My gut feeling is that if everyone knew they were going to die and Earth was going to be destroyed, they would be inclined to preserve the status quo for as long as possible. What would be the point in making big changes if everyone knew that there was no future for individuals, or possibly the entire human race?
Stephenson wrote that huge amounts of international resources were poured into the program that would make it possible for a small percentage of humans to survive in space, and that makes sense to me.
On thing that struck me was that the sections of the ring settlements were named (in a rather random fashion, I thought) after cities on the old Earth. While this was sort of charming, how much significance would those names really have had after 5000 years?
No, I don’t think Aida should have been vilified for acts of cannibalism, and I find it difficult to believe that a group of humans, scientists, survivors stuck in space, people who have just witnessed the destruction of the earth and have no place else to go for a few millenia, would have faulted those who were starving for eating what they could.
I find the thought revolting, but I have no idea how I’d feel if put into this kind of desperate situation. According to the article below, cannibalism in humans is an innate behavior! I remember reading a book when I was middle school age about the Chilean plane crash survivors and how they’d had to eat their fellow (deceased) passengers. Shocking then. Condemnation is probably deserved for the murder of a crew member, the mutiny and planned attack on the mother ship, but not the act of consuming the only available food source, imo.
I don’t fault Aida for cannibalism and besides I kind of liked her. I read that story about the Chilean plane crash victims too, in fact we were up in our cabin in Vermont and there it was on the shelves. I’m pretty sure I could eat someone who was already dead if I was starving.
While I understand that maybe reason would prevail and the world really would put their resources into trying to save as many as people as possible, my gut says that more likely there would be panic and chaos. But maybe there would be enough denial for his scenario to work. I liked the concerts from the cathedrals going dead. That was a lovely image.
I was not bothered by the rings being named after ancient cities. After all there is a Troy in New York named in 1789 after a Troy that disappeared in 85 BC.
I don’t think the others vilify Aida solely for cannibalism. It takes them aback momentarily but they acknowledge - if only to themselves - that they’d at least thought about it. Aida becomes the villain when she’s rescued and then attempts to kill the rescuers. All might have looked past - with some discomfort - the cannibalism but not the loss of friends and colleagues. So yeah she deserves the shunning and censure - just not for the cannibalism. She comes in planning to kill as many as can be killed.
^ Good point, and one that Spacer history kind of forgets. Five thousand years later, the cannibalism element is still at the forefront, and still a touchy subject. Of course, it doesn’t help that “The Epic” plays in a continuous loop everywhere you turn. That seemed rather unbelievable to me. Can you imagine us so closely tied to an event that happened in 3,000 B.C.–with the language virtually unchanged in five millennia?
From PlantMom’s link:
That’s a pretty accurate description of Aïda’s situation.
I think after a flurry of panic and a lot of media attention, people would go back to their normal lives, unconvinced that the end was near. In Seveneves, there is not really any catastrophic social change after the news:
Maybe that’s because without dramatic and immediate physical evidence, it becomes an idea easy to deny, and so you simply go about your normal business. After all, the world was supposed to end with Y2K, right? And I took it “surprisingly calmly.”
Also, for all you anxious CC parents out there, look how relaxing the end of the world can be:
The end of that description (p. 311)—“But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing”—reminded me of The Titanic.
Normally no, but if you are constantly keeping the language alive via video, films etc. I’d imagine it would change much more slowly - with the major changes being additional vocabulary. I believe from my readings in linguistics that language grammar tends to simplify over time, especially if there are a lot of immigrants. (That’s why English grammar is simpler than Latin, or Gaelic or whatever the Angle-Saxons spoke.) That said, it always amazes me that the people in old movies have this weird upper-class accent that really doesn’t exist any more.
Yes, I got a chuckle out of the no more worrying about test scores. And yes very much an echo of the Titantic.
^The Saxons spoke something like German. That’s why we have so many words in our language that are similar to German words. The Norman Conquest in 1066 imposed French upon the British Isles. I read somewhere that English words for humble things tend to be more like German words, and words for fancy things are more like French, because the conquering French constituted the upper class for quite some time.
German is certainly a lot more complicated than English! French is less so, except for the tricky pronunciation.
But even French has tenses we barely use anymore like the subjunctive (and I don’t mean the conditional) and all the nouns have genders. Yes it’s amusing that the farm animals are all German Schwein/swine, Kuh/cow, Huhn/hen and what we eat is more like French porc/pork, boeuf/beef, poulet/poultry.
As I thumb through the book, I keep stumbling across more sevens. The moon explodes into seven pieces (known as the Seven Sisters until Doob gives them silly names). Doob tells the story of the black-footed ferret, whose population decreased to only seven. The arklet clusters are in groups of seven, called heptads.
In part 3, the Spacers call one part of “the Epic” the story of The Seven Fat and Seven Thin, in which seven arklets full of starving people are connected by a cable to seven arklets in which there is plenty to eat, and how one group uses the other to survive (p. 624). This calls to mind another story in Genesis–Pharaoh’s dream of Seven Fat Cows and Seven Thin Cows, which foretells an era of plenty followed by famine:
One reviewer describes Julia as Hillary Clinton/Carla Fiorina.
The character Markus interests me. When he takes power, I thought uh-oh. Later I viewed him as understanding necessities and doing all he can for the survival of all. Julia seems his opposite: a lack of comprehensive understanding and doing all she can to ensure her survival (with power intact). I think one of the things that helps prevent anarchy on earth stems from the fact that the world’s leaders have a pact that they won’t leave earth. Obviously Julia ignores that part of the deal.
Considering that anatomically modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years, I’d say that the physical evolution in the book was too fast…epigenetics notwithstanding!
Did the Diggers change physically? I assumed the Pingers did some serious mucking around with their DNA - they didn’t need to rely on epigenetics since the males also survived. I think the point that we managed to get a huge variety out of the ur-dog in a relatively short period of time, suggests that major changes are possible relatively quickly if you want them.
I wanted to dislike Markus since he essentially pushed Ivy aside, but I think he had the skills needed for that job. I thought it was interesting that by the time they were down to seven who could procreate, Julia seemed pretty self-aware about herself. Not sure she was before though, though she does say she stopped taking drugs to help her depression because she thought they were making her stupid. She thinks her personality has benefits as well as drawbacks,"…society will go astray if there are not those who, like me, imagine many outcomes. Let those scenarios run rampant in their minds. Anticipate the worst that could happen. Take steps to prevent it. If the price of that - the price of having a head full of dark imaginings - is personal suffering, then so be it."
Aida also seems to admit to being bi-polar and feeling like it has benefits.
Also back to how much of a villain was Aida (and JBF) - I ended up feeling like there was a collective madness in what happened on the arklets. And while it doesn’t exactly excuse her behavior, I understand why she was paranoid about how they would be accepted and reintegrated with the rest of the crew. Of course, her actions guaranteed they would never trust her again. I would have liked to see how attitudes changed as they started having babies. But that was the part of the story that got glossed over.
I caught up on everyone’s post. Great discussion. As I mentioned when I posted on August 1, I like the book, but feel there were flaws. @ignatius, in post #71, touched upon one major thing that bothered me.
This is what I hated about the future civilization of the Seven Eves. They were so divided by race. I didn’t like it and have a hard time believing it. I have more hope for future humans. It was depressing to see so little progress.
@ignatius - Post #94 - For some reason I thought the group that went underwater did so on their own, not as part of a military program. I can’t remember exactly why, something Cal said to Ivy.
I didn’t like Julia. Very narcissistic. When I read the above, the first person to pop into my head was Donald Trump.
Yes, the Pinger physical evolution was far too fast without intervention, but I’m willing to go with the notion that the government sent a Moira-like expert down in the submarine to shake things up, DNA-wise.
I have a hard time, however, believing that the last eight women in the known universe, raising children collectively, would not have bonded like glue and let bygones be bygones, regardless of any earlier cannibalistic, murderous tendencies of their members. The seven Eves give birth to 35 children between them. Can you imagine a handful of underfed, exhausted, continuously pregnant women raising 35 small children together on a space ship? That’s not science fiction, it’s dystopian fiction. Makes being pummeled by the Hard Rain look like a walk in the park.
I’m pretty sure I could eat someone who was already dead if I was starving.