Seveneves Audiobook By Neal Stephenson cover art

Seveneves

A Novel

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Seveneves

By: Neal Stephenson
Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal, Will Damron
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About this listen

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic - a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.

What would happen if the world were ending?

A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.

But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain....

Five thousand years later, their progeny - seven distinct races now three billion strong - embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown...to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.

©2015 Neal Stephenson (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Fantasy Fiction Genetic Engineering Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Genetics Mind-Bending Suspenseful Apocalyptic Fiction
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What listeners say about Seveneves

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  • 4.5 out of 5 stars
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    13,238
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    7,514
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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Liked the book, narration could been better

Would you consider the audio edition of Seveneves to be better than the print version?

No. There's a couple of diagrams in the book that really help with visualizing the latter parts of the book. But more importantly, I really thought the female narrator who begins the book was not a good choice. Her vocalization of the male roles is really poor. I really wish they could have used the same woman, Jennifer Wiltsie, who read Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age". She did amazing work with that book and would have done a much better job with this one. The male reader was fine.

What other book might you compare Seveneves to and why?

I think Seveneves is a lot like Stephenson's other works like Cryptonomicon and Anathem. Building worlds and describing tech without as much emphasis on plot turns and twists.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

Not really that kind of book.

Any additional comments?

A good addition to the Neal Stephenson library. Not his best, but I enjoyed it.

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71 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Please someone force an editor on Stephenson!

Would you try another book from Neal Stephenson and/or Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron ?

I believe I have read every book Neal Stephenson has written.

Would you be willing to try another book from Neal Stephenson? Why or why not?

Yes, because his early books contained such brilliant ideas and promise, although his output is a very mixed bag. When he's brilliant, he's simply amazing.

Any additional comments?

If you like astronomy and astronautic adventures in GREAT detail then you'll probably love this one. The moon is suddenly destroyed by a force nobody can ever confirm; possibly a small black hole, but the entire book is about the aftermath. Three sections: the event, and figuring out what it means for earth to suddenly have an asteroid belt instead of a moon; then post-figuring that out, preparing for some fairly serious effects; and then several thousand years in the future, looking back.

There was definitely an interesting story in here. Some good characters and some great details and clearly a lot of research. However, at least half of it could have been cut, and the third section felt a little like a long afterword; it might have been better as an entirely separate sequel with a bit more weight of its own.

I looked up the review I wrote for Reamde and it 100% applies to this one too: "The book was lengthy at almost 1000 pages, and could easily have been cut in half without losing substance. It left me suspecting that Stephenson has reached a point in his reputation at which editors are now afraid to tell him to be more concise for god's sake, so he just rambles on and on when he really shouldn't."

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53 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Stephenson on his B game

Each new Neal Stephenson book must inevitably face comparison with earlier efforts, some of which were truly amazing. My personal favorite is ANATHEM, and in my view his two books since, REAMDE and now SEVENEVES, couldn't live up to the very high expectations of an ANATHEM devotee. Of course, this is hardly fair to either of the two more recent books, both of which are fine novels. It's just another case of an author laboring under the burden of an already great legacy. The same thing happened to Ursula K. LeGuin, whose wonderful LATHE OF HEAVEN seemed pallid after the truly transcendent DISPOSSESSED and LEFT HAND OF DARKNESS. So it takes a conscious effort for me to review SEVENEVES on its own merits.

Those merits are considerable. The scope of the narrative is grand, and the sheer scale of the tragedy unfolding, one ghastly event at a time, throughout the first two thirds of the book, is gripping. To judge by the state of the world tech base when the novel opens, the story begins approximately ten years in our future, with cultural motifs as familiar to any current resident of the developed world, and of North America in particular, as are viral cat videos. The US President is a kind of hybrid of Sarah Palin, Carly Fiorina, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, selectively combining many of the least admirable traits of all three politicians, along with a few of their more admirable ones. As is clear from the book's blurb, and revealed in the first fifteen pages, all of the characters--indeed, everyone--must soon come to grips with the knowledge that all life on Planet Earth is irrevocably doomed, with perhaps two years left on the clock. One question posed in the first two-thirds of the book is, how might a civilization with essentially the technology available to us today, attempt some sort of long-term survival strategy for the human species? What technical, social, political, and personal challenges would such an effort pose? These questions have been asked and addressed in earlier science fiction, but perhaps no where as well, or as plausibly. By the end of the first part of SEVENEVES all such questions have been settled, for better or worse. I should add a trigger warning here for the benefit of listeners who may be disturbed by the idea of seven billion people dying, all at once, along with all their hopes and dreams.

I'm not entirely sure I can believe that the global economy would continue to function as well as it seems to in the two years between the proclamation of doom and its arrival. But Stephenson doesn't shirk this issue, addressing it with enough detail and color that I was prepared to suspend my disbelief.

The second part then extrapolates long-term consequences--where by "long-term," I mean, 5,000 years later--of the status quo at the end of the first. On the timescale of human history, five millennia is a very long time indeed, as long as from the beginnings of the Early Dynastic Period in early Bronze Age Egypt to the present. Obviously a lot can happen during that time, and we still have no idea of the effects of durable records and universal literacy on the pace of cultural evolution. So the future societies depicted in this book may be a little too similar to our own to be completely plausible, despite some explanations provided within the narrative. The second part of the book also contains some coyly enigmatic devices that are never properly cashed out, somewhat to this reader's frustration.

Mary Robinette Kowal narrates the first, and longer part, Will Damron the second. Kowal doesn't have the range for this book, and I'm afraid she gets in the way. The text provides substantial information about the background and accents of various characters, described as upper-midwestern, upper-class British, West Indian Londoner with Cambridge overlay, Russian, Swiss, Filipino, etc. As performed by Ms. Kowal, none of these is even remotely plausible. Most male characters get the dropped-larynx treatment, and their voices sound strained and stentorian, but not really male. Most of the main characters of this first part are female, and a female reader is appropriate, but I can think of half a dozen audible.com favorites who could have done this much, much better (Kate Reading and Gabrielle DeCuir come to mind). Will Damron does not get in the way of the second part, but he has a much easier job. Characters 5,000 years in the future are not assumed to be speaking English, let alone in accents whose geographical and socioeconomic significance is familiar to the contemporary listener.

Despite the defects that keep me from giving either story or performance a five-star rating, this book definitely deserves a listen from any Stephenson fan, and from any fan of epic science fiction.

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15 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

overburdened with technical minutiae

I really love the premise of this book, but realized quickly this book is more of a series of technical manuals peppered with a story, bordering on tedious at times.
We get some great character development in the beginning of the book, however when the second half of the story comes about we learn very little about the characters themselves to the degree I didn't really care much about them at all.
The shift in narrators was jarring, going from male to female made no sense as the focus on the second half of the book is a female character. I didn't enjoy the female narrator's "male voices".
And then there's the ending. I found it to be terribly disappointing. the climax of the story (the big reveal) towards the end I found predictable but exciting. Did I care about the minute details of how armor and weapons work? No, not really. SO much time was spent on things like that, I felt the climax of the book suffered greatly.
just when we are getting to the end, a vague, tiny, and hardly mentioned idea from a couple chapters back is reintroduced and the entire ending, the bit that is supposed to leave us with some idea how the story is to continue, hinges on that. It fails miserably and felt more like a cop out.
side note: I have a new, hilarioud term in my lexicon: woo woo pod.

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Narration detracts from the story

I'm just getting into the book but I have to stop occasionally to depressurize after hearing technical terms getting butchered. I believe that Stephenson's books are aimed at the nerdy end of the spectrum so the people who enjoy his writings would tend to be more sophisticated. Hence, the producer should have done a better job of ensuring words like concatenation, petechiae, libration point, etc are pronounced correctly.

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Space Nerds & Tech Heads rejoice ...

If you like your Sci-fi rooted firmly in physical reality and complexity, you'll probably enjoy this book. I'm missing the other books that could have come out of this story line.

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3 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Blown Away

Where does Seveneves rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Probably at #2 -- can't top Simon Slater's rendition of Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall,' but very, very good.

What did you like best about this story?

Everything. I went into this story with only a vague idea of what the premise was, not having read the inside flap, and I was blown away. It was so fun to follow it without any idea of what might happen. If you read or listen to this, do yourself a favor and don't read the inside flap.

What about Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron ’s performance did you like?

Both were good, though Will Damron's performance was more critical. Mary Robinette Kowal added incredible depth to the female characters in the story which was great.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

Just. Keep. Swimming.

Any additional comments?

Best book I've read so far this year.

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Voice performances were a distraction

Personally, I found some of the voice performances to be distracting and not supportive to the story. The story itself was enjoyable, but, at times seemed to gloss over the nitty gritty in favor of jumping ahead. Could, and perhaps should, have been a series.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Don't let the negative reviews deter you

Yes, the first part is read with some kind of school teacher voice. But the story is great and the voice is digestible if you speed everything up 130%.

The second part is really enjoyable too. It is read with a much better voice and it paints a very interesting new world. I was longing for more adventures by the main characters.

The author kills characters you like as fast as in Game of Thrones. This keeps the story interesting. I find it a little hard to believe however that there would be so many feuds in space as sketched in part 1.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

One of the best books ever narrated. Neal Srephens

One of the best books ever narrated. Neal Srephens never fails to impress and keep the the interest fresh. This was the first book by his that I ever listened to. According to a rocket engineer that I know, the science was accurate when it has been proven, a sound when it could only be theorized.

The voice cast was excellent. I really had the feeling that I knew the difference between the characters. Different emotions in the characters produced different souds

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