First 26 pages of Neal Stephenson's new novel Seveneves | Hacker News Reader

First 26 pages of Neal Stephenson's new novel Seveneves

nealstephenson.com

122 pointsUhhrrr96 comments

It seems like my first knee-jerk impression of every Stephenson novel of the last decade has been "ugh, terrible", gradually replaced by a retrospective fondness after finishing it.

The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress, but maybe I'll like it better after reading the whole thing.

Anathem was kind of a slog for the first 200-250 pages, but then it started to get good, and then awesome, by the end of the book my mind was thoroughly blown.

The first time I read Anathem it was certainly slow to get through the first 200 pages, because I kept referencing the glossary to learn the vocabulary. The 2nd and 3rd times I read it the entire book flowed much more smoothly, and even the beginning was quite enjoyable.

I didn't find the beginning quite a slog but I did wonder if there was going to be a "plot" in the conventional sense. As you say, the rest of the book was a near-continuous crescendo. One scene in particular (Saunt Bucker's Basket!) made me literally stop reading while my brain processed.

My wife read my copy after me. If I remember correctly, she more or less read up to that scene in 5-10 page increments, and then read from that scene to the end in most of one night.

> Saunt Bucker's Basket!

That was, bar none, the best reading experience in my life.

what chapter is that in?

I think I started, and then shelved, Anathem three times before finally powering through the first third of the book and like you was hooked once I did.

Hmmm. Maybe I'll give it another shot. I started Anathem twice and just couldn't get into it.

This is how Cryptonomicon was for me. Anathem, I read after that, and I kinda understood what I was getting into, so I got through it much more more quickly.

Vonnegut spoke at my convocation. His advice for fiction writers was to write your whole work and then throw away the first chapter, thus dumping your reader into the action. He despised setup.

Vonnegut was one of a kind in many ways.

My first reaction to the linked excerpt was that Seveneves reminded me of Galapagos (thematically)

I had the opposite trajectory. I loved the early worldbuilding but didn't really care for the magical powers invoked at the end.

Glad I'm not the only one.

I don't write fiction but when I write longer-form articles, whitepapers, and so forth I find that a good percentage of the time I end up going back and chopping out a good bit of what a former boss described as "throat clearing" at the beginning. Not always; sometimes by chance I hit on a good metaphor or story or some other lead-in that works. But at least as often it's way too much digression and backstory and setup in advance of getting to the actual topic at hand.

With respect to Anathem in particular a lot of the problem is you didn't really understand what was going on for quite a while and I found that made it a bit of an effort to keep going.

That was part of the payoff, though. You're confused at first, wondering wtf is up with the vocabularly people are using, it all starts to make sense about 3/4 of the way through the book.

Damn, I need to read that one again. It's been too long.

And when you read it again, you might find that it's still too long!

I kid, I kid. I ended up loving Anathem too, although I seriously struggled to get going.

The new vocabulary was tough. It was a difficult thing to keep a track of through the whole book.

A Clockwork Orange was the same way. Real effort to get through the first 50 pages or so.

earlier editions of A Clockwork Orange had a Nadsat dictionary in the back for reference.

It is and, as I recall, Stephenson said as much in a foreword or afterword. Most of the book is an exercise in only partly understanding what's really going on or even the frame of reference you should be applying. It was well done and I enjoyed the book in the end but it definitely had a certain bar to clear in order to get into it. (In general, I find Stephenson's recent books could be tightened up and I didn't really like Reamde; it was a page-turner but suffered from coincidences driving plot.)

I had the exact same experience with Anathem.

I remember around the 200-page point thinking, "ok, now we're getting started."

I gave up within the first couple hundred pages. Just wasn't enjoying it.

I had the same experience, anathem took me 4 tries, but eventually I got through the first 200 pages and then thoroughly enjoyed it.

The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress

Man, no kidding. It feels like a very inelegant info dump. While I realize those tend to show up in Stephenson books at some point or another, it's a rough way to start.

I liked a lot about Anathem but found Reamde unmemorable. I'd love to see a return to form.

Yep, exactly. Stephenson has a crazy lot of potential - Diamond Age hit pretty well for me, Anthem hit, but some of his other stuff are simply not for me. Readme was a straight forward action story in the middle and I just gave up. He seems to have very very different writing modes.

Diamond age was a disaster for me. I found the beginning and middle very good and looked forward to more development of a few things. And then it turned into something completely different and weird. I'd rather see the last pages of his new book just to verify he figured out how to write an ending.

Diamond Age is one of my favourite books. Alongside Cryptonomicon, American Gods and Rainbows End.

Reamde was a dud for me as well.

Anathem is one of the best reads in years. But Quicksilver and other book in the baroque cycle is impossible to get through.

Agreed. For me, it seems that on a page by page basis, the writing was phenomenal - he can verbally paint a picture in a way that no one else can. But the whole Baroque Cycle seemed to lack any actual plot, as far as I could tell. I mean, stuff happened, but it wasn't stuff in the course of resolving some central tension to the story, so you had no idea what direction you were traveling in. And I just couldn't go another thousand or two pages aimlessly.

That's absolutely true. I remember the first 100 pages of 'Cryptonomicon'. I was just trying to make sense of that blabber I wasn't used to. Since English is not my mother-tongue, I had to use the Kindle to search through the dictionary all too often, otherwise it was impossible to follow. After a 250 pages, I was familiar with most words, even saw some patterns emerging. The novel became increasingly more and more interesting as the pages flew by.

I recently started re-reading 'Cryptonomicon' and just finished the first 100 pages. There's an awful lot of setup and flipping between characters but right around this point the stories stop weaving about and begin to demonstrate a determined path. Without those first 100 pages you'd lose a lot of backstory that ends up being pretty interesting as you learn the characters, but I agree it is difficult to follow.

That's interesting... my reaction to "Snow Crash", "Diamond Age" and "Cryptonomicon" was that the premise set up was interesting but the ending always descended into a lame Hollywood action sequence. I'm sure I'm not the only one?

Same thing happens in Reamde.

Yep, that too, although in that case I didn't even think the premise was that interesting. With the three I mentioned I was totally hooked until the last quarter of the book.

This helped make reading this a little easier. Copy and paste to your URL bar. You may have to retype the javascript: as it appears to get stripped for security.

  javascript:$('.entry').css({ "background":"#fff","color":"#333","padding":"10px","font-family":"Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif","font-size":"14px","font-style":"normal","font-variant":"normal","font-weight":"400","line-height":"20px" })

You can also just turn styles off ("View > Page Style > No Style" in Firefox).

Or even better, if you`re in a recent version of Firefox you can click on the little "open book" icon in the address bar and enter the reader mode which looks pretty nice as can be seen in http://i.imgur.com/oiZGekO.png

     “Most black holes are formed when stars collapse,” Ivy said. 
     “But there’s a theory that some of them were created shortly 
     after the Big Bang. The universe was lumpy. Some of the lumps 
     might have been dense enough to undergo gravitational 
     collapse. They could form black holes that instead of 
     weighing what a star weighs could be a lot smaller.”
     “How small?”
     “I don’t think there’s a lower limit.”

Yes there is. Black holes lose mass by Hawking radiation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation

A black hole smaller than 0.8% Earth masses loses more mass than it gains from the cosmic microwave background, and will eventually evaporate.

That doesn't create a lower limit, just a life expectancy. And the life expectancy is still very long — "within the lifespan of the universe" http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole

You are mistaken.

http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1 (See the table on page 15)

The lifespan of a 108,000 tonne black hole is ~350 hours. At that mass, its event horizon is .32 attometres across, and the Hawking radiation it emits is measured in gigaelectronvolts.

350h is a lifespan, and you're quoting a speculative paper. I haven't read the story extract, but I assume the plan would be to bleed matter into the micro black hole to maintain it. (Arthur C Clarke posited the same concept 40 odd years ago in his Imperial Earth novels.)

I assume your point is that a GeV is a minuscule amount of energy, which isn't going to push 130kT around at any speed.

  you're quoting a speculative paper.

Hawking radiation has never been directly observed, but it is generally presumed to exist.

  I haven't read the story extract, but I assume the plan 
  would be to bleed matter into the micro black hole to 
  maintain it.

Read the story. In context, the character is talking about how small a natural, primordial black hole can be. There is an obvious lower bound, due to Hawking radiation.

  I assume your point is that a GeV is a minuscule amount of 
  energy, which isn't going to push 130kT around at any speed.

Read the paper. That's the pseudotemperature of the event horizon. It's so hot that it's glowing largely in ultraenergetic gamma rays. The total power radiated by a .32 attometre black hole is 5,519 petawatts.

I love this on his page about the novel:

"The only part that gave me any trouble was calibrating an ending that would leave the reader satisfied that the story had concluded while leaving the impression of an open-ended world."

Surprise! Still can't write endings. It's okay Neal, it's what we've come to expect, and we totally love you anyway.

I liked it, but I am a big Stephenson fan. I skipped Anathem and the baroque cycle books, but Diamond Age is one of my favorite books and I also like Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon a lot.

Reamde was pretty good, and this is an interesting setup.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)

> I skipped Anathema

You my friend, have missed out big time.

Reamde was very mediocre compared to the ones you skipped.

I enjoy the plot where multiple groups converge on a single location to get their hands on some key object. It's the same structure as two of my favorite movies: The Fifth Element and True Romance. When the groups are stereotypes as in True Romance, I find it even more entertaining. Reamde had all of that: bikers, anti government mountain people who are armed to the teeth and gangsters from multiple foreign countries :-)

I'll see if I can check out Anathem at some point, but Baroque is really too much of a commitment for me. I'm a slow reader.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)

Anathem, not Anathema.

Books I've liked recently that have done that sort of thing: Rainbows End, or if you're willing to venture a little further in genre then Stardust (by a different Neil).

Rainbows End is amazing.

I think that's one of the things (about Reamde) that most bothered me about that novel. All sorts of amazing coincidences needed to happen or there wasn't a story. I actually found it easier to get into than some of his other books but was generally unsatisfied at the end.

Not his best novel, but it was a lot of fun and was well paced. It had a lot more action than most of his larger novels, which was kind of a nice departure.

I disagree, and since people seem to be piling on REAMDE, I just want to pipe up in defense of it. Having read most[1] of Stephenson's books, I think REAMDE is the best of them, or at least the second-best behind Cryptonomicon.

It's less ambitious than most of his work, sure. But it is a lot harder to create a gripping and memorable book set in the present day, written in a conventional style, and without the benefit of speculative future technologies.

With REAMDE he pulled it off, though.

I have read a lot of light thriller-type novels in my day (mostly bought at airports in the pre-Kindle era, admittedly), and they are usually pretty hard to care about. Not so with REAMDE, though.

[1] Anathem is in my Kindle queue, and I couldn't stay interested enough to get through the Baroque Cycle. Have read the rest, though.

I found the first half interesting. Then suddenly a random "terrorist" appeared and a completely different book appeared. The first half read like a Stephenson, the second half read like The Cobweb. All the interesting stuff disappeared and it went all wild west.

I liked the Baroque Cycle books a lot. I like Anathema too, but it kind of lurched along; some of the philosophy portions were a bit dull.

Yeah, just let me repeat what the other replies to you have said, Anathem is very much worth reading. It starts out kind of confined and a little slow. But it starts picking up steam and then goes off in a wonderful direction I never ever expected.

For me it's in his top three books along with Snow Crash and Diamond Age. It's also on a very short list of "books I will definitely read again at some point".

If the Baroque Cycle doesn't appeal up front, you're probably fine skipping it. I liked them, but I really had to push myself through large parts of each book. I kind of felt like they needed to be edited down a bit.

Yes! Someone should make a fan edit of the Baroque Cycle, or just a List of Best Bits. The cannon duel and most of the L'Emmerdeur parts would go in there.

Anathem is my favorite Stephenson book, and one of my favorites overall. Especially if you're a fan of his other work, I'd really recommend going back and checking it out.

I've read Anathem 4 times (just finished 4th read a couple weeks ago actually) and I find it satisfying with every single read. Funny thing is that I struggle with all his other books I've tried reading.

I've intentionally not read this teaser, but from he blurb I feel like I'm going to like Seveneves

I'm a huge Stephenson fan but tend to disagree with a number of others on Anathem. I found it to be a slog, that did pick up towards the end, but only by virtue of numerous deus-ex contrivances and somewhat ridiculous jumps of reasoning by the characters as they work through the central mystery.

I liked Snow Crash and loved Diamond Age - but Cryptonomicon I couldn't be bothered to finish. Maybe having just read Singh's The Code Book highlighted how bad (subjectively) Cryptonomicon was.

My theory has been that after Diamond Age he got to famous and/or no longer had an editor that said: this is OK. Cut from 1500 pages down to 450 and this could be great.

Judging from this thread Anathem might be worth a look. And this excerpt doesn't look half-bad either.

Warning: publishing date is May 19th so you'll be left hanging for a month if it sucks you in.

That reminds me, I really hate how they start promoting books a few weeks before they are released. I see the promotion, and then when I go to buy it "pre-order" ??!?! Like it isn't a fucking yacht, I give you the money you give me the book, I'm not interested in a more complicated transaction. I'd be happier if they did the promotion during a time frame where I could actually buy it.

Business reality, alas.

The book biz isn't as bad as movies, which are made or broken by their first 48 hours of box office receipts, but 80% of sales still occur within 3 months of publication (in hardcover, with a similar bounce when the book goes paperback). First-week sales are what count for (a) bestseller list presence and (b) bookstore re-orders based on (a). And pre-orders count towards first-week sales!

You can buy the ebook. It'll just magically appear on my Kindle on release day.

Same as pre-order I suppose. I suppose his complaint was that don't build the hype unless we can get hold of it. It's like Nolan's movie teasers which end with "Summer, ++Now.Year()".

Yeah, I probably average 1000 pages per month on Kindle for iPhone. My usual purchase flow is: I see a book that interests me, I get the sample sent to my phone. When I feel like reading, I read some samples and If I like one I can order from my phone and start reading.

With this particular book it would be a safe bet, I've read all his books, even REAMDE twice, which others didn't appear to find as compelling. But I don't like even the concept of pre-orders on general principles, although fiction publishers don't abuse them as badly as other i.e. game publishers (http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/2s6zgz/stop_preorder...) I still prefer not to participate.

What I found silly was the buy in the US link went to the HarperCollins store where the book is $35 + Shipping. I look it up on Amazon where it's 24.92 w/free shipping. WTH?

At a guess the moon will turn into a ring surrounding the earth in the longer term, curious how it will continue.

It will turn into a cloud of asteroids surrounding the earth intended to prevent the human race from unleashing whatever hell we create with those autonomous mining robots on the ISS (would be my guess, at least). Feel like the agent/patient distinction is pretty blunt foreshadowing against it being a survival/resilience story against and abstract antagonist like a random natural disaster.

edit: http://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-A-Novel-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0... gives a bit more detail and it is likely it will not become a ring. Probably a lot of highly energetic reentrant debris capable of generating a lot of atmospheric heat.

edit: @jaquesm - i'm allowing for creative license, and was making guess explaining what would happened based on my gut feel for the plot direction. you're probably correct on the physics.

That's at odds with what I understand of the celestial mechanics of the earth-moon system, roughly the same thing happened to Saturn and even though the rings have thickness they are relatively thin compared to their width.

What reason would there be for the moon debris to form a cloud, that would require a lot of energy added to the pieces after the initial collision to get them to go into other orbits? (I'm sure Stephenson has researched this but it makes no sense to me at first sight.)

The options really are quite limited, re-unification in a 'lump', one or more large chunks escaping earth orbit or a ring, I don't see how a cloud is possible.

All but the second would result in quite a bit of debris landing on earth as the debris from the collisions would be scattered in all directions.

Energy was added, so I'm sure it will be a dynamic mess..

On the other hand, the moon is beyond earth's Roche limit so I don't think the final result will be rings.

Also what is the tensile strength of the center of the moon? I'm not sure it's possible to have 7 large non-spheroidal shaped pieces, but google suggests ~800 km is the lower limit for rocky bodies, so maybe it's just possible.

I'm going with the Wool Omnibus theory: we find out that someone on earth did it on purpose.

Right towards the end, it seemed that he was implying that some other non-newtonian stuff was happening with kidney bean and the other one of the 7 sisters. (And that the threat is clearly not over)

Oh right, this is coming out next month! He's going on tour to support the release:

http://www.nealstephenson.com/tour.html

US only. Lame.

Thank you for mentioning this. I would have likely never heard about the tour in time otherwise; an upvote isn't enough good karma for you, sir/madame!

The first time i read Cryptonomicon it was a pleasure the whole way through, from page 01 to page >9000. This may have been because it was almost entirely news to me; i had little to no experience with anything it covered. I finished it in 3-4 days. What a delight. Each reread i learn something new. Conversely, I went into Snow Crash with high expectations only to find the story somewhat silly. Not that there weren't really great moments.

19th May will not get here soon enough. Always good sometime challenging but I never get sick of reading his books!!

astronomicalbodiesformerlyknownasthemoon.com was registered by someone on 2015-03-12.

http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-exce...

It's always so hard to read things on a dark background on a backlit screen. And especially looking at light backgrounds after that. Why is that?

I don't know, but the white text started sort of "flickering" between bright and dark after a while; a paragraph might look pretty bright, then it would suddenly seem darker again while the paragraph above looked brighter. It messed with my head and eventually I had to stop.

The gradient in the background might have had something to do with that. Also, low grade LCDs have obnoxiously extreme brightness variations from top to bottom that are most prominent in the mid-to-dark grays.

Ah, but this is my big fancy expensive Dell screen at work... I think it was a combination of the webpage and my brain flipping out.

     “Not now, Pa, I know the moon’s pretty, I’m right in the middle of debugging this method . . .”

My eyes... dear god. Everywhere I look I see false images of letters.

The moon blew up with out warning and for no apparent reason.

TIL that "with out" is two words.

(I mean, seriously. How do you screw up your very first sentence?)

It appears to be fixed.

my eyes

jesus god, what awful typesetting

The entire body is letterspaced and bold, that's the main problem. If you're in chrome you can edit styles on the fly, so try adding:

    letter-spacing: 0;
    font-weight: 300;
    line-height: 1.5em;

Cabin, which if I'm reading the CSS properly is what he's using, isn't a bad typeface. (Humanist sans serif related to Gill which I rather like.) But the spacing and weight--combined with the white on black--are really awful.

Man, no kidding. It feels like a very inelegant info dump. While I realize those tend to show up in Stephenson books at some point or another, it's a rough way to start. I liked a lot about Anathem but found Reamde unmemorable. I'd love to see a return to form

I appreciate his consideration in saving me a future time investment. Plus everyone else now gets moved up a slot on the library reserve list. A win-win.

Wow, what a horribly self-righteous way to tell everyone about your personal tastes. I feel enlightened already.

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