threat (it’s complicated). Faced with an imminently uninhabitable homeworld, humanity must scramble to get enough people and resources off-planet before doomsday, storing them in an orbital Ark (i.e. newly converted International Space Station). Given this premise, Seveneves seems like a high-octane survival story, and it is. But all the nail biting serves a greater purpose, which is to ruminate long and hard about the merits of humanity as a species, to scrutinize our numerous flaws, and to celebrate our capacity for competency, creativity, and endurance under pressure. Anyone who tells you that Seveneves is just one long geek-out session about the laws of orbital mechanics isn’t reading closely. It’s much, much more than that. It’s an examination of our grace and grit, as evidenced in delicious passages like this one:

This was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets. (53)

The psychological interplay between technical minutiae and big-picture thinking pervades Seveneves in a way that can only be described as shockingly beautiful.

Paralleling this tension is the relationship between humanity and technology, a topic that has always characterized Stephenson’s voice, but that he now takes up with special poise. Seveneves offers what is by far Stephenson’s most diverse and fascinating cast of characters to date, most of which are women. These people––intrepid, frightened, brilliant, pig-headed, heroic, despicable––bring humanity to the very brink of extinction, and back again. Reliance on technology generates nerdy obsessions as well as intimate affections for the habitats and machines that are our heroes’ only defense against the vacuum of space. This predicament could be fairly criticized as nothing more than an engineer’s wet dream, with the Godlike Human Creator at its center, but the fact that the characters have little choice but to retreat into fabricated environments effectively neuters any such complaints. We don’t escape to space because we want to, but because we have to.

Playing out here are Stephenson’s well-documented concerns about Innovation Starvation––what he perceives as humanity’s current inability to solve big problems with ambitious technical solutions. Seveneves is shot through with desire for improvements in large-scale infrastructure, even to the point of kicking off with a slightly more advanced civilization than we might expect in the near future (e.g. there is a small asteroid attached to the ISS).

We are also treated to Stephenson’s bald disdain for the political processes that sometimes stifle innovation. Stephenson’s libertarian and private sector leanings would be more distressing were he not so aware of them. In a telling moment, a character observes that “politics” is a word “that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization” (238). Despite his obvious impatience with political maneuvering, I think Stephenson gives the political process (if not politicians themselves) a fair shake in the overall story arc.

Somewhat more concerning are his long-term ideas about re-seeding Earth’s ecosystems after several millennia of environmental decimation. His described approaches are laughably hubristic in one sense, but also pragmatic and downright cool given the circumstances. Once again, the expediencies of his apocalypse scenario save Stephenson from becoming a full-blown caricature of the adolescent desire for human dominance over nature.

While some critics seem let down by Seveneves’s final third––which takes place 5000 years after the initial action––I think this section is indispensable for understanding the intellectual and emotional scope of Stephenson’s project. Rarely do I come across a story good enough to be treated as a fictional Creation Myth, and never have I encountered one in which I actually get to witness that Creation Myth (here referred to simply as “the Epic”) give birth to a new way of life.

Stephenson introduces an entirely new cast of characters, descendents of the Seven Eves (the last surviving women from the Epic). Given the exceptional characterization in the first two sections, it would be ruinous to start from scratch in the last few hundred pages. But Stephenson circumnavigates this pitfall by situating the Epic as the foundational document for a technologically advanced panhuman civilization that has more than overcome its earthbound limitations (if not its petty predilections for competition, socioeconomic hierarchies, and war-making––sigh!). We see how the legacy of the Seven Eves plays out in the thoughts, interactions, and conflicts of their descendents, and are delighted to find that the personalities of the Eves we came to love so dearly still echo many millennia after their deaths.

This is reinforced by the Eves’ agreement that, in repopulating the human race, each gets to choose one major genetic alteration to bestow on her descendents. These changes, which become inculcated into the reproductive practices of each of the new genetic lines, result in seven new races, all of which are recognizably human, but exhibit very different physical, intellectual, and cultural traits. The new races depend on one another––through cooperation as well as competition––for survival, and each must put its particular genetic and cultural assets to use within the context of the other six. It’s a richly-imagined portrait that, while not always entirely believable, offers a surfeit of fodder for thinking about what humanity truly is, and what we might become in the deep future.

Stephenson’s “adapt or die” message is obvious. He makes no bones about which human quality he values most: intelligence. Riffing on Stewart Brand’s famous proclamation, one character explains:

We need brains, is the bottom line…We’re not hunter-gatherers anymore. We’re all living like patients in the intensive care unit of a hospital. What keeps us alive isn’t bravery, or athleticism, or any of those other skills that were valuable in a caveman society. It’s our ability to master complex technological skills. It is our ability to be nerds. We need to breed nerds…I’m giving you facts. We’re all nerds now. We might as well get good at it. (560)

While it comes as no surprise that Stephenson favors nerdiness, his far future culture is a radically diverse one. This is no technocratic tyranny, but rather a hodgepodge of different strategies for survival and flourishing––each of which can be justified as a kind of intelligence. Humanity’s intolerance and tribalism are still rampant, but we have also become measurably better on most fronts, rendering the book’s final section surprising and fun rather than blindly utopian. Only one thing is clear: stubborn entrenchment––either mental or physical––is always a prelude to obsolescence.

The endings of Stephenson novels are notoriously nebulous and sometimes disappointing, but Seveneves’s final pages strike a perfect balance between mystery and explanation. We get just enough emotional and thematic resonance for a sense of completion, and Stephenson leaves us with a gentle reminder to pull our heads out of our asses and have a good look around:

Humans have always…preferred to believe that there was a purpose to the universe. Until the moon blew up, they had theories. After Zero, the theories all seemed kind of stupid. Fairy tales for coddled children. No one thought about the big picture for a few thousand years. We were all scrambling to survive. Like ants when their nest has been destroyed. On those rare occasions when we thought about the big picture, it wasn’t really that big. (859)

We can always count on Neal Stephenson to show us something we haven’t seen before, to push our minds, try our patience, and explode our spirits. All his books are worth reading, but Seveneves is something of a different order altogether, something ineffably grand. My only regret after finishing is that I cannot erase this tale from my memory and experience it again for the first time.

Rating: 10/10