Engineering Fiction

Monday, July 6th, 2015

The first two-thirds of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves is not science fiction so much as engineering fiction, John Derbyshire notes:

The moon suddenly disintegrates, cause unknown. There are seven big pieces and innumerable smaller ones.

At first there seems no cause for alarm. The fragments are gravitationally bound. The single, solid moon has been replaced by a rubble cloud; that’s all. The big pieces — orbiting their common center of gravity — occasionally collide and shatter, but there seems to be no danger in that.

Then someone does the math. The number of collisions will increase exponentially, reaching a “hockey stick” upward turn in two years’ time. Then trillions of moon fragments will fall from orbit onto the Earth, superheating the atmosphere and sterilizing the surface. The bombardment will last for millennia.

The first two-thirds of Seveneves describes the frenzied two-year effort to get enough people and materials into orbit for life up there to be self-sustaining. The International Space Station, somewhat enhanced from its actual current configuration, plays a lead role.

At this point in what we used to call “the Space Age” (remember?), ISS — now in its 15th year of continuous occupation — is deeply unglamorous. Probably most Americans are not aware of its existence. Neal Stephenson is very aware. He has researched ISS down to the last lug. It’s the toehold he needs to make his story work.

So this first two-thirds of the book is in fact not so much science fiction as engineering fiction. There are no just-barely-imaginable scientific possibilities in play here, only Newtonian mechanics and a relentless press of technical problems large and small. Large: Those trillions of falling rocks will fall through the orbital zone ISS inhabits. Small: The human eyeball loses its shape in prolonged weightlessness, so everyone needs new eyeglasses.

You either like this kind of thing or you don’t. I couldn’t get enough of it, and breezed through these first 566 pages.

Comments

  1. Lucklucky says:

    “At first there seems no cause for alarm.”

    What about tides? Would earth rotate faster?

  2. Bill says:

    LuckyLucky, I think Stephenson covered that by some sort of reference to the center of mass of the fragments during the first part of the novel, which was still going round and round the earth. What happened after that I have no idea, because I, unlike John Derbyshire, had had quite enough after several hundred pages.

    When my wife asked about it, I said it was like a NASA spec that someone had spent the minimum effort on fictionalizing. Or something like that.

    Sure, I’ve read my share of hard sf, not to mention books like Tom Clancy’s doorstops (the ones that he actually wrote), and liked them with all their gory details. However, I think that the label “fiction” gives me the right to expect more than Mr. Stephenson provided in that particular work. My two cents.

    If Seveneves doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, but you want to read new fiction, try Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Peter Cline’s The Fold, or for a change try Sam Munson’s The War Against the Assholes.

  3. From the description it sounds like whatever broke up the moon’s interior structure didn’t add enough energy to keep the pieces from just coming back together via their mutual gravitation (that’s how the moon, like any astronomical body, formed in the first place after all). There might be effects on Earth from that scenario, but most wouldn’t be noticeable without instruments.

    I’ll have to read the book for the details of just what it was that did this in the first place, though I suspect that the second half will leave me as cold as it did our august reviewer.

  4. I see I’ve made an error in the above; I had confused Derbyshire’s review (he liked the second half) with someone else’s I had read at around the same time.

  5. Steve Johnson says:

    The tides wouldn’t initially be affected. The center of gravity of the rubble would be the same as the moon.

    By the time that’s not the case there are other, significantly bigger problems — namely constant bombardment with bolides for 5,000 or so years that heats the Earth’s atmosphere to the point where the oceans boil.

    I tore through this book and cannot recommend it highly enough.

    He explores technology and sociology in a very engaging way and makes a harsh cutting criticism of our short attention span culture as well as the pathological power seeking that comes up time after time in human society — people for whom reality is meaningless and only words matter and how committed to this world-view some people are.

    More directly, he sticks the shiv in the progs with the point that all human traits can be bred for and that human evolution is just as real and significant as evolution in every other species. (He softens the blow with some nonsense about engineering humans who are capable of epigenetic shifts based on their environment.)

  6. Bill says:

    It’s not recent fiction, but I should also mention The Martian, by Andy Weir (2011) as a highly technical piece of hard sf that I absolutely could not put down. If you like that sort of thing.

Leave a Reply