Lots of scientists and non-scientists alike get interested very quickly and it all lands in the wow-factor category until some intrepid graduate student decides to try and model the new 7-piece moon and realizes that very bad things are going to start happening very soon.
It’s not apparent what has hit it, or even IF something has hit it, but it’s obvious that the moon has broken into several pieces. Something catastrophic happens to the Earth’s moon. The story starts exactly the way stories are supposed to start: with a bang. She is a scientist currently inhabiting the International Space Station (ISS, or Izzy) with work involving the harvesting of precious metals from a “small” asteroid named Amalthea. So it stands to reason that he’d be central to so much of what happens in a near-future science fiction apocalyptic (almost) thriller. They all look to him when it comes to questions dealing with science beyond their ken. You’ve heard of Bill Nye the science guy, yeah? Well Doob here is Bill Nye for the politicians of the world. It’s told from a number of character viewpoints, but the large majority come from Doc Dubois (Doob) Harris and Dinah Macquarie. It’s told in three parts - almost clinically so - and each part is unique and almost a story of its own. SEVENEVES by Neal Stephenson ( Amazon) is a novel that was a long time in coming, and like so many of his other novels, has a very long story to tell. This one could happen tomorrow, and I think, for the most part, it could all feasibly happen. A story of very-near Science Fiction that is about an apocalypse that we haven’t read before (e.g., planetary self-destruction, religious fruition). This one pushed a lot of my buttons, but strained my patience quite a bit, too. Smart, funny, character-centric, inventive, informative - his books, for me, stand tall and somewhat apart from so much of the other writing out there. It’s been a while since I read a Stephenson book, and I was in need of his kind of storytelling.
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