5000 years of story depicting the fate of humankind reflecting the choices of a few protagonists. Fascinating.
The moon.
The moon.
The moon of doom.
Reading this book gives joy and gloom.
Neal Stephenson´s “Seveneves” has a stark scientific angle and seems well researched, specially concerning orbital dynamics. The unexplained lunar destruction has the delta v of an asteroid heading to earth and will hit your head which gets drawn in by a swarms of robots and frenetic engineering activity to save some lives and things that matter. His noah´s ark reboot comes across like a in-depth research of what is scientifically possible right now, what the engineering capacity of earth could do, if the want to and opens the gates to a bombardment of sensations in human orbital drama. Space is not so problematic, technically.
Getting up there is. And changing the orbital plane. You can live in a tin can with 1mm thickness and rather get too hot then too cold, even though the systems have to even out ~220 degrees of temperature difference, depending if you are in direct sunlight or in the shadow. His range of thinking on robotics, asteroid mining and epigenetics is a mind-opener.
If you are not familiar at all with the physics and options in outer space for us humans, let him entertain you. The human and political component is harsh and basically divided in two books, which are (unluckily?) forged into one. We care about those protagonists, and then we have to care about them not anymore, as the story moves on. A trilogy could have made sense here, but maybe he did not have enough material imagined for that. It is terrifying to see that we ARE like that or could be like that, even though it could be worse than this outcome he envisions. Read it quickly, don´t worry about the apocalyptic gloom and see what we COULD DO, facing such an event. And learn to take politics and media into account, as well as Golding´s Lord of the Flies. We will need it as much as 3 rocket starts per day…
And to really feel in our guts that we are all stardust…