Neal Stephenson is, indisputably, a genius. If only someone had worked up the courage to edit the damned book. The premise is breathtaking, the characters are truly engaging, and the challenges and adventures that stem out of these two facets make for really interesting reading. What we are left with is two-thirds of a book that is a complete and full story – but that reads more like a think-tank’s novelization of their doomsday preparations – and one-third of a book that is so cramped, condensed, and rushed – while representing a think-tank’s novelization of their preparations for rebuilding human life – that it either should have been its own book, or removed entirely.Īnd making it even more confusing is the fact that, for a healthy portion of the time I was reading Seveneves, I was utterly enthralled. Seveneves is, in my opinion (and I know it’s not necessarily the opinion of all) the result of a brilliant writer surrounded by editors unwilling or unable to tell him to stop, rewrite, condense, or anything else an editor is supposed to do with a book.
Neal Stephenson seems to have heard my challenge in advance, and written a book that seems to go out of its way to prevent someone from finishing it. But I have had a horrifying tendency to not finish Stephenson’s more recent, and more mammoth books of late, and when Seveneves finally arrived on my doorstep, I made a silent pledge not to do the same thing again. I have been a fan of Neal Stephenson’s writing for a while now, and at least two of his works can easily be brought to mind when someone asks me for something brilliant.
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