Seveneves by Neal Stephenson: #tbt review

(Finished September 24, 2015)

If you love good, hard science fiction, this book is for you. If you love The Expanse or Battlestar: Galactica, this book is for you. If you love a good apocalypse, like I do, this book is for you. If you loved Snow Crash and The Diamond Age but felt meh about Stephenson's alternate-history stuff, this book is for you.

It doesn't hark back to those earlier, less messy, shorter (all things being relative) tales—but the plot, while sprawling, is clean, with no gratuitous elements, and the characters are compelling again. Thank goodness; I used to love Neal Stephenson's work, and it's wonderful to be able to love it again.

There's damn little else I can say about this book without spoilers. It's incredibly plot-driven, and yet it manages to have real—really lovable as well as really despicable and really complex—characters throughout. Not to mention one major appearance by a thinly-veiled actual person, who happens to be one of my favorite living celebrities. My mind was blown on numerous occasions while reading. I was more deeply sucked-in to this book than I have been in a long, long time. 

It gripped me in much the way that Battlestar: Galactica (the modern series) gripped me: I cared too much about the people in this book, and their plight was too desperate, for me to be able to stop reading before I knew what became of them all. There were a number of nights that I stayed up far too late reading this because I HAD TO KNOW how a situation would resolve itself before I could compose myself for sleep.

The ending... well. It fizzles just a bit. I can't say anything about it without wrecking the book for you, but I will say that the last few hundred pages, though clearly Stevenson did a lot of thinking about how things would pan out, just weren't as vividly painted as the rest of the book. And the characters didn't shine through in the same way. And—well. I can't say more. It was a perfectly fine ending, satisfying, but not up to the standard of the rest of the book.

But that's because the rest of the book set an incredibly high standard. Read this. Truly. That is all.