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    Seveneves: A Novel
    Seveneves: A Novel
    Seveneves: A Novel
    Audiobook31 hours

    Seveneves: A Novel

    Written by Neal Stephenson

    Narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

    What would happen if the world were ending?

    A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

    But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .

    Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . . to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

    A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateMay 19, 2015
    ISBN9781501220258
    Author

    Neal Stephenson

    Neal Stephenson is the author of Termination Shock, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Zodiac and the iconic Snow Crash, named one of Time magazine's top one hundred all-time best English-language novels. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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    Reviews for Seveneves

    4/5

    1,949 ratings148 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Enjoyed a lot. Ending was weak. Loved the details.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      What a great story. Narration was great too. Bravo everyone.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Life is too short. This book could have been half as long. I should have abandoned it.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Interesting concepts, technological and biological. But too much telling over showing. And the end seems to have just ...

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      The book is excellent. A science fiction book with very little warfare. The first reader is very distracting with very poor rendering of dialogue, although when just reading the text she is fine. The second reader is professional and the voices of different characters is excellent.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Five stars do not do justice to this great book. Science fiction geeks (such as myself) will find in this book a great epic tale, technical details on space travel, and exciting (but slow) "orbital mechanics" action.
      This book makes you ponder on how the choices made by very few reverberate throughout humanity reaching more than five thousand years of history and shaping the core of political alliances, and of course political divisions.
      Overall a very intelligent book that makes obvious a huge work of fact-checking and research. The end somewhat suggests the plot for another novel with another epic, this time reaching the depths of our inner space. Cannot wait!

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      An Epic Scifi masterpiece of scope and brilliance on par with Dan Brown’s Cantos series. I love the humor and the authors inedible imagination.
    • 3/5
      It is two books in one. The first story is mostly adventurous sometimes a bit labour some. The second story, playing 5000 years in the future, feels like it’s written by somebody else. The second story is mostly philosophical,, and sometimes adventurous. it is somewhat laborious to listen to plenty of good ideas though
    • 1/5
      Wow, did this book suck! I loved the premise of the book but it did not deliver. I will admit that I am fairly new to the sci-fi genre, but I have read/listened and enjoyed many others. This was ridiculously heavily with technical info. I’m a Crichton fan and have heard people complain about his books being too information heavy. But Crichton books have nothing on this, in that regard. I understand having a little, so that you understand what is going on. But there was so much unnecessary information that made this book just drone on and on. The story moved soooo slowly I almost gave up multiple times.

      The second part seemed promising because it was a little less technical stuff and the story moved at a nice speed. But there were some things that just didn’t seem plausible. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but with a planet of 6+ billion people, pre-moon incident, the probability of things revolving around just a few people isn’t realistic. The biggest let down though was the ending. I understand leaving on a cliff hanger, or leaving things open to a possible sequel. But this book has an abrupt ending, that’s not even a cliff hanger. It felt like the book ended mid story.

      The thing that really pisses me off though is how long this audiobook is. Most audiobooks I read are about 10-15 hours. So if I don’t like it or it has a bad ending I did waste that much time. But I suffered through this for 32 hours and it was just a colossal waste of time.

      As far as narration, not great but not the worst. Other audiobooks do a much better job at the different voices and accents. The majority of the book is a female narrator and her male voices are just horrific. The male narrator at the end wasn’t too bad. And this isn’t about men being better or anything. I’ve listen to other female narrators that did amazing male voices.
    • 4/5
      The end is very abrupt and jarring to the point of being off putting. However, Stephenson delivers again.
    • 2/5
      Boy, the rating sure doesn't tell the whole story of my experience with this book. Two stars for me means "I did not enjoy this book" which is accurate, but it took me a while to get there.I realized fairly early on that this book isn't really a "me" book. Hard sci-fi, in space when I wanted more focus on the destruction of earth, more epic than character-focused, definitely transhumanist which I find depressing on an instinctive level... and yet for Parts One and Two, I was really into it. Yes, there are times when the oh-so-rare action and tension was interrupted by six pages explaining delta vee and mass acceleration and there were little lines here and there that felt either preachy or not very realistic as far as human nature goes, but for some reason it still worked for me. I devoured this section. Four stars all around. I also recommended the book to my husband as it seemed right up his alley.Then I hit Part Three. Let's split this into two parts and address it that way. The first half of Part Three was okay. Three stars. Way more explanations than I needed to the point where my brain was overloaded and just nothing made any sense the further I read particular explanations (mostly about the habitat rings and how their current technology interacted). I found the sociology stuff about the different races kind of interesting but not enough to read a textbook about it, which is what this book seemed to become. Meh but whatever. I'll keep going because I think I know where this is going and I'm curious. I told my husband that yeah, it gets a little long-winded but I still think you will enjoy it.Then I hit the second half of Part Three, where they go on their little Lord of the Rings quest. Tonally, this just did not fit with the rest of the book. We get mini-lectures about matriarchy good/patriarchy bad (because it's better when a society starts with women telling other women to pop out up to 20 babies but not okay if a man tells women not to have babies; also female-owned strip clubs are a-okay and not creepy), some nice hypocrisy about "Old Racism" from someone part of a society that has lots of their own racism built in to their system, and then the most unemotional action/battle scenes I have perhaps ever read (not helped by the fact that they are occasionally interrupted by a page of explanation on whip-cracking techniques). This whole section feels like it was written five years after the initial parts or was originally written for a different book. I set the book down for two days and forgot about it during this section. I also revoked my recommendation to my husband that he read it. Look, maybe if Part Three were a sequel book, the tonal shift would have worked better. It is a continuation of the world, but just doesn't fit with Parts One and Two. Also, Stephenson's editor did him dirty on this one. Just because you have notes and backstory to flesh out a book does not mean it needs to be included. This book should have been at least three hundred pages shorter because a lot of the unnecessary information should had been removed. It's not helpful to the storyline, it's just evidence of research and/or imagination.This is my first Stephenson novel and, after looking at some other reviews, perhaps it wasn't the best one for me to start with. I do have one other of his books which I will give a go and hope for something more like Parts One and Two of this book, because I did really enjoy that, even if it wasn't my typical type book. But although this book didn't turn me off of the author, I can't recommend this book to anyone.
    • 5/5
      Such a great writer, his work is always amazing and this is no exception. So exciting and expansive, with distinct, complicated characters.
    • 3/5
      I'm only around 75% of the way through at the moment, but still, I feel fairly confident that I won't change my mind on this before the end of the book.
      I like it, but I feel it's one of those few books where the "unabridged" label on the Audiobook should really be a warning sign rather than a point of pride :p. There's just so much detail, which is great but personally I find it impossible to keep it all in my head when listening to an audiobook. I just have to accept that I'm going to zone out during the techy info dumps (and I'm quite a technical person - it's not that I can't understand it) and hope that I tune back in in time for the dialogue and important plot details.
      I wouldn't want to read this book (again, unless there was an abridged version), but at least in audio form I can listen along while doing mundane but necessary things, so I don't feel so much like I'm giving my undivided attention to miniscule details that I'm only half interested in.
    • 5/5
      Great work on characters! Interesting story, captivating. The 30+ hours of audio book flew by fast. Not easy to predict the story line. Will read more work from this author.
    • 4/5
      The world building and imagination by Neal Stephenson depicts a future for the human race (or races) that is to a degree, frighteningly possible. Great story. My first real venture into hard sci fi.
    • 5/5
      It is just theoretically the most awesome book ever written! Never have I seen such a fictional account. It matches The Maze Runner! Respect to the writer. I hope I match the book I am writing now.
      It's truly heart-rending. Go for this epic science fiction book: seven eves by the talented writer Stephenson. Thank you Stephenson for this fulfilling book.
    • 5/5
      It's not perfect and I would have liked more of the world 5000 years post-Zero, but it's really damned good. It's a big book, set mostly in a very small space. It's smart, woman-centered )dare I say "feminist"?) science fiction. It would occasionally get bogged down in scientific detail, but even that is something that will appeal to a lot of people. (It just made me feel out of my depth.) I would recommend this book to anyone who likes smart science fiction with intelligent, sympathetic characters (mostly) and solid world-building.
    • 2/5
      I had this recommended by a friend because I loved the expanse. This was rough. I am not sure what was harder to listen to, the actual content of the book or the narrator. The narrator is the worst I’ve ever listened to. Her representation of every male voice was unbelievably terrible. It sounds like she was mimicking men in a joking manner but she’s not. I don’t understand how she came up with her accents and tonality. It’s so distracting that the book is almost unlistenable
    • 5/5
      I enjoyed this epic! some aspects of the way things turned out I didn't buy at all such as the lack of certainly technology advances compared to others. IMHO you couldn't have one without the other. But in the grand scheme of the story it was a small thing. Over all a grand story with lots of drama and angst and even some sardonic humor. I just had to know how it ended.
    • 5/5
      AMAZING SUSPENSE AND WORLD BUILDING. It wants three more words
    • 3/5
      Review for the Audiobook: The female narrator for the first part is bad at reading for male characters! They all sound like an English butler. This book is long and sounds like a movie script, like a screenplay, too many details. The storyline is great though, maybe best to read and skip through some of mondane detailed descriptions.
    • 4/5
      This novel was a 5, right up until the the last sentence. Then because that was an entirely unexpected finish point of the story, it lost a star. That should have just been where part 3 started. So now I feel like I invested over 30 hours of my mental life, to an unfinished story, and that definitely sours the whole works for me.
      I will say that both narrators did a great job, but I especially appreciated the first one, even though male voices aren't a strong point for her.
    • 5/5
      hahahahahhahaha... nice.. this is great... how could i live without yo
    • 5/5
      One of the best science fiction books I have ever read. Cannot recommend this book strongly enough
    • 4/5
      Great performance of a wonderful novel. A mind blowing work full of ideas and sharp observations about the human condition.
    • 5/5
      Somewhat slow and dry, I still couldn't help needing to know what happened next. Who would come into power, who would be the next to die, who is good or bad. It was like Game of Thrones in space.
    • 5/5
      One of Stephenson’s best. It belongs on the same shelf as Snowcrash, Zodiac, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age…
      This is given to lengthy bouts of techno exposition like any other later period Stephenson novel, but it is well balanced with plot, character and action and as usual, the exposition gives exciting insight into a lot of physics and engineering processes as well as other, softer sciences.
      This novel starts with a phenomenal “What If” and keeps rolling tautly along from there.
    • 5/5
      Epic, mind-expanding sci-fi as only a master like Neal Stephenson can write!
    • 3/5
      This book is 861 pages. The plot, however, can be boiled down to a mere 150 - 200 pages. The rest is filled with "hard science facts" that is either plain boring or unneeded in some cases. For most of the book, there is little to no character development. Characters are added, and later killed, with the reader caring very little about it. In some instances, Stephenson interrupts characters in mid conversation to spew science for six pages. All in all, it leaves the reader with a sense of a much greater book lurking behind the intriguing premise of the story, if only it could be uncovered from the barrage of facts buried on top of it.
    • 3/5
      The book opens "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." From then on, humanity is on a desperate race to find ways to survive the coming meteor storm, which will bombard Earth for centuries, leaving the Earth's surface a desolate wasteland. Their primary tactic: create a space station that will hold a few thousand people and sufficient technology and biological samples to recreate Earth's biome after the meteor bombardment. The book follows various scientists and engineers as they strive to create this haven. The effort takes 566 pages, and is by far the best part of the book. In fact, I wish it had been the entire book, because pages 567-851 follow characters who are far less interesting, in a context that I find far less believable. I did not buy for a second the society that thrives in space five thousand years after the bombardment; aside from a little slang, it's almost indistinguishable from twenty-first century Western civilization. They've been living in space for five thousand years, under incredibly difficult conditions! Even worse than a future that I didn't buy, it's boring. There are mole people! Mer people! Robot swarms fighting each other! And yet, because Stephenson is bad at writing humans and human activity at the best of times, and loves stopping in the midst of action scenes to explain how every little weapon works, and the precise physics of how someone fell down a hill, the second part of this book is pretty dull.

      Stephenson has a tendency to do astounding amounts of research and then showcase alllll of it. Every single scientific concept and every single invention is described in exhaustive (and by the end, exhausting) detail. This is a perfect book for people that like that sort of thing. I'd have preferred more characterization and more plausible social movements.