This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers. They agree that each of the seven "Eves" gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced. Because it really is two totally separate novels.). And now it all seemed a moot point anyway. Review posted at the B&N Sci-Fi and Fantasy Blog: As the joke has been going, if you enjoy orbital mechanics as a main character, you'll enjoy this novel. Following this there is a period of mixing in the single Cradle habitat: Stabilization, which lasted through the following ten generations or so as Y chromosomes were patched up, lingering genetic mistakes were fixed, and members of different Strains began to interbreed to produce hybrids within their own racial groups. [11], The Guardian's Steven Poole was more critical in his review, criticizing the work as being overly descriptive, and observing: "Once we arrive in the novel's snail-paced last third, there are lots and lots of lavish descriptions of imaginary machines: city-sized orbiting habitats, giant pendulums reaching down into the Earth's atmosphere, 'sky trains'. After that, 7 tumbling boulders still bound by gravity remain. The novel shifts from having a lot to do with orbital mechanics and the movements of bodies through space to being concerned with humanity's genetic legacy. The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. according to Cyc, the Pingers evolved solely through selective breeding. When Endurance reaches the safety of the Cleft, there are only eight surviving Homo sapiens in space, all of whom are women. Besides, the artists and their music . Popular African-American celebrity scientist Doc Dubois is, Commercial spaceflight billionaire Sean Probst is Elon Musk, Teenaged activist and target of an assassination attempt Camila is Malala Yousafzai, Space exploration company Arjuna Expeditions is, Tech blogger and singularity theorist Tavistock Prowse is Cory Doctorow. Dubois "Doob" Jerome Xavier Harris, Ph.D. observes the moon's destruction during a fund-raiser at Caltech Athenaeum. The book was shortlisted for the 2016 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Teklans have a long standing tradition of Zero-G martial art that has roots in Sambo. Subverted; the artifacts are only a publicity stunt designed to get people to buy into the project. The Cradle, being a counterweight attached to the Eye, is essentially a floating town that moves above the surface of Earth. open the books and provide a current and accurate account of all stocks of water, food, and other staples, and how those numbers were changing over time. Contents Plot Ada still possessed an air of menace. Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of science fiction, steampunk, and cyberpunk. They had scrubbed the place down with bleach and made the beds with clean sheets in the hopes that none of them would be occupied for a long time. Suffering from brain damage, blindness, and psychosis, he struggles to find answers in an ever changing reality. Insights into the human character shine like occasional full moons." -- Boston Globe The project is designed also to engage those left behind, and prevent worldwide chaos. This causes a world-wide scramble to put everything possible into the Cloud Ark. It's not just that it's intellectually lazy (it is, though, full of strawmen) or that it's politically objectionable (Stephenson has his heart in the right place). They did not know quite what to do with Julia and Ada. No cosmic radiation could touch them here. Later (A+0.0.4: zero years, zero days, and four hours after the event) at a meeting in the ISS between Commander Ivy Xiao, Dinah, and the ten other crew members, German astronomer Konrad Barth theorizes that a Primordial Singularity, or small black hole, hit the moon like a bullet through an apple. What would happen if the world were ending? Tell me you don't love the idea of a dooban race. vegan) just for fun, does this inconvenience the caterers and staff? Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. And they had plans for rebooting digital civilization later; they had tools for making tools for making tools, and instructions on how to use them when the time came. and some of her inner circle. He observed: "Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low Earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. Seveneves proposes a not-too-distant future where the moon is blasted apart by an errant asteroid and what that means for the future of humanity. Noun. By clicking Post Your Answer, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. and our At this point the decision is made not to revert back to the original human genetic template: To undo those decisions by reverting to the rootstock human race was viewed almost as a kind of auto-genocide. So even when there was mixing, the seven lines would continue as they started. Contents 1 Plot 1.1 Part 1 1.2 Part 2 1.3 Part 3 2 Characters 2.1 Parts One and Two 2.1.1 The Seven Eves 2.1.2 Others Seveneves is a speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2015. After Endurance (formerly the ISS) is fitted with the immense ice "splinter" captured by tragically heroic Sean Probst and his crew, the new mass burdens the projected one-year, 300,000-mile journey to Cleft into three years. One, the sociologist Luisa, has reached menopause, and the remaining seven (Dinah, Ivy, Ada, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) come to be known as the Seven Eves. With the Human Genetic Archive gone, Moira explains that, using automictic parthenogenesis, uniparental embryos can be created out of normal eggs. As a result, the Spacers don't really have a concept of God, but a form of nontheistic spirituality called. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Seveneves. While melting and splitting the water theyd used for propellant, they had extracted from it many tons of phosphorus, carbon, ammonia, and other chemicals, left over from the dawn of the solar system, that had once cloaked Gregs Skeleton in a reeking black carapace. Dinah is the sole survivor of this mission, but now the Ark is assured of water for propellant and drinking. Still. As far as I can see, I just got two novels for the price of one. Nations band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. An optimistic theory circulates, claiming the moon's gravity will gradually draw together all the fragments, but vivid meteor showers seem to contradict this notion. I'm in the process of reading the book now and I'm wondering the same damn thing. I'm no good at editing, so I'll leave it to the author or someone else to figure out where to put in the actual question: What prevented the racial mixing between the grandchildren of the different Eves? rev2023.3.1.43269. Thanks for the edit @gowenfawr. One character sees a recording of one of the Eves and notes that common artistic depictions give her more idealized features than the real deal had. A WEEK LATER, WHEN THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS HAD SUCCUMBED to their wounds or to radiation sickness, eight humans remained alive and healthy. Since one of the Seven Eves was a Russian Cosmonaut, the Russian influence is quite apparent in The Spacers' language and culture. in order to hold out the possibility that racial purity could be maintained. That was the price of being sheltered from cosmic rays and coronal mass ejections. "Going epi" has a similar effect on Moirans that regeneration has on Time Lords. Niall Alexander is an extra-curricular English teacher who reads and writes about all things weird and wonderful. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Ivy called for a twenty-four-hour pause to grieve and to take stock. The Diggers live in a much more dogmatic, tradition-driven society, but also don't appear to worship any gods. Integral with cosine in the denominator and undefined boundaries. You crystallized my question. The food picture had turned out to be bleak. The problem is that it's a propos of nothing. The brain-trust is tasked by leaders to engineer a self-sustaining environment capable of maneuvering away from larger fragments, and withstanding 5,000 years in near-earth orbit until the planet is stable enough to be terraformed into supporting life. And they wanted to give Tav a taste of his own medicine by uploading his physical body into theirs.. So a Julian and a Moiran could have three kids, who might randomly be a Julian, a Teklan, and an Aidan. It sits on a shelf gathering dust. They had demanded that J.B.F. To the other side was life: the series of compartments where Moira had been setting up her genetics lab. In addition to these Spacer races, there are two "rootstock" races that do not descend from the Seven Eves. An ad hoc committee of spacefaring nations establishes a project of immense scale: the International Space Station will serve as the hub around which will be constructed a Cloud Ark consisting of hundreds of "arklets," prefabricated "cans" rotating in pairs for artificial gravity. Not long after, Swiss astronaut Markus Leuker replaces Ivy as commander of the Ark, and announces that all political/national allegiances no longer hold, and declares what amounts to martial law pursuant to the Crater Lake Accorda sort of new Constitution prepared on Earth during the massive production of materials in Seattle. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck. Some of them had become completely isolated and could only be reached by a person in a space suit. But short of locking her up in an arklet, there was nothing they could do about that save keep an eye on her. Ada's curse ensures that all of her descendants will be treated with contempt by the other six races. 600 pages of concentrated awesomesauce, let down a little by Stephenson's decision to devote so much of the last part to backfilling the 5000 years of future history he skipped absent the underpinnings of character or narrative. There are some clues in Part 3 of the book. May 29, 2015 9:30 AM PT. The *science* and world-building is awesome. This Study Guide consists of approximately 77pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - The predicted "hard rain" starts 701 days after the moon's shattering, and Earth's surface is annihilated. So the canonical answer is each of the races kept to their own habitats during the 4,000 year period before the habit ring was constructed, and thus there was little opportunity for the groups to mix, as travel was difficult in this era. Ada still wasnt talking, but Julia was. I was under the impression that each of the Seven is purebred from their Eve, not that they have dominant racial characteristics. They had, in effect, sidestepped grief by convincing themselves that nothing had happened. If those unusually dark- or light-skinned people selected each other, you could have a reemergence of a group of dark- or light-skinned people, given enough generations and a big enough population. For face to face communication, most people in the Cloud Arc have to make due with Skape (Skype) calls. They wanted to silence me, and so they did. Then I met someone who had gotten annoyed enough to begin counting pages when it happened and got to around 259 pages of it. SEVENEVES is a very old project; I first started thinking about it when I was working at Blue Origin, probably circa 2004. The human race faces a catastrophic event which leaves them scrambling to survive. The greeting gestures seem easy, since culturally all hipsters, and all jocks, and all sci-fi geeks act similarly. The first sentence sets the scene pretty well: This epic tale of survival of the human species in space after the earth gets wrecked by a Hard Rain of meteorites was a real treat for me. There were definitely people of mixed race in the book. After the contraceptives ran out, promoting abstinence became the only non-radical way of achieving that. . Only nine people survive, and Dr. "Doob" Harris dies after a final "moon-walk." One idea that I had was that NS could have just included one line that says that Moira developed some kind of genetic coding that ensured the babies would carry the genetic traits of the mother always. Interesting, and extremely entertaining book. Endurance weighed about as much as a couple of semi-trailer rigs. Swarmamentalists, who want "pure swarm," i.e., the genetics lab and materials distributed among the arklets, which would then collectively move to a higher orbit relatively safe from lunar debris. It only takes a minute to sign up. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. ON THE SURFACE OF CLEFT, A HUMAN WEIGHED ABOUT AS MUCH AS three pints of beer would weigh on Earth. Ada initiates a kind of a genetic arms race against the other Eves, trying to anticipate whatever qualities they give their progeny and giving her own children complementary and counterweight features. The artifacts are dumped as soon as people aren't looking and both the Cloud Ark and the Human Genetic Archive are massive failures. Plastic, I would say, is among the least of their worries. Teklan Habitats are said to be even more Russian. and the others, the reaction was just that much more severe. Sunlight for energy and agriculture could be had a short distance above them, high on the walls of the crevasse, where the sun shone almost all the time. Most of the iron core of the Moon has been used to build the habitats, while Cleft itself has been turned into the Cradle, an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth along the equator. This had led to a variety of responses that had determined the history and politics of the Swarm ever since: among some, a further retreat into mysticism and wishful thinking, based on a belief that the Agent had been some sort of avenging angel sent by God, or by aliens so powerful that they might as well be God, to bring about the end of days and the merging of all human consciousness into a digital swarm in the sky; among others, a frank embrace of cannibalism in the sense not of killing people for food but of eating those who had died of natural causes as a stopgap measure until J.B.F. The healthy ones patched holes, repressurized modules, got the torus spinning again, and turned it into a sick bay, which filled up immediately. could be toppled and replaced by people who knew what they were doing. At first sight it has it all: original ideas, thorough descriptions of new technologies and scientific theories, but it's very long with a boring plot and a bunch of unlikeable characters. Library descriptions No library descriptions found. Privacy Policy. This is the backdrop against which Neal Stephenson has set one of his most ambitious and visionary fictions: Seveneves. Authorities on Earth, including NASA, paint the moon's destruction with false sentiment and "cute" terms. They were dependent, in many ways, on digital technology. That would take a long time, but the survivors all shared the conviction that, having sacrificed so much to make it here, they should be interred and not burned. The story is this: after an unexplained event shatters the Moon into fragments, the Earth becomes uninhabitable. The analogy was a loose one. From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epica grand story of annihilation and survival spanning. Two days had passed since she had eaten the last of Tavistock Prowse, so she was very hungry, but otherwise in good shape. Ironically, the last male gives his life for the remaining women, putting them into a difficult situation where they are forced to use alternative means of reproduction. In the meantime, their big reactor as well as four dozen arklet reactors were producing far more power than they could ever use, and would continue doing so for decades. I know the mass of the 7 pieces are large but it was never even discussed in the book. The problems with inbreeding are mitigated by having a world-class geneticist on hand. "Doc" Hu Noah forms a "Seven" with one member from each race to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. The Moirans have the unique ability to "go epi" and reshuffle their genetic phenotype, making them the most versatile race of the Seven. Why does the impeller of torque converter sit behind the turbine? Truce of the burning tree -- how realistic? Not only does this succeed for the most part 5000 years later, but the Epic that forms part of said archives has since become a nigh-sacred aspect of Spacer society. By accepting all cookies, you agree to our use of cookies to deliver and maintain our services and site, improve the quality of Reddit, personalize Reddit content and advertising, and measure the effectiveness of advertising. The great thing about a good Stephenson book is it makes you think about the future in new ways, and this book was no exception. Is the word "vitamin" meaning "any item shippable to space" a creation of Neal Stephenson in Seveneves? My guess would be that at the very beginning, when the Eves themselves were still having children, racial lines were reasonably clear. [10], Bill Gates recommended Seveneves as one of five books to read in the summer of 2016, praising in particular its scientific accuracy. Seveneves was included on President Obama's Summer 2016 reading list. *sigh*. At the Council of Seven Eves, Julia explains away both her and Ada's atrocities as caused by extreme paranoia. Diggers (descended from Eve Dinah's father), who built underground holdouts; and Pingers (descended from Eve Ivy's fianc), who guided submarines into the deepest undersea canyons. Oh we've never let up on SevenEves. There have also been bacteria that have been genetically engineered to produce plastic. Be maintained a not-too-distant future where the moon 's destruction during a fund-raiser at Caltech Athenaeum only a publicity designed! 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