Snow Crash, that was a great book right? Who cannot love a book where the main actor is called Hiro Protagonist. Careening all over the place, it was a kind of post cyberpunk drunken spree through three different parties that left you hungover in a field.
I came into Seveneves a little late, because I’d seen the size of the physical book and decided that I didn’t want to risk a sprained wrist.
One Scribd.com encounter later.. Feeling a bit under the weather, I thought me some thrilling sci-fi apocalypta would be just the ticket. Long, OK, but he will have honed his craft so long after Snow Crash days, kept the ship trimmed, polished the machine, can I stop now ok stopping. I felt.. not.
Stephenson’s pre and post-apocalyptic epic is paced pretty strangely. There’s a lot of time spent on what should feel like tense moments in the battle for a future, but felt like a dragging description of some kind of technical thought experiment. A Hyperion like epic, OK, we can get on board with that maybe. We then (eventually) jump quite suddenly to what is basically the end game (only.. is it?), with the results of parallel attempts at life as what seem to be footnotes, or perhaps a desperate attempt to bring the sprawling epic to some kind of conclusion, while perhaps leaving some room for expansion.
Much talk of exponential curves in the earlier science expo actually somewhat plays out in the narrative. A bit of a drag, to be honest. Perhaps not meant to be read in one fell swoop. 6.8/10 pies soggy in the middle and burnt on top.
