The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason (2017)
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jasmcole.com
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_High_Frontier:_Human_Col...
Looks like you can rent it on Google Play for $3.99, which is good enough for me. Appears to have won a bunch of awards.
It could have easily been a series of books like Dune, but for whatever reason he opted for a single, hastily-wrapped-up gigantic one.
All of Neal Stephenson's books are hastily-wrapped, like he just got out the point he wanted to make and cannot be bothered to finish the book
"Their songs are on the whole very simple and mostly follow the familiar theme of boy-being meets girl-being beneath silvery moon, which then explodes for no adequately explored reason."
The ratio of science to fiction determine the type of science fiction you get. Hard sci-fi, a la Arthur C. Clarke tends more toward the science bit while Ursula K. Leguin is more fiction than science.
In the end, what we look for in Sci-Fi, I believe, is the "What if" thing. It lets you explore ideas and concepts that you normally wouldn't, using some amount of "suspension of disbelief".
Historically, most of science fiction has been the opposite: 80% fiction and 20% "science" which usually means speculation about future technologies, without going into the details of how they could be realised. Realistic treatises of future scientific or technological breakthroughs are, to my experience (long time fan) absent from science fiction which is, after all, a genre of popular literature meant primarily for entertainment.
There is a trend of "hard" science fiction (like the Stephenson novel, which I haven't read) but since it's still just some guy (or broad) writing stuff in freeform language (rather than maths) without any attempt at formal definitions, or to prove theoretical results and test them empirically, one can only make very weak claims about "realism".
To boil it down to plain English: if you're looking for science, look at scientific publications, not science fiction publications.
This isn't a criticism of the book. The second half was pretty unpleasant but I enjoyed the first part.
Uncanny valley is a good description to me. I think Stephenson found an interesting in between. Not a criticism of the book; just an observation/assessment.
Snow Crash is metaverse + extreme libertarianism + software/mind virus.
Diamond Age is nanotechnolgy + neovictorianism + clades.
Cryptonomicon is digital currency (not quite blockchain, but close), plus some WWII stuff.
The Baroque Cycle is "how did modern finance get invented* plus seggsytymes.
Anatham is "philosophy, protractors, and starships, but medaeval-like".
His earlier works (Big U, Zodiak, and the two he wrote with his uncle) also centre around one core technological concept, interacting with society, business, politics, etc. But the gist is "take some idea and run with it, see where it goes".
And to dismiss it and his other works as "take some idea and run with it" is to dismiss not only his work, but other well-written sci-fi.
Would you call Ringworld "dudes built a ring around a sun but entropy kicked in? Ender's Game, "just another Campbellian archetype?"
I'm not saying that this is all that there is to Stephenson. I'm saying that as I read it, this is the spine and core of the book --- the central organising premise, if you will. Other elements are hung off that.
Put another way, though there are characters in Stephenson, his books are not generally character driven. Or narrrative-driven. Plot ... maybe, though I'd argue that the central conceit drives the plot itself.
And for the record, I've enjoyed his books tremendously and seek them out, not something I can say of many authors these days.
I'd start with the Moon blowing up for no reason. That's a biggie.
OTOH, I also enjoyed Moonbase Alpha as a kid and still love the Eagle transporter design (even though, now, as an adult engineer, I recognize its shortcomings).
Further to that, I'd start with the precise, huge, amount of energy required to "blow up" the Moon into exactly 7 pieces.
For me this is not implausible, it is just unexplained. Something can be considered implausible when, once everything is explained, it doesn't hold.
Unexplained is one thing, but something that violates the laws of physics requires some extra suspension of disbelief.
I like that a lot.
No matter how implausible you find that the moon blow up and the fragments did a dance that ended 2 years later, but the third part was a solid block of suspension of disbelief, specially for the genetic and psychological/sociological aspects of it. I don't know, if the initial phrase was "the moon grow legs and walked through the sky", it would had been more plausible than the third part of that book.
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason [Book]
One of my favourite Larry Niven stories is Inconstant Moon. One evening the moon starts getting brighter and brighter, people start partying in the street and it becomes almost as bright as daylight. The protagonist goes to a bar and starts getting as drunk as possible, because he knows where the light of the moon comes from, the effect this must be having on the sunward side of the Earth, and what that means is about to happen where he is.
Maybe it would be less clickbaity framed as "The moon blew up" or "A simulation of the moon blowing up"
A non-clickbait title simply and directly describes the thesis of the article. In this case, something like "Simulation of the Earth/Moon collision scenario in the novel Seveneves."
Another example is a post I just put up about a sci-fi and fantasy book review blog with the sadly useless name of “Before We Go Blog”. I contemplated explaining it better in the title exactly as you are suggesting, but in the end added a comment with the blog’s own self-description and left it at that. If enough people find it interesting, it will sort itself out.
Anyway, enjoyable post. Can’t wait for the movie. The 2 part movie.