Review: Seveneves

Pin It Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A friend told me that this is the best book he read last year and I can see that that sentiment is echoed by many other people (myself excluded). I have very little history with Neal Stephenson other than Snowcrash, which is one of the best sci-fi books I've read. I had heard that he tends to put a lot of research into creating his stories and that he is very thorough with details. I'll be honest that that alone should have warned me since I'm not big on minutia and much prefer character-driven books. I like my emotions to be tested and I enjoy loving some characters and hating others.

Seveneves is a massive book and equally grand in its scale. The time period it covers is possibly the largest of any book I've read and I found this idea to be quite exciting initially, expecting the get a glimpse of a fantastic world drastically different from the one left behind. Unfortunately, the parts I longed for were largely absent.

This is a book that I really wish would have been written by another author. I loved the basic idea and overall story but it was all of the filler that put me in a coma. The endless physics and description of parts of a space ship overtook the people who were there among them. I never really cared about any of the characters because it felt like everyone was devoid of feeling. I mean, how can you spend 500 pages describing the end of the world and not have your reader feel even a tiny bit of sadness, loss or heartbreak? I wanted this book to make me cry and then blow me away with a grand new world filled with wonder. It didn't do that and it's a bloody shame.

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