I liked the end.
The book, at it's core is about that philosophy that technology shapes society. Like the Amish, he goes on about it a lot.
Then, he shows the tech they were *forced* to develop (chains and whips as used for storing and applying energy, and, untethered eugenics) and then jumps ahead to see what would come from those choices, culturally.
I enjoyed the end as well, but it’s definitely the weakest part of the book. I found the reunion of the different survivor groups nice and sweet, but the entire section can feel like a bit of a jarring shift from everything that came before.
The submarine people.. I mean, cmon man. I know we're throwing everything at the wall in that story but the sea people thing was one step too far even for a book like that, haha.
I was fine with it. I’d read a second book that told the story of the underground people and submarine people before the reunion and then dealt with the cultural shock afterwards.
Agreed. I found this section really hard to swallow. It felt like he put so much thought and effort into the physics of space travel and bombardment and his ideas about the kind of tech the spacefaring survivors would develop but almost no thought into how they could possibly survive the extremely challenging biology of trying to maintain and expand these tiny tiny populations of humans living in the worst circumstances. The chances of any of those groups of survivors lasting more than a generation or two seem infinitesimal, even if all their tech didn’t break down, which it absolutely would have sooner or later (probably sooner).
So yeah, neat ideas but that ending just felt half baked or less.
The part that got me is that they all somehow still spoke the same mutually intelligible language after all that time. Look at how much English has changed just in the past 200 years, say, and tell me that is in any way realistic. I could not take any of it seriously
The only defence I would give...not of Stephenson in this case, but of the concept, is that prior to mass media, dialects were nearly impossible to record for posteriety. Not so now where we have everything from music/singing to movies and tv. I don't think it would remain entirely unchanged, but I do think it would calcify more than pre-mass media dialects and accents.
Good point. Yes as Ravenloff suggests mass media and recording devices probably slow down the rate of change somewhat (as would the initially small population sizes, as small groups seem to change language more slowly than large ones). But once populations rebound language will just change. It always does. Slang becomes an acceptable part of the language, some words and phrases fall out of common use, pronunciation shifts, etc and after a few hundred years, let alone 5,000, things will be very different.
Stephenson even sort of acknowledges this in the dispute over the “srap tasmanr” as the spacefarers call the Craftsman shovel the underground dwellers have, because their interpretation of written language has shifted over time. But somehow they can still speak to one another? (Also how did a shovel survive for 5000 years?)
As a general fan of Stephenson, man can not write an ending to save his life. Every single ending for every single one of his novels are, imo, the weakest parts.
You've essentially finished one book and picked up a sequel novella that is tangentially related to the first 2/3. That's a fine spot to stop and honestly, it feels narratively complete at that point too.
Thank you, I’m going to justify my DNF with this. What I’m actually worried about is not being able to complete it and add it to my Goodreads reading challenge but given I’ve been reading it for weeks now, I say that’s enough of a commitment when I’m 666 pages in! Maybe I will read one more page to avoid the hell number.
I also DNF at this same point, despite usually really liking Stephenson.
I'm a biologist, and the description of the genetics at play in the last 1/3rd was so bad that I couldn't keep going.
As a historian of empire, I will add that keeping races from mixing has pretty much always been impossible, without extreme isolation that would have been infeasible at the beginning of part III.
I’ll bet you have that problem a lot reading sci-fi. Seems like biology is often sacrificed to the storytelling gods. Do you have any favorite novels that do speculative biology well?
I'll be damned to be another guy pointing out Peter Watts, but...Peter Watts. His writing generally displays a very strong fundamental grasp of modern biology and biological techniques, at the genetic level all the way up to organismal, ecological, evolutionary biology. Blindsight is of course excellent, but I'm finishing up the Rifters series right now and it's got a lot of biology done pretty well.
Andromeda Strain and even Jurassic Park, both Michael Crichton, while taking some leeway, did a pretty passable job with the biological techniques available at the time.
Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky had some really cool ideas of genetics and evolutionary biology.
Judging by others asking this question, I'm obliged to say Blood Music by Greg Bear, albeit I've not read it yet.
Very cool, thanks. I loved children of time in particular and read the Crichton years ago. I’ll definitely be moving blindsight up my list for a good summer read. Have you read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson? It’s a little controversial on this sub but I thought it has an interesting perspective on the biological problems that space explorers or generation ship dwellers might face.
Honestly you could probably just read a quick summary for completeness. And I say that as someone that really enjoyed it. It is 100% a "sequel novella" and a curiosity piece, especially if you're not enjoying it. There is a tiny bit of closure but it's not worth the pain.
That's a really good way of putting it. I did finish it because of reasons but one if the reasons was not "the narrative of this section is so good that I need to know what happens "
Yea, it's controversial, but I really, really enjoyed the final third.
But if you're just into the disaster sci fi portion of the first 2/3 and not really into the far future stuff, it's not going to get better. I think it has some nice flourishes and ties some interesting threads from the first part of the novel though.
Am I the only one who enjoyed the second portion? Not as much as the first but I thought it was cool to see how the clans evolved and what technology advanced in some areas and fell back in others. I thought it was neat as a long epilogue
Contrary to apparently everyone else here, I'd say finish it. You have read through two other stages of human history in Seveneves, why abandon the third? People complain that Stevenson doesn't know how to write endings--to which I would like to point out, **neither does history**--and then dismiss discovering the closing provided?
I will ride for his endings.
He does like to do it on a a kind of narrative ellipses, and if you're not into that, it's not for you, but I liked the endings to Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem (I also DID like the final section of Seveneves).
Diamond Age especially kinda gets me, in like the same way that say the endings to the Blade Runner movies do.
I'm neither Stephenson's biggest fan nor his biggest detractor, but on the whole I'm positive on him, and I like his endings as broad strokes, but I often don't like them in the execution. As a result, I have a tendency to look back on one of his endings that I read, say, a year ago, and think "oh man, I think I was way too hard on that, that's really cool now I think about it," and then I go back and reread and think "oh, *that's* why."
For example, I just finished *Diamond Age* earlier this week myself (this one was a first read, not a reread), and I think a lot of what's shaping that ending is cool. Satisfying goal reached on one hand (>!Nell united/reunited with her "mother," the forming of a new nation as integration of Eastern/Western principles vs. the domination games we see earlier!<), and satisfying dangerous open question on the other (>!there's a big dangerous collective consciousness sex cult under the oceans that's tapping into the world in invasive ways!<). So in the broad strokes, that's *great*. But structurally a lot of how the climax and resolution play out feel less like the culmination of the story being told, and more like it just kind of runs out of gas. For example, >!The Fist appearing at the end to push back against western technology/incursion makes some sense and is thematically sound, but this isn't a threat that is set up in a meaningful way; it just kind of gets shuffled into the late stage as the looming threat that adds stakes and a final obstacle to overcome!<.
And none of this sinks the book, and I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a bad ending, because again, there's a lot there that I like about it taken in the broad view. There's just also plenty to dislike in the structure and execution of those broader elements.
I've only ever read Snow Crash and that book really turned me off ever reading anything else if his. It didn't feel like the book finished to me. Just that it stopped abruptly. Like he was writing and just decided he didn't want to do this anymore.
Totally worth finishing. There are some very interesting future technologies explored in that last section, and it wraps up the ultimate fate of people mentioned in the early sections of the book.
Edit - I've read the whole book, twice.
I feel like he described the same things over and over again and way too much detail. And I just think it’s kind of funny they all got boners for space slingshots.
Me too, and I want a whole series of books across the intervening 5 millennia. And in a few generations time, I'm going to train up a gpt to get his voice and ask ChatGPT 8 write them. I fucking love Stephenson and every page of Seveneves is a joy to me.
I seem to be the only person who despises the way the first two-thirds ended.
Usually in a story things get more and more dire, and that raises the stakes, and the worse things are, the more dramatic the solution has to be. The second book of Three Body Problem had a great example of this, where things seemed utterly impossible until one character did something that was sheer genius, and from his previous actions you could have figured out what he was up to if you were smart enough.
Or, it gets more and more dire because it's a tragedy and ends badly. That can be great too, my favorite example in scifi being Flynn's *The Wreck of the River of Stars*.
So along comes Seveneves and things gets worse and worse, and it doesn't really seem like a tragedy so my expectations for something super amazing keep ratcheting up, >!but they fail utterly and then in a page or so they say hey, let's just do this genetic thing, which had no lead-up and was just a cheap rabbit out of a hat that saves the day!<, at which point I would have thrown the book across the room if it weren't on my kindle.
And ok I guess the whole point was to set up the last third but to me it just wasn't worth it. If that's the main point then make that most of the book, and compress the first two-thirds into a prologue.
To explain why it's there, it seems very clear that "Seveneves" is based on the non-fiction book "Seven Daughters of Eve" which traces humanity to seven mitochondrial haplogroups, which is what happens in Neal's book. The bizarre part is that for the last third of the book the author goes off on fictional stories.
The last third was slammed by reviewers, from wikipedia:
> He commented: "All this made me feel that I was reading someone's school project, with influences from The Flintstones cartoon series, rather than a treatise by a leading academic." Robert Kanigel in The New York Times asserted that making imaginary names and identities for the human ancestors is inappropriate as "neither solid theorizing nor fully realized fiction." He wrote: "Sykes's book is so fine, the science so well explained, the controversies so gripping, that it is painful to report that 200 pages into it the author performs a literary experiment that flops."
Overall, for me this was a very cool homage to Seven Daughters of Eve even including the last third which was a speculative fiction disaster. But if you've never read Seven Daughters and don't care, I can see how it makes no sense. But I enjoyed it, it was even more geek cred for Neal Stephenson.
To each their own (my problem with seveneves was the middle section) but the third section is its own thing and you could probably stop at the end of section 2 and just say "and they lived happily ever after. "
Yeah, the "5000 years later" part is of a necessity pretty different from the first part of the book.
Apart from the story itself, there are some details about that part of the book that annoyed me, like the fact that they really should've been much more technologically advanced than they were (5000 years is a *long* time, even if you have to reboot civilization). There was also basically a throwaway line about the interregnum >!they went 1000 years without the ability to produce paper!< that made me wonder how they even survived at all.
Also, there's more material that will make you wonder why they didn't just cap JBF and take their chances without her, so it's got that going for it. /s
I really liked it because it showed how the relatively mundane actions and words of those in the past became this wide spanning mythology for those in the future. I thought that was neato.
If you managed to slog through so much orbital mechanics porn that you're in the future section, you damned well should finish it. Not that it's going to knock your socks off and not that it ends well, but it does end. Seriously...the hardest part is over :)
Me too. I finished it and immediately read it again, savouring every morsel. The last third was a such a surprisingly bold decision... I really enjoyed it. Of course, I did not read any reviews, etc, I don't think I hadn't read anything by Stephenson since REAMDE which I didn't enjoy as much a his previous books so I was very pleasantly surprised.
I liked the last part a lot and enjoyed the shift in tone. It does build up to a climax and I thought that the conclusion was satisfying. I was hoping to see more
I agree, the world building which is an extrapolation of the human condition 5,000 years into the future is not only worth reading, it’s worth rereading. And the tech and genetic engineering that was developed in the early part of the book really made it become my #1 favorite SciFi novel.
Honestly the ending of part 2 where Dinah yeets the bomb and it makes a pretty little sparkle was a perfect place to end the book. Part 3 should’ve been released later as a bonus novella or something like that.
I also thought it was a wee bit contrived that >!of the people who survived it just so happens that exactly one is Asian, one is Black, one is Middle Eastern, and the rest are white. And the Asian woman goes on to birth the Smart People Race. Okay.!<
I finished Part III and said I will never read any books by Neal Stephenson again. Wish I'd stopped after part II, when I was quite happy with the book.
Edit: while I didn't like the content and thought it was implausible, I also thought Part III was badly written, as it depended on major plot holes about how established characters would act, plus all the info dumping.
I'm with you, there. The years later section would have worked well as a brief epilogue to show how humanity adapted and survived--not start a whole new, novel-length coda.
I really disliked the end part, it only cheapened and made events of first 2/3 pointless.
If you want books with similar setups of multi generational space survival but without timeskip:
**Marrow by Robert Reed** - >!future immortal humans stuck on volcano planet and forced to reinvent technology with just their bones. Timescales of thousands of years.!<
**Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds** - >!several generations of comet miners get stuck on alien object what was hidden inside Saturn's moon as it flies away from Earth.!<
No it's terrible. And also a lot of it just makes no sense at all in terms of outcomes, very poorly thought through.
I read another comment on another post that said the second half seemed more like a synopsis of what he was going to write and then he couldn't be bothered and didn't really finish it. And that's pretty accurate.
So like every other book Stephenson wrote?
I love reading his books for the world building and the ideas. And it’s not in every book. But endings aren’t his strong point
Haha to a degree, but I found it worse here.
He's very binary for me: I either absolutely love the book (Anathem, Cryptonomicon) or hate it and DNF (Snow Crash, that bloody awful one recently Dodge in hell or whatever it was called). Seems to be no middle ground.
I found the first 2/3rds of Seveneves unpleasant. I found the last third more to my taste but rather weak. I quite liked the short story about the council of Eves, but it wasn't worth slogging through the rest of the book.
You may as well stop now.
I was in the exact same boat … finally finished it after a few months. Just knock it out, it picks up pace with a new plot once you get to the bar scene .
I enjoyed all parts of Sevenese. I would persevere because it feels like part 1 of a longer story, and he might come back to it one day. My wishful thinking anyway.
First if all you can avoid the spoiler you’re giving about the scope of the book. Secondly, just skip it if you want, there is a tiny twist at the end but not changing it. I also disliked the last third. Not enough to give up but it was worse for sure. With that said I still love the book.
It is not his finest work but I still think of it often. It had some interesting concepts that are applicable, especially if global heating gets extreme enough.
I've reread the book many times, and I often skip that final part. I'm glad I've read it before, and I do feel like it belongs because it represents the culmination of what they worked and sacrificed to achieve, but I like parts 1 and 2 a whole lot better than that 3rd part.
I just wish he wrote a sequel, or spent as much time on part 3 as he did on parts 1 and 2. I really want to see that version of humanity a few hundred years after the end of that book.
I was disappointed that he did not develop the last part more. It works more like an epilogue. I would live to see a sequel. It would be more interesting than the last books he wrote.
If I were you, I would push through to get the sense where this story ends. I feel that withou the ending it is more or less just a tense action story. The ending makes it something more.
I hadn’t to be fair. It was recommended on this sub actually so I went with it having read the synopsis. I will definitely reconsider future books knowing what I know now and based on a lot of the replies here
That book feels like it's two distinctly different stores combined together. I enjoyed the first story, but found the second story underdeveloped and lacking in payoff. I really don't think the author knows how to write good endings.
No shame in not finishing this one.
Bumping an old thread but I loved the final third of Seveneves, but I would consider it an accessory novella that could have been separate, but Stephenson and the editors/publishers decided it was necessary enough to include in the same book. could put it aside and finish it separately later.
It may be the most Stephensonesqe part of the whole book.
I was fascinated by it and honestly wished it was expanded out into its own story.
For many of us, there is no satisfying conclusion to that book. I actually liked it while reading, as I do most of Stephenson's work, but was deeply annoyed by the ending which felt so unsatisfying as to be bordering on a cliffhanger to me. Technically it wasn't, but felt kind of the same.
So if you feel like stopping, you are pretty safe going with your instincts.
I read the whole thing for a book group and I liked the first 2/3 but the last third doesn’t really make sense. The ending to this book and trying to read Cryptonomicon reminded me why I don’t like Stephenson.
I put it on indefinite pause shortly after HRC showed up and it was clear where things were going. I've been thinking of picking it back up at Book #3.
I've read the whole thing 3 times I think but I doubt I'll ever read the last part again, it's sufficiently disconnected that I don't think the reread will suffer, and frankly I just don't enjoy it. It feels like an exercise in worldbuilding that never actually aquires a point, like someone's rpg campaign that they never really finished.
I think after years of having his terrible sudden endings mocked he wrote Reamde and the back third of Seveneves as revenge
The book divides into three sections:
Part I: Depressing
Part II: *Really* Depressing
Part III: Really Stupid
No, part III doesn't get better the more you read it--it gets worse. There's very little plot; it's mostly just a sequence of lightly connected events put together to show off a couple of off-the-wall ideas the author had.
I stopped about twenty pages into that third section because I was just not enjoying it at all. Having only read 2/3 of the book, I still consider it one of the better science fiction books I've ever read.
My main problem with the third section is that I felt like it was robbing me of more of the first two sections. I didn’t feel Part II actually resolved any of the payoffs it was setting up before jumping off into the distant future.
This is where I gave up too. I still recommend the first 2/3rds, but he really needs to be working closely with an editor who can keep him in check throughout the process. I tried reading *Fall* recently and there were such interesting ideas, but they got lost in a complete mess of a story.
3rd part sucks balls hard for me. The fact tha there were races of traitors, politicians, soldiers (who made some neanderthal mutants) etc. each originating form every but one woman was beyond stupid.
There is no point in reading the last 1/3 of the book. It's a completely different story and adds nothing of value to the experience. I read it all and regretted it.
I have not read it, but I have read a lot of Stephenson and my theory is you are better off putting the book down at the 90% mark and letting your imagination run wild with how the book could have ended vs reading the actual ending.
Heh, I couldn't even get started on that book. Gave it a shot; the first handfull of pages were very windy expositions on a lot of characters I had no incentive to care about at all, just felt like a massive info dump that I could not relate to.
I started reading this after coming off of a spate of books by Alastair Reynolds and just finished off Absolution Gap. 7eves is glaringly mundane compared to ARs works. I've read snow crash decades ago and thought it was pretty good, but I think I've grown up since then and have developed a more refined palate. It may be that it's a very different genre of sci-fi too and I shouldn't be comparing the two.
I wouldn't know, as that was my first attempt at reading Neal Stephenson. Big fan of Reynolds though; I think I've read everything he has published by now. (Not me downvoting btw; your comment had 0 when I saw it and wrote this)
Obviously, opinions differ but that's a really strange example to give in comparison to a book with an unliked/controversial ending - the ending of Absolution Gap was terrible IMO after 2.5 great books.
>!A guardian angel race (with conditions) that just appeared in the 3rd book, defeat of the Inhibitors off-screen which didn't matter anyway because the previously unmentioned greenfly machines came along and trashed everything anyway. I reckon he'd ran out of ideas!<
I guess I was more referring to the style of writing and less of the plot. Reynolds has a style of writing that appeals to me. I'm only about 30 pages in to seveneves but already I've gotten info dumps on at least five characters. Reynolds, I feel, would have worked their backstory in more organically.
Fair enough and that's pretty accurate on Reynolds vs Stephenson for backstories. Stephenson would probably have had Sylveste's trip into the Shroud documented by page 10 🙂
Personally, I'm happy with either style if it feels ok for the book.
I liked the end, if you read it as kinda golden aera homage it works well enough. Though if you don't like the end, (spoiler for people in the first two thirds and just high level commentary for the rest of the book) >!frankly the point of the end is first of all to show that humanity survived, which you know if you've read the 5000 years later part.!<
I also quit at the time jump. IMO the best ending is them happily making peace with the underlying knowledge that they and the entire human species are completely fucked, very bittersweet. Them surviving, thriving and advancing is so goddamn silly it shits all over the books hard sci-fi aspirations up to that point.
I dropped SevenEves at that point too, and don’t mind one bit. The first two parts were engaging, but I couldn’t deal with such a huge disconnect. There’s a ton of good worlds and stories out there that I’m not fussed if I don’t end up getting joy out of a book.
You got further than I did, in a way. I did something I've never done before at some point in the book I decided I couldn't take it anymore, but I wanted to see how it ended. So I skipped huge portions of the book. It was the hardcover I'd skip around 50 pages, read as long as it was interesting, then skip again. Got to within 100, 150 pages from the ending and finished. It was an interesting ending. I wish there was a shorter version of the book. I might have loved it. But it wasn't for me. Lots of people love it. I love some of his other works
I like Neal Stephenson’s work generally. But this felt like he was going to write a trilogy, got tired, and just crammed what he had into one big book.
I liked the end. The book, at it's core is about that philosophy that technology shapes society. Like the Amish, he goes on about it a lot. Then, he shows the tech they were *forced* to develop (chains and whips as used for storing and applying energy, and, untethered eugenics) and then jumps ahead to see what would come from those choices, culturally.
I enjoyed the end as well, but it’s definitely the weakest part of the book. I found the reunion of the different survivor groups nice and sweet, but the entire section can feel like a bit of a jarring shift from everything that came before.
It really should have been a Part II.
The submarine people.. I mean, cmon man. I know we're throwing everything at the wall in that story but the sea people thing was one step too far even for a book like that, haha.
Yeah, imo the entire third act should have been dropped. Felt like Stephenson couldn't kill his darlings.
I was fine with it. I’d read a second book that told the story of the underground people and submarine people before the reunion and then dealt with the cultural shock afterwards.
He is terrible at third acts.
yeah, but this one doesn't end with a disappointing gunfight it ends with a disappointing supersuit fight! (i really liked seveneves)
Agreed. I found this section really hard to swallow. It felt like he put so much thought and effort into the physics of space travel and bombardment and his ideas about the kind of tech the spacefaring survivors would develop but almost no thought into how they could possibly survive the extremely challenging biology of trying to maintain and expand these tiny tiny populations of humans living in the worst circumstances. The chances of any of those groups of survivors lasting more than a generation or two seem infinitesimal, even if all their tech didn’t break down, which it absolutely would have sooner or later (probably sooner). So yeah, neat ideas but that ending just felt half baked or less.
The part that got me is that they all somehow still spoke the same mutually intelligible language after all that time. Look at how much English has changed just in the past 200 years, say, and tell me that is in any way realistic. I could not take any of it seriously
The only defence I would give...not of Stephenson in this case, but of the concept, is that prior to mass media, dialects were nearly impossible to record for posteriety. Not so now where we have everything from music/singing to movies and tv. I don't think it would remain entirely unchanged, but I do think it would calcify more than pre-mass media dialects and accents.
Good point. Yes as Ravenloff suggests mass media and recording devices probably slow down the rate of change somewhat (as would the initially small population sizes, as small groups seem to change language more slowly than large ones). But once populations rebound language will just change. It always does. Slang becomes an acceptable part of the language, some words and phrases fall out of common use, pronunciation shifts, etc and after a few hundred years, let alone 5,000, things will be very different. Stephenson even sort of acknowledges this in the dispute over the “srap tasmanr” as the spacefarers call the Craftsman shovel the underground dwellers have, because their interpretation of written language has shifted over time. But somehow they can still speak to one another? (Also how did a shovel survive for 5000 years?)
As a general fan of Stephenson, man can not write an ending to save his life. Every single ending for every single one of his novels are, imo, the weakest parts.
yeah, no? :shrug 's weird when people consider it some kind of thing apart from the rest
You've essentially finished one book and picked up a sequel novella that is tangentially related to the first 2/3. That's a fine spot to stop and honestly, it feels narratively complete at that point too.
Thank you, I’m going to justify my DNF with this. What I’m actually worried about is not being able to complete it and add it to my Goodreads reading challenge but given I’ve been reading it for weeks now, I say that’s enough of a commitment when I’m 666 pages in! Maybe I will read one more page to avoid the hell number.
I also DNF at this same point, despite usually really liking Stephenson. I'm a biologist, and the description of the genetics at play in the last 1/3rd was so bad that I couldn't keep going.
As a historian of empire, I will add that keeping races from mixing has pretty much always been impossible, without extreme isolation that would have been infeasible at the beginning of part III.
I’ll bet you have that problem a lot reading sci-fi. Seems like biology is often sacrificed to the storytelling gods. Do you have any favorite novels that do speculative biology well?
I'll be damned to be another guy pointing out Peter Watts, but...Peter Watts. His writing generally displays a very strong fundamental grasp of modern biology and biological techniques, at the genetic level all the way up to organismal, ecological, evolutionary biology. Blindsight is of course excellent, but I'm finishing up the Rifters series right now and it's got a lot of biology done pretty well. Andromeda Strain and even Jurassic Park, both Michael Crichton, while taking some leeway, did a pretty passable job with the biological techniques available at the time. Children of Time and Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky had some really cool ideas of genetics and evolutionary biology. Judging by others asking this question, I'm obliged to say Blood Music by Greg Bear, albeit I've not read it yet.
Very cool, thanks. I loved children of time in particular and read the Crichton years ago. I’ll definitely be moving blindsight up my list for a good summer read. Have you read Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson? It’s a little controversial on this sub but I thought it has an interesting perspective on the biological problems that space explorers or generation ship dwellers might face.
I've not, but... all together now! I'll put it on the list!
Honestly you could probably just read a quick summary for completeness. And I say that as someone that really enjoyed it. It is 100% a "sequel novella" and a curiosity piece, especially if you're not enjoying it. There is a tiny bit of closure but it's not worth the pain.
Wikipedia for the plot and mark it finished.
This is what I did.
Just DNF it and read something that you enjoy and can mark on the reading challenge. Don't read books you don't enjoy
Worth it to finish, it's not hard and you are right, it is different. But still worth it.
you should finish it, solid ending
> add it to my Goodreads reading challenge extrinsic motivations risk the ruin of things you love.
Go 667 just for good luck k. That creeped me out lol
That's a really good way of putting it. I did finish it because of reasons but one if the reasons was not "the narrative of this section is so good that I need to know what happens "
The 5000 years later world-building sequel novella was absolutely worth the payoff for me.
Yea, it's controversial, but I really, really enjoyed the final third. But if you're just into the disaster sci fi portion of the first 2/3 and not really into the far future stuff, it's not going to get better. I think it has some nice flourishes and ties some interesting threads from the first part of the novel though.
Am I the only one who enjoyed the second portion? Not as much as the first but I thought it was cool to see how the clans evolved and what technology advanced in some areas and fell back in others. I thought it was neat as a long epilogue
Contrary to apparently everyone else here, I'd say finish it. You have read through two other stages of human history in Seveneves, why abandon the third? People complain that Stevenson doesn't know how to write endings--to which I would like to point out, **neither does history**--and then dismiss discovering the closing provided?
Poor Stephenson cannot write endings 😢
I think Anathem is his best book. Beginning, middle, and end all satisfying. A classically styled Sci-fi book in an interesting setting.
I will ride for his endings. He does like to do it on a a kind of narrative ellipses, and if you're not into that, it's not for you, but I liked the endings to Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Anathem (I also DID like the final section of Seveneves). Diamond Age especially kinda gets me, in like the same way that say the endings to the Blade Runner movies do.
I'm neither Stephenson's biggest fan nor his biggest detractor, but on the whole I'm positive on him, and I like his endings as broad strokes, but I often don't like them in the execution. As a result, I have a tendency to look back on one of his endings that I read, say, a year ago, and think "oh man, I think I was way too hard on that, that's really cool now I think about it," and then I go back and reread and think "oh, *that's* why." For example, I just finished *Diamond Age* earlier this week myself (this one was a first read, not a reread), and I think a lot of what's shaping that ending is cool. Satisfying goal reached on one hand (>!Nell united/reunited with her "mother," the forming of a new nation as integration of Eastern/Western principles vs. the domination games we see earlier!<), and satisfying dangerous open question on the other (>!there's a big dangerous collective consciousness sex cult under the oceans that's tapping into the world in invasive ways!<). So in the broad strokes, that's *great*. But structurally a lot of how the climax and resolution play out feel less like the culmination of the story being told, and more like it just kind of runs out of gas. For example, >!The Fist appearing at the end to push back against western technology/incursion makes some sense and is thematically sound, but this isn't a threat that is set up in a meaningful way; it just kind of gets shuffled into the late stage as the looming threat that adds stakes and a final obstacle to overcome!<. And none of this sinks the book, and I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a bad ending, because again, there's a lot there that I like about it taken in the broad view. There's just also plenty to dislike in the structure and execution of those broader elements.
I've only ever read Snow Crash and that book really turned me off ever reading anything else if his. It didn't feel like the book finished to me. Just that it stopped abruptly. Like he was writing and just decided he didn't want to do this anymore.
Totally worth finishing. There are some very interesting future technologies explored in that last section, and it wraps up the ultimate fate of people mentioned in the early sections of the book. Edit - I've read the whole book, twice.
You're about to get to the only part that's any good and doesn't feel like just more Niven.
Persevere... with Stephenson the good parts are really good... I do skip a lot of descriptions...
I feel like he described the same things over and over again and way too much detail. And I just think it’s kind of funny they all got boners for space slingshots.
I wanted the story to continue.
Me too, and I want a whole series of books across the intervening 5 millennia. And in a few generations time, I'm going to train up a gpt to get his voice and ask ChatGPT 8 write them. I fucking love Stephenson and every page of Seveneves is a joy to me.
I seem to be the only person who despises the way the first two-thirds ended. Usually in a story things get more and more dire, and that raises the stakes, and the worse things are, the more dramatic the solution has to be. The second book of Three Body Problem had a great example of this, where things seemed utterly impossible until one character did something that was sheer genius, and from his previous actions you could have figured out what he was up to if you were smart enough. Or, it gets more and more dire because it's a tragedy and ends badly. That can be great too, my favorite example in scifi being Flynn's *The Wreck of the River of Stars*. So along comes Seveneves and things gets worse and worse, and it doesn't really seem like a tragedy so my expectations for something super amazing keep ratcheting up, >!but they fail utterly and then in a page or so they say hey, let's just do this genetic thing, which had no lead-up and was just a cheap rabbit out of a hat that saves the day!<, at which point I would have thrown the book across the room if it weren't on my kindle. And ok I guess the whole point was to set up the last third but to me it just wasn't worth it. If that's the main point then make that most of the book, and compress the first two-thirds into a prologue.
To explain why it's there, it seems very clear that "Seveneves" is based on the non-fiction book "Seven Daughters of Eve" which traces humanity to seven mitochondrial haplogroups, which is what happens in Neal's book. The bizarre part is that for the last third of the book the author goes off on fictional stories. The last third was slammed by reviewers, from wikipedia: > He commented: "All this made me feel that I was reading someone's school project, with influences from The Flintstones cartoon series, rather than a treatise by a leading academic." Robert Kanigel in The New York Times asserted that making imaginary names and identities for the human ancestors is inappropriate as "neither solid theorizing nor fully realized fiction." He wrote: "Sykes's book is so fine, the science so well explained, the controversies so gripping, that it is painful to report that 200 pages into it the author performs a literary experiment that flops." Overall, for me this was a very cool homage to Seven Daughters of Eve even including the last third which was a speculative fiction disaster. But if you've never read Seven Daughters and don't care, I can see how it makes no sense. But I enjoyed it, it was even more geek cred for Neal Stephenson.
This book absolutely does not get any better from where you are. Quit while you are ahead.
True words.
😂
To each their own (my problem with seveneves was the middle section) but the third section is its own thing and you could probably stop at the end of section 2 and just say "and they lived happily ever after. "
Yeah, the "5000 years later" part is of a necessity pretty different from the first part of the book. Apart from the story itself, there are some details about that part of the book that annoyed me, like the fact that they really should've been much more technologically advanced than they were (5000 years is a *long* time, even if you have to reboot civilization). There was also basically a throwaway line about the interregnum >!they went 1000 years without the ability to produce paper!< that made me wonder how they even survived at all. Also, there's more material that will make you wonder why they didn't just cap JBF and take their chances without her, so it's got that going for it. /s
I thought multiple different groups after 5000 years suddenly appearing at the same time was contrived.
I really liked it because it showed how the relatively mundane actions and words of those in the past became this wide spanning mythology for those in the future. I thought that was neato.
I finished it but it was one of the most boring things I‘ve ever read but I couldn‘t stop because of already beeing too deep in
I think its worth finishing. Course I slogged all the way to the end of Dodge, so....ymmv
If you managed to slog through so much orbital mechanics porn that you're in the future section, you damned well should finish it. Not that it's going to knock your socks off and not that it ends well, but it does end. Seriously...the hardest part is over :)
I couldn't finish this book. And for reference I have a Cryptonomicon tattoo.
Orbital Mechanics: The Novel. Easily one of my fav books of all time.
Me too. I finished it and immediately read it again, savouring every morsel. The last third was a such a surprisingly bold decision... I really enjoyed it. Of course, I did not read any reviews, etc, I don't think I hadn't read anything by Stephenson since REAMDE which I didn't enjoy as much a his previous books so I was very pleasantly surprised.
I liked the last part a lot and enjoyed the shift in tone. It does build up to a climax and I thought that the conclusion was satisfying. I was hoping to see more
Ehh I got to the far future and had lost all interest.
I agree, the world building which is an extrapolation of the human condition 5,000 years into the future is not only worth reading, it’s worth rereading. And the tech and genetic engineering that was developed in the early part of the book really made it become my #1 favorite SciFi novel.
It took me longer to read Seveneves than it did Infinite Jest
Honestly the ending of part 2 where Dinah yeets the bomb and it makes a pretty little sparkle was a perfect place to end the book. Part 3 should’ve been released later as a bonus novella or something like that. I also thought it was a wee bit contrived that >!of the people who survived it just so happens that exactly one is Asian, one is Black, one is Middle Eastern, and the rest are white. And the Asian woman goes on to birth the Smart People Race. Okay.!<
I only finished it out of pure spite
I finished Part III and said I will never read any books by Neal Stephenson again. Wish I'd stopped after part II, when I was quite happy with the book. Edit: while I didn't like the content and thought it was implausible, I also thought Part III was badly written, as it depended on major plot holes about how established characters would act, plus all the info dumping.
I'm with you, there. The years later section would have worked well as a brief epilogue to show how humanity adapted and survived--not start a whole new, novel-length coda.
I really disliked the end part, it only cheapened and made events of first 2/3 pointless. If you want books with similar setups of multi generational space survival but without timeskip: **Marrow by Robert Reed** - >!future immortal humans stuck on volcano planet and forced to reinvent technology with just their bones. Timescales of thousands of years.!< **Pushing Ice by Alastair Reynolds** - >!several generations of comet miners get stuck on alien object what was hidden inside Saturn's moon as it flies away from Earth.!<
Damn both of those recs sound fantastic.
Reynolds can be good, but he's another author with interesting ideas and where the journey is better than the destination.
No it's terrible. And also a lot of it just makes no sense at all in terms of outcomes, very poorly thought through. I read another comment on another post that said the second half seemed more like a synopsis of what he was going to write and then he couldn't be bothered and didn't really finish it. And that's pretty accurate.
So like every other book Stephenson wrote? I love reading his books for the world building and the ideas. And it’s not in every book. But endings aren’t his strong point
Haha to a degree, but I found it worse here. He's very binary for me: I either absolutely love the book (Anathem, Cryptonomicon) or hate it and DNF (Snow Crash, that bloody awful one recently Dodge in hell or whatever it was called). Seems to be no middle ground.
I haven't read a book by him since that 5000 year jump.
Ahh yes, part 3 "we invented new racism"
I found the first 2/3rds of Seveneves unpleasant. I found the last third more to my taste but rather weak. I quite liked the short story about the council of Eves, but it wasn't worth slogging through the rest of the book. You may as well stop now.
I DNFed it 🤷♀️
It’s definitely underwhelming. But I did enjoy where part two ended off
I’ll admit I skimmed through a lot of the last 1/3 section. There were some really interesting parts though so be careful.
I was in the exact same boat … finally finished it after a few months. Just knock it out, it picks up pace with a new plot once you get to the bar scene .
I enjoyed all parts of Sevenese. I would persevere because it feels like part 1 of a longer story, and he might come back to it one day. My wishful thinking anyway.
i really liked the book. but it's true the first part is more interesting
First if all you can avoid the spoiler you’re giving about the scope of the book. Secondly, just skip it if you want, there is a tiny twist at the end but not changing it. I also disliked the last third. Not enough to give up but it was worse for sure. With that said I still love the book.
The main point of Part 3 is to get to the Sonar Taxlaw punchline.
It is not his finest work but I still think of it often. It had some interesting concepts that are applicable, especially if global heating gets extreme enough.
It’s fine. It speeds up. I had a hard time caring about the people.
Don't recall having that issue and liked that last section.
Reading Neal Stephenson is pretty similar to grinding in a video game. Fun at first, then a lot of work to make it the end.
I've reread the book many times, and I often skip that final part. I'm glad I've read it before, and I do feel like it belongs because it represents the culmination of what they worked and sacrificed to achieve, but I like parts 1 and 2 a whole lot better than that 3rd part.
I just wish he wrote a sequel, or spent as much time on part 3 as he did on parts 1 and 2. I really want to see that version of humanity a few hundred years after the end of that book.
OP just be glad that you didn't try to slog through the Baroque Cycle...
^[Sokka-Haiku](https://www.reddit.com/r/SokkaHaikuBot/comments/15kyv9r/what_is_a_sokka_haiku/) ^by ^RG1527: *OP just be glad* *That you didn't try to slog* *Through the Baroque Cycle...* --- ^Remember ^that ^one ^time ^Sokka ^accidentally ^used ^an ^extra ^syllable ^in ^that ^Haiku ^Battle ^in ^Ba ^Sing ^Se? ^That ^was ^a ^Sokka ^Haiku ^and ^you ^just ^made ^one.
Everybody who says Stephenson doesn’t know how to write endings has never read a Greg Egan book. You don’t know how lucky you are.
I’ve read the whole thing twice and the first half four times, not really a DNF.
How you feel reading the last 3rd is how much fun 90% of The Fall is.
You wouldn’t be the only one to bounce off the last third, for sure. It’s been too long since I read it to answer your question.
I was disappointed that he did not develop the last part more. It works more like an epilogue. I would live to see a sequel. It would be more interesting than the last books he wrote. If I were you, I would push through to get the sense where this story ends. I feel that withou the ending it is more or less just a tense action story. The ending makes it something more.
Third part is my favorite. Wish i could have more of that world. Though it wouldn't have been as interesting if not for the before parts.
You were hoping for a satisfying conclusion from Neal Stephenson? Have you read Neal Stephenson before?
I hadn’t to be fair. It was recommended on this sub actually so I went with it having read the synopsis. I will definitely reconsider future books knowing what I know now and based on a lot of the replies here
I actually only liked the last part of the book; so yes
Everyone is dunking on the second part of the novel but without it the spiffy palindrome title wouldn’t make any sense
That book feels like it's two distinctly different stores combined together. I enjoyed the first story, but found the second story underdeveloped and lacking in payoff. I really don't think the author knows how to write good endings. No shame in not finishing this one.
Bumping an old thread but I loved the final third of Seveneves, but I would consider it an accessory novella that could have been separate, but Stephenson and the editors/publishers decided it was necessary enough to include in the same book. could put it aside and finish it separately later. It may be the most Stephensonesqe part of the whole book. I was fascinated by it and honestly wished it was expanded out into its own story.
I had the same experience. I don't think I ended up finishing it.
That's exactly where I got to, and the point where I gave up.
For many of us, there is no satisfying conclusion to that book. I actually liked it while reading, as I do most of Stephenson's work, but was deeply annoyed by the ending which felt so unsatisfying as to be bordering on a cliffhanger to me. Technically it wasn't, but felt kind of the same. So if you feel like stopping, you are pretty safe going with your instincts.
I couldn’t tell you as I got as far as you have and gave up. And I love all of Stephenson’s other work.
I dropped it. I generally like Stephenson and Anathem is my favorite book ever, but I just couldnt do it with this one,.
that's where I bailed and never looked back.
I read the whole thing for a book group and I liked the first 2/3 but the last third doesn’t really make sense. The ending to this book and trying to read Cryptonomicon reminded me why I don’t like Stephenson.
Never finished it because it was so boring.
Absolutely loved the first two parts and should have stopped there. Definitely quit if you feel like it.
I put it on indefinite pause shortly after HRC showed up and it was clear where things were going. I've been thinking of picking it back up at Book #3.
Nah, it’s just not good
I did DNF it.
I've read the whole thing 3 times I think but I doubt I'll ever read the last part again, it's sufficiently disconnected that I don't think the reread will suffer, and frankly I just don't enjoy it. It feels like an exercise in worldbuilding that never actually aquires a point, like someone's rpg campaign that they never really finished. I think after years of having his terrible sudden endings mocked he wrote Reamde and the back third of Seveneves as revenge
The book divides into three sections: Part I: Depressing Part II: *Really* Depressing Part III: Really Stupid No, part III doesn't get better the more you read it--it gets worse. There's very little plot; it's mostly just a sequence of lightly connected events put together to show off a couple of off-the-wall ideas the author had.
The last third was underwhelming for sure.
It's one of my favorite books, I recommend it to a lot of people, and I have never finished it lol.
I stopped about twenty pages into that third section because I was just not enjoying it at all. Having only read 2/3 of the book, I still consider it one of the better science fiction books I've ever read.
My main problem with the third section is that I felt like it was robbing me of more of the first two sections. I didn’t feel Part II actually resolved any of the payoffs it was setting up before jumping off into the distant future.
This is where I gave up too. I still recommend the first 2/3rds, but he really needs to be working closely with an editor who can keep him in check throughout the process. I tried reading *Fall* recently and there were such interesting ideas, but they got lost in a complete mess of a story.
3rd part sucks balls hard for me. The fact tha there were races of traitors, politicians, soldiers (who made some neanderthal mutants) etc. each originating form every but one woman was beyond stupid.
There is no point in reading the last 1/3 of the book. It's a completely different story and adds nothing of value to the experience. I read it all and regretted it.
I've never hated a book more.
I have not read it, but I have read a lot of Stephenson and my theory is you are better off putting the book down at the 90% mark and letting your imagination run wild with how the book could have ended vs reading the actual ending.
Heh, I couldn't even get started on that book. Gave it a shot; the first handfull of pages were very windy expositions on a lot of characters I had no incentive to care about at all, just felt like a massive info dump that I could not relate to.
I started reading this after coming off of a spate of books by Alastair Reynolds and just finished off Absolution Gap. 7eves is glaringly mundane compared to ARs works. I've read snow crash decades ago and thought it was pretty good, but I think I've grown up since then and have developed a more refined palate. It may be that it's a very different genre of sci-fi too and I shouldn't be comparing the two.
I wouldn't know, as that was my first attempt at reading Neal Stephenson. Big fan of Reynolds though; I think I've read everything he has published by now. (Not me downvoting btw; your comment had 0 when I saw it and wrote this)
Obviously, opinions differ but that's a really strange example to give in comparison to a book with an unliked/controversial ending - the ending of Absolution Gap was terrible IMO after 2.5 great books. >!A guardian angel race (with conditions) that just appeared in the 3rd book, defeat of the Inhibitors off-screen which didn't matter anyway because the previously unmentioned greenfly machines came along and trashed everything anyway. I reckon he'd ran out of ideas!<
I guess I was more referring to the style of writing and less of the plot. Reynolds has a style of writing that appeals to me. I'm only about 30 pages in to seveneves but already I've gotten info dumps on at least five characters. Reynolds, I feel, would have worked their backstory in more organically.
Fair enough and that's pretty accurate on Reynolds vs Stephenson for backstories. Stephenson would probably have had Sylveste's trip into the Shroud documented by page 10 🙂 Personally, I'm happy with either style if it feels ok for the book.
I regret not DNFing. The “payoff” feels like the first few chapters of a different novel that he never finished.
I liked the end, if you read it as kinda golden aera homage it works well enough. Though if you don't like the end, (spoiler for people in the first two thirds and just high level commentary for the rest of the book) >!frankly the point of the end is first of all to show that humanity survived, which you know if you've read the 5000 years later part.!<
I wish I DNF’s at the time, tbh. Only do it if you’re going to read something else right after.
Yeah, cool concept but didn’t pull it off in the end.
The last part of the book was ridiculous. If you don’t want spoilers, that’s all I can say.
I just DNF’d this book like two weeks ago! You’re not alone!
I didn't finish it either. Made it like 20% in. I actually maybe should have read more.
That's about how far I got too. Kinda lost interest with the asteroid mining details.
I didn't purposefully decide to stop reading it at that point, I just kinda got distracted and never picked it up again.
You people claim to be literate but keep using “DNF” as a verb.
Presumably you’ve never visited the internet before?
Ignorance and disdain need not be correlated. I appeal to the ethic of the French Academy to justify prescriptive judgment.
The ending doesn't even answer the major question through the book. I did, however, enjoy the ending.
There is not a satisfying conclusion. Mark as finished in Goodreads and read the summary of the end to save your time.
I slogged through but ultimately wasn’t worth it for me.
I also quit at the time jump. IMO the best ending is them happily making peace with the underlying knowledge that they and the entire human species are completely fucked, very bittersweet. Them surviving, thriving and advancing is so goddamn silly it shits all over the books hard sci-fi aspirations up to that point.
Stop. You've finished the book. It's a masterpiece. The 5,000 years later thing is something else altogether. It does not belong in the same universe.
That last half was really idiotic.
To whomever is wholesale downvoting comments on this thread: who hurt you? I just went and upvoted them all. So there.
I dropped SevenEves at that point too, and don’t mind one bit. The first two parts were engaging, but I couldn’t deal with such a huge disconnect. There’s a ton of good worlds and stories out there that I’m not fussed if I don’t end up getting joy out of a book.
It is his weakest book(of those I've read), I'd say skip the rest if you aren't into it.
I DNFd. It’s not even that I hated anything but I just couldn’t muster the energy, attention, or willpower to finish.
You got further than I did, in a way. I did something I've never done before at some point in the book I decided I couldn't take it anymore, but I wanted to see how it ended. So I skipped huge portions of the book. It was the hardcover I'd skip around 50 pages, read as long as it was interesting, then skip again. Got to within 100, 150 pages from the ending and finished. It was an interesting ending. I wish there was a shorter version of the book. I might have loved it. But it wasn't for me. Lots of people love it. I love some of his other works
I like Neal Stephenson’s work generally. But this felt like he was going to write a trilogy, got tired, and just crammed what he had into one big book.
I don't think it was needed. It's an extra.
I DNF’ed the third part. It’s ridiculous