Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
October 11, 2025
It's only October, but Seveneves is shaping up to be my favorite read of the year. It has everything a girl could want: well-written women in space, cosmonauts, a compelling modern-day-ish disaster that felt plausible but not plausible enough that it added to my general sense of anxiety, thoughts on leadership and the general course of humanity, a casual BRCA (or other cancer genetic mutation) reference that didn't infantalize or catastrophize the woman involved...
Ok, that's a very specific list. And the BRCA-esque reference was so quick (like in the Barbie movie) that my husband didn't catch it. So that's not the point.
The point of the book is that the moon explodes. And that's bad. It's the end of life on earth bad.
The book mostly follows the crew of the ISS as the world prepares to save what it can of the human race before the remnants of the moon rains down. Saying anything else about it feels like giving things away. That probably makes this a bad review. Oh well. Have some parts that I highlighted on my Kindle.
"You could get used to anything. You got used to it and then time raced by, and before you knew it, time was up."
"he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children."
"She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward."
"On the social front it was a question of Amistics, which was a term that had been coined ages ago by a Moiran anthropologist to talk about the choices that different cultures made as to which technologies they would, and would not, make part of their lives. The word went all the way back to the Amish people of pre-Zero America, who had chosen to use certain modern technologies, such as roller skates, but not others, such as internal combustion engines. All cultures did this, frequently without being consciously aware that they had made collective choices[...]Each enhancement is an amputation."
The discussion of enhancements being an amputation is something I've been thinking a lot in regards to my relationship with social media. It's a lot easier to post online now, yes, but I'm obviously back making my own website in the search of interactions that have soul again. It's, um, a more profound foreshadowing in the book.
I don't want to give away the ending and tell you why finishing the book up on the beach is now a core memory of my life, but man...the unlikely beach read delivered.