Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was so looking forward to this, because, well, Neal Stephenson! And I loved the first half, being technology and space and clever people doing hard things to handle an epic crisis, until suddenly politics intrudes, and nearly ruins the whole thing. I mean I know this stuff exists, and does in practice rule the world (and every large firm I’ve ever worked in), but I wasn’t looking for that out of this book. Plus, I’m not sure NS is the right author to write it convincingly. Not enough layers to it, I felt. Anyway, then we skip forward along the timeline, and I liked that last third a bit more again, but this time I felt again NS was trying to write from an interesting sociological PoV, but didn’t quite convince me with the characters. So I liked it – a lot in many parts – but from NS, I was a little sad that it wasn’t AWESOME.