
First 26 pages of Neal Stephenson's new novel Seveneves - Uhhrrr
http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/
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ceequof
It seems like my first knee-jerk impression of every Stephenson novel of the
last decade has been "ugh, terrible", gradually replaced by a retrospective
fondness after finishing it.

The first couple pages of Seveneves certainly does not impress, but maybe I'll
like it better after reading the whole thing.

~~~
MagicWishMonkey
Anathem was kind of a slog for the first 200-250 pages, but then it started to
get good, and then awesome, by the end of the book my mind was thoroughly
blown.

~~~
itp
I didn't find the beginning quite a slog but I did wonder if there was going
to be a "plot" in the conventional sense. As you say, the rest of the book was
a near-continuous crescendo. One scene in particular (Saunt Bucker's Basket!)
made me literally stop reading while my brain processed.

My wife read my copy after me. If I remember correctly, she more or less read
up to that scene in 5-10 page increments, and then read from that scene to the
end in most of one night.

~~~
pavel_lishin
> _Saunt Bucker 's Basket!_

That was, bar none, the best reading experience in my life.

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msielski
This helped make reading this a little easier. Copy and paste to your URL bar.
You may have to retype the javascript: as it appears to get stripped for
security.

    
    
      javascript:$('.entry').css({ "background":"#fff","color":"#333","padding":"10px","font-family":"Arial, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, sans-serif","font-size":"14px","font-style":"normal","font-variant":"normal","font-weight":"400","line-height":"20px" })

~~~
jefurii
You can also just turn styles off ("View > Page Style > No Style" in Firefox).

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soapdog
Or even better, if you`re in a recent version of Firefox you can click on the
little "open book" icon in the address bar and enter the reader mode which
looks pretty nice as can be seen in
[http://i.imgur.com/oiZGekO.png](http://i.imgur.com/oiZGekO.png)

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ceequof

         “Most black holes are formed when stars collapse,” Ivy said. 
         “But there’s a theory that some of them were created shortly 
         after the Big Bang. The universe was lumpy. Some of the lumps 
         might have been dense enough to undergo gravitational 
         collapse. They could form black holes that instead of 
         weighing what a star weighs could be a lot smaller.”
         “How small?”
         “I don’t think there’s a lower limit.”
    

Yes there is. Black holes lose mass by Hawking radiation:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawking_radiation)

A black hole smaller than 0.8% Earth masses loses more mass than it gains from
the cosmic microwave background, and will eventually evaporate.

~~~
Tloewald
That doesn't create a lower limit, just a life expectancy. And the life
expectancy is still very long — "within the lifespan of the universe"
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_black_hole)

~~~
ceequof
You are mistaken.

[http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1](http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803v1) (See the
table on page 15)

The lifespan of a 108,000 tonne black hole is ~350 hours. At that mass, its
event horizon is .32 attometres across, and the Hawking radiation it emits is
measured in gigaelectronvolts.

~~~
Tloewald
350h is a lifespan, and you're quoting a speculative paper. I haven't read the
story extract, but I assume the plan would be to bleed matter into the micro
black hole to maintain it. (Arthur C Clarke posited the same concept 40 odd
years ago in his Imperial Earth novels.)

I assume your point is that a GeV is a minuscule amount of energy, which isn't
going to push 130kT around at any speed.

~~~
ceequof

      you're quoting a speculative paper.
    

Hawking radiation has never been directly observed, but it is generally
presumed to exist.

    
    
      I haven't read the story extract, but I assume the plan 
      would be to bleed matter into the micro black hole to 
      maintain it.
    

Read the story. In context, the character is talking about how small a
natural, primordial black hole can be. There is an obvious lower bound, due to
Hawking radiation.

    
    
      I assume your point is that a GeV is a minuscule amount of 
      energy, which isn't going to push 130kT around at any speed.
    

Read the paper. That's the pseudotemperature of the event horizon. It's so hot
that it's glowing largely in ultraenergetic gamma rays. The total power
radiated by a .32 attometre black hole is 5,519 petawatts.

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allworknoplay
I love this on his page about the novel:

"The only part that gave me any trouble was calibrating an ending that would
leave the reader satisfied that the story had concluded while leaving the
impression of an open-ended world."

Surprise! Still can't write endings. It's okay Neal, it's what we've come to
expect, and we totally love you anyway.

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nissimk
I liked it, but I am a big Stephenson fan. I skipped Anathem and the baroque
cycle books, but Diamond Age is one of my favorite books and I also like Snow
Crash and Cryptonomicon a lot.

Reamde was pretty good, and this is an interesting setup.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)

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bryanlarsen
Reamde was very mediocre compared to the ones you skipped.

~~~
nissimk
I enjoy the plot where multiple groups converge on a single location to get
their hands on some key object. It's the same structure as two of my favorite
movies: The Fifth Element and True Romance. When the groups are stereotypes as
in True Romance, I find it even more entertaining. Reamde had all of that:
bikers, anti government mountain people who are armed to the teeth and
gangsters from multiple foreign countries :-)

I'll see if I can check out Anathem at some point, but Baroque is really too
much of a commitment for me. I'm a slow reader.

Edit: Anathem not Anathema (thanks __david__ and lmm)

~~~
lmm
Anathem, not Anathema.

Books I've liked recently that have done that sort of thing: Rainbows End, or
if you're willing to venture a little further in genre then Stardust (by a
different Neil).

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tormeh
Rainbows End is amazing.

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bryanlarsen
Warning: publishing date is May 19th so you'll be left hanging for a month if
it sucks you in.

~~~
elevensies
That reminds me, I really hate how they start promoting books a few weeks
before they are released. I see the promotion, and then when I go to buy it
"pre-order" ??!?! Like it isn't a fucking yacht, I give you the money you give
me the book, I'm not interested in a more complicated transaction. I'd be
happier if they did the promotion during a time frame where I could actually
buy it.

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TylerE
You can buy the ebook. It'll just magically appear on my Kindle on release
day.

~~~
myth_buster
Same as pre-order I suppose. I suppose his complaint was that don't build the
hype unless we can get hold of it. It's like Nolan's movie teasers which end
with "Summer, ++Now.Year()".

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jacquesm
At a guess the moon will turn into a ring surrounding the earth in the longer
term, curious how it will continue.

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3am
It will turn into a cloud of asteroids surrounding the earth intended to
prevent the human race from unleashing whatever hell we create with those
autonomous mining robots on the ISS (would be my guess, at least). Feel like
the agent/patient distinction is pretty blunt foreshadowing against it being a
survival/resilience story against and abstract antagonist like a random
natural disaster.

edit: [http://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-A-Novel-Neal-
Stephenson/dp/0...](http://www.amazon.com/Seveneves-A-Novel-Neal-
Stephenson/dp/0062190377) gives a bit more detail and it is likely it will not
become a ring. Probably a lot of highly energetic reentrant debris capable of
generating a lot of atmospheric heat.

edit: @jaquesm - i'm allowing for creative license, and was making guess
explaining what would happened based on my gut feel for the plot direction.
you're probably correct on the physics.

~~~
jacquesm
That's at odds with what I understand of the celestial mechanics of the earth-
moon system, roughly the same thing happened to Saturn and even though the
rings have thickness they are relatively thin compared to their width.

What reason would there be for the moon debris to form a cloud, that would
require a lot of energy added to the pieces after the initial collision to get
them to go into other orbits? (I'm sure Stephenson has researched this but it
makes no sense to me at first sight.)

The options really are quite limited, re-unification in a 'lump', one or more
large chunks escaping earth orbit or a ring, I don't see how a cloud is
possible.

All but the second would result in quite a bit of debris landing on earth as
the debris from the collisions would be scattered in all directions.

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jhallenworld
Energy was added, so I'm sure it will be a dynamic mess..

On the other hand, the moon is beyond earth's Roche limit so I don't think the
final result will be rings.

Also what is the tensile strength of the center of the moon? I'm not sure it's
possible to have 7 large non-spheroidal shaped pieces, but google suggests
~800 km is the lower limit for rocky bodies, so maybe it's just possible.

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pronoiac
Oh right, this is coming out next month! He's going on tour to support the
release:

[http://www.nealstephenson.com/tour.html](http://www.nealstephenson.com/tour.html)

~~~
brerlapn
Thank you for mentioning this. I would have likely never heard about the tour
in time otherwise; an upvote isn't enough good karma for you, sir/madame!

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classicsnoot
The first time i read _Cryptonomicon_ it was a pleasure the whole way through,
from page 01 to page >9000\. This may have been because it was almost entirely
news to me; i had little to no experience with anything it covered. I finished
it in 3-4 days. What a delight. Each reread i learn something new. Conversely,
I went into _Snow Crash_ with high expectations only to find the story
somewhat silly. Not that there weren't really great moments.

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2close4comfort
19th May will not get here soon enough. Always good sometime challenging but I
never get sick of reading his books!!

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jefurii
astronomicalbodiesformerlyknownasthemoon.com was registered by someone on
2015-03-12.

~~~
thundt
[http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-
exce...](http://www.nealstephenson.com/news/2015/04/13/seveneves-excerpt/)

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zkhalique
It's always so hard to read things on a dark background on a backlit screen.
And especially looking at light backgrounds after that. Why is that?

~~~
jff
I don't know, but the white text started sort of "flickering" between bright
and dark after a while; a paragraph might look pretty bright, then it would
suddenly seem darker again while the paragraph above looked brighter. It
messed with my head and eventually I had to stop.

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nitrogen
The gradient in the background might have had something to do with that. Also,
low grade LCDs have obnoxiously extreme brightness variations from top to
bottom that are most prominent in the mid-to-dark grays.

~~~
jff
Ah, but this is my big fancy expensive Dell screen at work... I think it was a
combination of the webpage and my brain flipping out.

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slashnull

         “Not now, Pa, I know the moon’s pretty, I’m right in the middle of debugging this method . . .”

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tonetheman
My eyes... dear god. Everywhere I look I see false images of letters.

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CamperBob2
_The moon blew up with out warning and for no apparent reason._

TIL that "with out" is two words.

(I mean, seriously. How do you screw up your _very first sentence_?)

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joshschreuder
It appears to be fixed.

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robodale
my eyes

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plg
jesus god, what awful typesetting

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grey-area
The entire body is letterspaced and bold, that's the main problem. If you're
in chrome you can edit styles on the fly, so try adding:

    
    
        letter-spacing: 0;
        font-weight: 300;
        line-height: 1.5em;

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ghaff
Cabin, which if I'm reading the CSS properly is what he's using, isn't a bad
typeface. (Humanist sans serif related to Gill which I rather like.) But the
spacing and weight--combined with the white on black--are really awful.

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expert
Man, no kidding. It feels like a very inelegant info dump. While I realize
those tend to show up in Stephenson books at some point or another, it's a
rough way to start. I liked a lot about Anathem but found Reamde unmemorable.
I'd love to see a return to form

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pinewurst
I appreciate his consideration in saving me a future time investment. Plus
everyone else now gets moved up a slot on the library reserve list. A win-win.

~~~
ChrisClark
Wow, what a horribly self-righteous way to tell everyone about your personal
tastes. I feel enlightened already.

