SEVENEVES by Neal Stevenson

Narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron

     Thin Plot—Thinner Story—World-Building Exercise

I like Neal Stevenson as much as the next guy and more than most. My introduction to his fiction came relatively late. I have long been a fan of Snow Crash but did not come to appreciate his other efforts until recently. And so it was with great anticipation with which I approached his new novel Seveneves, which was to be the first new Neal Stevenson release to occur while I considered myself a true fan.

Neal Stevenson here proves that his narrative voice is capable of wide variance from one novel to the next; seeming to be a different author. In Snow Crash he is a gonzo genre-busting cyberpunk virtual reality hacker. In The Diamond Age he morphs into a William Gibsonesque near-future cautionary tale teller. For multi-volume series The Baroque Cycle he explores the very nature of the scientific method as a plot device—quite successfully, I might add. In Anathem he becomes an SF religious allegorist reminiscent of Walter Miller Jr. In Cryptonomicon he deftly weaves code-breaking with World War II heroics. For Reamde he becomes a top-shelf political techno-thriller novelist. And now in Seveneves, he writes a throwback Hard Science Fiction™ global disaster novel told in the clear—some may say non-existent—style of Isaac Asimov. If the name Neal Stevenson did not appear on the covers of all these titles one would be hard pressed to determine that all were written be the same author. There is one giveaway. The common element in all Stevenson’s work is his endearing tendency toward Attention Surplus Disorder, a label given to one of the characters in Anathem, but which aptly describes his obsessive-compulsive attention to detail.

This book has a plethora of interesting forays into world-building. First is a near future world where humanity has become a space-dwelling race. The second is a post-apocalyptic space-faring group of survivors. Next is the group of their descendants engaging in re-terraforming earth. The problem for me is that in each section the world –building situation takes precedence over the story. This novel suffers from the implausibility of the situations the humans are dealing with. It seems that the quirks of our culture are still felt five millennia in the future and the races established by the survivors still remain distinct despite living in close quarters. The novel is unrealistically told as if nothing of historical importance occurs in the five thousand years between the major sections. This implausibility makes it impossible for the listener to engage with the characters who are sorely impacted by their dire circumstances; circumstances which just don’t have a strong enough connection with reality, or even to plausibility, to allow the reader to make an empathic connection with the characters. As a result the book seems to be a collection of outlines of pre and post-apocalyptic scenarios strung together with a few key characters who are mere place-holders occupying a necessary slot in the framework

It took me a few hours to warm up to the voice of Mary Robinette Kowal. And, though I grew to appreciate her narration because she tries to give each character a voice, I still cringe sometime when she reads some of the male characters as if they were surfer dudes. To her credit, she is, for the most part, not intrusive and lets the words tell the story. The second half of Seveneves is narrated by Will Damron, who delivers the text in straightforward fashion assiduously avoiding undue emotional inflection or any hint of drama. The two narrators are well matched in that they read clearly and with a steady pace. I prefer Mary Robinette Kowal since she adds a much needed element of the dramatic to her performance that Will Damron seems to shun.

Seveneves stems from a long line of Sc-Fi planetary-scale disaster novels. Other noteworthy examples in this sub-genre are:

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE bu Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer

THE WANDERER by Fritz Leiber

LUCIFER’S HAMMER by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle