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.)

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.

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.

What about tides? Would earth rotate faster?