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Comment by adenozine | Hacker News Reader

If you like it, you might enjoy a book called Seveneves. The first sentence involves the moon blowing up, and the rest of the book is about the consequences of that. Quite good, imo.

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I really enjoyed the first "part" of Seveneves. I felt the second part went a bit off the rails and was almost _too_ out there for me (at least as it compared to the first part. Love Neil Stephenson though (Cryptonomicon was amazing and Diamond Age / Snow Crash hold a special place in my heart).

I’ve heard this sentiment a lot from people who’ve read it.

I think he wrote himself into a tight spot though, and I’m happy with the result. Part of me thinks the second act could’ve been broken down into maybe like 0-1000, 1000-5000, and then the final act could’ve been essentially as it was, stripped down a bit. It felt to me like he crammed a little too much worldbuilding into it and couldn’t draw on the resourcefulness and resilience of humanity that dominates the first act. But it makes sense in context, because they’re not in such dire straits in the second half, and are approaching the whole issue from complex standpoints of religion and meaning and societal archetypes.

I surely couldn’t have done better, I know that much.

I thought both books were entirely too generous in their depictions of humanity's ability to coordinate for enormous, earth-saving efforts. I have a feeling that a real extinction level crisis would be much more like Don't Look Up or Greenland(extra optimistic ending scenes not included) than we'd care to admit. Bureaucratic incompetency and political infighting leading to a tragic and preventable end in both cases presented in the books.

I think this happens a lot to Stephenson. He's great at creating worlds, and that's the genius of his writing. Then what happens in those worlds is sometimes underwhelming.

Anathem is another one of these novels.

The answer to the (paraphrased) question "how long do you expect that to last?" is so subtly delivered and unexpected and unhyped, and beautifully sets up the rest of the first (of two) section of the book.

I had to read the small passage through a couple of times to make sure I had the right context.

Also read, and loved, and had emotional reactions to Project Hail Mary. Highly recommend.

I liked Project Hail Mary (and Artemis, and The Martian) but I thought it was a little too heavy in the programmer narrative style. I won’t spoil anything in case someone reads this comment who hasn’t read it, but a large section involving establishing a communication protocol really wore me down from the story.

The big revelation about how he got there also felt nearly translucent in how obvious it was when it was revealed.

I hope he writes a couple more books though, if I can ever get some grandkids outta my kids, Weir’s books will be in their collection for sure.

This was the book I was thinking about as I heard this news! Hopefully that vortex doesn't come down on us in a 5000 year rain of fire.

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