I thought she shot Starling too - based on that comment.
NASA has been investigating the plants-in-space issues with their Veggie Plant Facility on the ISS:
https://blogs.nasa.gov/kennedy/2015/07/08/astronauts-plant-second-crop-of-lettuce-on-station/
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/Veggie.html
Maybe this is slightly off-topic, but I finally located a weirdly fascinating article that I read earlier this year about a young guy who is convinced he’s going to Mars via “Mars One”:
https://medium.com/matter/all-dressed-up-for-mars-and-nowhere-to-go-7e76df527ca0
When I read about the evidently ill-fated Mars expedition in Seveneves, this article was the first thing that came to mind.
ignatius and cartera45, I knew Julia had taken Pete Starling’s gun, but I didn’t put two and two together to see that she had shot him. Thanks for the clarification. So Julia shot Starling before Dinah arrived on the scene, and then he got hit by a bolide? Poor guy.
I’m assuming she shot him because he was trying to prevent her from boarding the capsule headed for the Cloud Ark, correct?
I assume Julia shoots Pete Starling because it’s expedient for her to do so at that given moment. Reason unknown other than he probably wasn’t on board with whatever she wanted to do or maybe because she just didn’t need him anymore. I doubt she ever thought she’d run into an Aida who not only could play her game but win it.
Interesting book, that vast bulk where he’s channeling Larry Niven, but l’d have paid triple for more dialogue. Try Cryptonomicon, if you haven’t read it. Still stupefying, math & computer both, but funny. Reamde, as well.
Great article–and yes, weirdly fascinating. Sad, too.
Reading the article makes me see why Neal Stephenson didn’t bother to follow-up on the fate of the Mars expedition in Seveneves. Because it’s pretty clear the crew could not have survived, what with the fine dust, chlorates, radiation, vitamin D deficiency, eventual blindness and starvation. I think there was a certain amount of “space madness” at work among those doomed characters, for them to even think that they had a chance.
Coming in a day late - was in Vermont with no internet access. I have such mixed feelings about book. I did enjoy it very much, but it also seemed very flawed structurally. I talked about it a lot with my younger son, who listens to a web podcast about the writing process, so he thinks a lot about how books are put together. This is mostly his critique, but I do basically agree with him. Part One was an almost perfect book. While the book is obviously more plot than character driven, you do care about the characters and each one felt believable to me. I marked dozens of bits of dialog that made me laugh and observations that just seemed so spot on. Part Two was pretty good, but some of the technical bits went on far too long especially since he then rushed through the decimation of the population. He was so careful with the world building and then rushed over the part that I felt needed the most convincing. I’m just don’t buy that humankind could come out of seven women, and I don’t understand why none of those men had DNA or sperm that couldn’t have been collected after the original DNA records/samples were lost. I liked the idea of the 5000 year later coda, but it was either way too long or not long enough. It seemed like the first half of a novel that stopped smack in the middle of the rising action. We barely see the Pingers and yes, it would have been nice to find out what if anything happened to the Mars expedition. I found the ending deeply annoying.
Will start to tackle Mary’s great questions tomorrow.
Just some nice lines:
Dinah and Rhys (In response to a discussion of which Fantastic Four character they resonated with.) : " I think I’m in love," she said. / He clapped a bag over his mouth and threw up.
Because it was through trivia that his (Doob’s) mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head. [did she or didn’t she dye them?]
The Russian invasion began a week later, with a spate of flights producing what NASA described as “mixed results” and Roskosmos termed “an acceptable fatality rate.”
In spite of this [scars and buzz cut], or perhaps because of it, she [Tekla] was kind of hot. Moira hated to say it. But hotness was a part of the human condition and it was pointless to pretend that it did not exist.
At the very end of part one when Markus is giving Doob a pep talk: And Markus Leuker, using one of the ropes that were strung across the Woo-Woo Pod as handholds, propelled himself toward the exit. As he passed into the tube, Doob saw his silhouette against the circle of light, a Da Vinci man, just for a moment.
A question of my own - on page 3 Stephenson talks about “the Agent” and “the patient” - looking at the novel as a whole can you divide other people or groups into those two categories?
Yep.
Here’s a review which notes that Seveneves “owes a standout homage to Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle”: http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2015/05/25/book-review-seveneves-by-neal-stephenson/
Also, for those interested in reading something by Larry Niven, see his short story Inconstant Moon: http://www.amazon.com/Inconstant-Moon-Larry-Niven-ebook/dp/B008CIN07W
Howdy - just popping in, from family trip to Colorado, to say I gave up on the book, for all the reasons mentioned above. Not a good sign when I started wishing the characters had opted to perish in the hard rain.
Enjoy reading the discussion- carry on !
I was fascinated by the Moirans and the whole concept of epigenetics. Epigenetics is certainly not something we learned about when I studied biology in college many years ago!
While the kind of complete personality changes Stephenson envisioned (the “three incarnations of Kath”) is kind of wacky, I like the fact that he ventured into this territory, and I wish he had done more with it. As with other elements of the last part of the book, the author’s exploration of the characteristics of the Moirans was somewhat skimpy.
Somewhere I read that a lot of what Stephenson put in the far-future part of the book was similar to what one finds in other sci-fi writing. But I don’t read enough sci-fi to know! I wonder if other sci-fi writers have played around with the concept of epigenetics also?
I agree that there was too much packed into the book. I would gladly have read it as a trilogy or even more. There were characters I liked who were given short shrift. I also thought a very interesting book could have resulted had the earth never been destroyed after years of expecting it to be destroyed. There were a lot of decisions made predicated upon destruction. Figuring out a way to get back on track after that would also interest me.
I agree with mathmom & son’s analysis of the flawed structure of the novel – and I agree as well that bits of brilliance that came through nonetheless. One of the dialogue passages I liked was on pp. 419-424–a conversation between Julia and Doob, which revealed character, explained plot points and foreshadowed outcome. I wish there had been more of that.
To compare Neal Stephenson to Herman Melville, even unfavorably (post #54), is to acknowledge that he is a very gifted writer. I think my criticisms stem from frustration over what Stephenson could have done in 860 pages, but chose not to.
Neal Stephenson can be funny, and at times, I found his writing to be slyly tongue-in-cheek. One of his epigenetics descriptions (p. 638) made me laugh:
I have four daughters. At our house, we call that puberty. 
I appreciate your positive comments about the book, Mary. It’s an easy work to criticize, but I really did like it a lot and am glad I read it.
I’m another who really likes the book and perhaps one of the few here who likes Part 3.
Julia - as POTUS - has to know about the undersea program? It sounds like the military’s answer to the upcoming Hard Rain, et al. If so, did Julia think her chances better above than below? Why? Easier to establish control over the young Arkies?
(In a total flight of fancy here, perhaps she shot Starling to keep him from sharing that information with Ivy. To paraphrase Ben Franklin: “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead.” No love lost between Ivy and Julia. Why would Julia share positive news about Cal with Ivy, though I think Starling might have. I also think Julia intended to slam that door on Starling and Dinah. Julia didn’t want Starling alive and didn’t care about Dinah.)
I googled around and didn’t look there were any. Epigenetics is a pretty new field, and so at odds with what we all learned in school!
I loved people being named after the Encylopedia, but I didn’t think it was a very realistic way to preserve knowledge. I did love the idea that the reality tv show of the early years continued to be fascinating 5000 years later.
Humans take so long to grow up, I just don’t see how a tiny population could get itself reeducated in time for the whole construct not to collapse. The handwaving of that part of the book didn’t help. Other sci-fi writers have teaching tapes and the like where you can download a lot of technical knowledge relatively quickly.
silverlady, interesting comment about the chapters being too long. I recently read a very long fantasy with many short chapters and I kept reading too many of them at bedtime!
I generally prefer character driven fiction (Bujold over Niven for sure!) But I do like enough technical stuff for it to feel believable especially if you talk about the consequences. I like the reviewer who quoted some sci fi classic who said if you invent the car you need to invent the traffic jam too. There wasn’t that much of that here. I liked hearing about the physics of chains, but the description of their final resting place never really made much sense to me. I thought for the most part the characters were developed enough - at least in the first two parts. In part three no one seemed very real.
I’m not convinced Julia had her Total World Domination plan in place at that point. I think she hitched a ride in a rocket instead of a submarine because she desperately wanted to live and it was the quickest and most accessible way out of town. It was a “hastily arranged launch into orbit” with “a sequence of mishaps and coincidences just shaggy enough to be somewhat plausible. No liar could fabricate such a story” (p. 350).
The reality show aspect of Part 3 reminded me of The Hunger Games.
Now, I’m not saying Suzanne Collins was an influence on Neal Stephenson—he probably doesn’t even know who she is—I’m just saying that both stories reflect some of the same human foibles. The success or failure of Katniss Everdeen depends a great deal on the type of show she puts on for an audience watching her every move on screen. In the same way, Cantabrigia Five is “always thinking about the narrative” as she arranges the camera-carrying buckies in such a way as to tell the story she wants, and Ariane does the same when she orchestrates the grand on-camera entrance with the abducted Digger woman. “It’s all entertainment,” says Arjun (p. 804).
The other time I thought of The Hunger Games was during the Casting of Lots:
Of course, unlike The Hunger Games, the Casting of Lots is theoretically a lottery of life, not death, but Doob knows better—he sees its tragic, darker side, comparing it to the Greek myth of Theseus and the minotaur, “which hinged on the premise that the people of Athens had somehow been persuaded to select seven maidens and seven boys by lot, every few years, and send them to Crete to serve as monster chow” (p. 196). (Hmm…there’s that number 7 again.)
^I loved that he deliberately used the words boys and maidens - this isn’t a recent Hunger Games idea - it’s been around forever. And it does have the ominous overtones of - are they actually sacrifices to make the survivors feel better not the ones who will be saved.
^ Yes…forever!—I just realized how much of it is in the Bible, too: the story of Abraham and Isaac, the story of Moses and the deaths of the firstborn sons of Egypt, children being sacrificed in Leviticus, Kings, Psalms, etc.
I didn’t know the story of Theseus and the Minotaur until I read about it in Seveneves. Suzanne Collins acknowledges it as a source:
(The above is from an interesting [off-topic] article about how modern children’s literature goes so often to the dark side, without the light-hearted balance of earlier works: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/no-more-adventures-in-wonderland.html?_r=0)
Thinking about Biblical references has me pondering Aïda…and cannibalism.
Do you think Aïda and her descendants should have been vilified for centuries? Should she have been given a chance at redemption? She tells the Eves, “I have never been as bad as you all think that I am” (p. 563). Even the good guys on the Endurance essentially admit “there but for the grace of God, go I”:
Aïda and her shipmates cross the (fine) line when they kill the dying Tav in order to eat him, instead of waiting the very short time necessary for him to die.
Aïda is allowed to live, yet is marked for eternity, making her very much like the biblical Cain. God curses Cain because he kills his brother Abel, and leaves him with a mark that protects him from death, but not from contempt. Looking at Genesis 4:11-16, I’d say this was a deliberate allusion on Stephenson’s part, especially considering that our favorite number plays a part: