Neal Stephenson. Seveneves. New York: Morrow, 2015. E-book.

I have always considered Neal Stephenson one of the most creative and imaginative writers around today. It is no surprise that he has edited some of David Foster Wallace’s material. If anything, Seveneves is Stephenson’s best, at least, the best of his that I have read.

I read a lot. Not every book I read gets reviewed here. Sometimes it is not worth it. I also read two daily newspapers, and countless student submissions. As a result, I can normally put things down and pick them up at will. I could hardly put Seveneves down. It was fascinating.

Seveneves concerns survival in space. Usually science fiction stories invent technologies which are mere fantasy—things like warp speed and worm holes and time machines. Seveneves is really based on what technology is available nowadays—suborbital rockets, the International Space Station, the Internet, IC robots.

The moon has suddenly exploded. We do not know why. Astronomers simply call the inexplicable cause the Agent. Lunar fragments are orbiting while the bulk of its former volume is in seven large chunks. At one point, two of these large pieces collide splitting one of them in two, making eight large pieces or eight irregular satellites orbiting the earth.

Physicists predict that within two years the earth as we know it will be destroyed. The term they use is Hard Rain (cf. Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Going to Fall”). As gravity draws many of the lunar fragments closer to the atmosphere, they will begin to burn up, the larger ones crashing on the earth. This will cause the entire earth to burn, all but the deepest parts of the seas evaporating and all life on the surface dying. The earth will be uninhabitable for five thousand years.

As a television science popularizer puts it:

The good news is that the Earth one day is going to have a beautiful system of rings, just like Saturn. The bad news is that it is going to be messy. (29)

The first two thirds of Seveneves tells how a very small group of people manage to survive this holocaust by going into orbit around the earth. The International Space Station orbiting the earth is already beginning to mine iron from an asteroid that is also orbiting the earth. Unlike the imaginary devices in most science fiction, the survival tactics are realistic, if extreme, even with today’s technology.

Perhaps the most ambitious survival project is the attempt of a for-profit space pioneer to harness a chunk of ice from a comet (perhaps a little shout out to The Ice Pirates?) which becomes the main source of water for these extraterrestrial colonials.

In addition, the nations of the earth plan what they call the Cloud Ark—a literal swarm of rockets to orbit together like a school of fish following the space station.

In an arguably realistic manner, Stephenson tells how out of the hundreds who are initially launched into space, only a few survive. Many die heroically trying to keep the space colony alive. Some cannot adapt. Of course, there are conflicts and rivalries.

After a few years, only eight women survive. One is beyond childbearing age, so the seven others subject themselves to genetic engineering. One of the seven was chosen to go into space because of her expertise in genetic engineering and epigenetics. These are the Seven Eves, the palindrome ancestors of all the inhabitants of the space colony in the millennia to come. Perhaps Seven Eves is the response to the old palindrome joke, Madam, I’m Adam.

The eldest of the seven is the former President of the United States: politically middle-of-the-road, but terribly self-serving. According to the international agreement, no political leader was supposed to go into space, but she sneaks in. Another person who knows her says:

She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfalls a rationalization for it afterwards. (424)

It appears that the author may have been inspired by a certain female politician who nearly did become president.

There are echoes of Genesis throughout. Obviously, the means of survival is called the Ark. Each of the Seven Eves becomes the foundress or matriarch of at least one nation. Thousands of years later each nationality will be characterized by certain physical and behavioral traits, not unlike the Genesis Table of Nations (Genesis 10).

Some people attempt to build a kind of mountain to assert their power. Tower of Babel, anyone? A minor character who interprets dreams is unjustly accused of a crime like Joseph. And while most of the people in space agree to a new legal system, one of the Eves named Aïda rebels and nearly destroys everyone. Like the first Eve, her sin also involves eating, but not eating a fruit.

Julia the ex-president is sympathetic to Aïda, so there are indications that the space survivors may pay lip service to the new constitution but in reality form a kind of Orwellian Animal Farm where some people are more equal than others.

There are also some conscious allusions to Shackleton: the famous Antarctic explorer whose daring helped save his ship and crew that had become stuck in the ice.

The final third of Seveneves is set five thousand years later as the descendants of the space survivors begin to resettle the cooling Earth. We had read of a group of miners and some naval submariners who attempt to survive the global disaster by staying underground or under the water. Are any of them still alive?

Among other things, Stephenson imagines the language of the space survivors being mostly English, since that was the most widely-spoken language before the Agent, with influences from Russian since they were the other main power behind the International Space Station. The alphabet becomes a mixture of the Latin and Cyrillic, especially since the Cyrillic alphabet has symbols for sounds like “sh” and “ch” that English is at best ambiguous about.

As is typical of most science fiction set in the future, there is no religion. Some people do speak of a Purpose, with a capital P, but it appears to be more of an existential philosophy—we do not really believe in God or an afterlife, but we must live our lives as though there is some kind of higher power. The Lewis Space Trilogy or A Canticle for Liebowitz are exception to this, but even with this kind of existentialism we get a sense of what Ecclesiastes 3:11 tells us, that God has put eternity in the hearts of mankind.

It almost seem paradoxical, but given the premise of the moon’s explosion, Seveneves presents a realistic survival story. While it alludes to Genesis, Shackleton, and Orwell, it reminded this reader of the mother of all survival stories: Robinson Crusoe.

In imagining his perfect society of “noble savages,” Rousseau saw no need for books or education for man in his natural state. Such things tend to bring people into bondage and conflict, he wrote. However, Rousseau made one exception. People should read Robinson Crusoe so they can learn how to survive in an uninhabited wilderness.

If any future philosophes get an idea to colonize space—whether it is to create a utopia, to promote space exploration, or to escape a global catastrophe—they should read Seveneves. It may become the mother of any story that presents a realistic, though excruciating, account of the challenge to survive in outer space.