Seveneves

Seveneves is both a wonderful book and a frustrating one.

On the wonderful side Stephenson geeking out about space is what I've been waiting for. I waded through him geeking out about linguistics, computing, cryptography, philosophy, and economics to get to this point. Frustratingly, the space infodumps are clumsily handled. There are often transitions to the infodumps but not transitions out of them, which makes sense because they go on for longer than a reader can reasonably maintain the illusion that they are simply exposition.

I found myself attached to characters, even to the point of tears, but wanted more time with them. And yes I know that part of the point of an apocalyptic book is that there isn't enough time to give to characters because everyone is dying. But I wanted this to be a character book. I would even have sacrificed some of the more tedious orbital mechanic explanations.

My point is that I loved it enough to recommend it to fans of Stephenson and those that are about to let the good rise above the bad. (and I'm maybe, just a teeny weeny bit, cursing the luck of whatever alternate universe exists where Scalzi got this idea instead and wrote a 5 book long series of it because I wanted to know more at the end)