In Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, the moon explodes in the first sentence. At first, the damage is mostly cosmetic because all the moon’s mass is technically still there, albeit in seven large chunks. The moon’s center of gravity (and here is one of Stephenson’s many lessons in physics) remains more or less where it was before the mysterious collision so it’s business as usual for Earth’s tides. Unfortunately, it’s not long before two of those seven chunks collide and create more chunks. Scientists the world over realize that each time another chunk is created, the odds of another collision only increase. The collisions are eventually going to result in an earth-wide event called the White Sky, which immediately precedes “the Hard Rain.”
One character describes the Hard Rain like this: “Those fiery trails we’ve been seeing in the sky lately, as the meteorites come in and burn up? There will be so many of those that they will merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilized.”
Long story short, the Hard Rain is coming in two years, at which point Earth will be inhospitable for a period of fifty centuries or more. Humanity only has a handful of months to prepare the preservation of the entire species. It’s going to require a ton of jury rigging and massive risk-taking to complete such a project. And if that’s not exciting to you, check you pulse, pal. It’s a very hard science fiction story that strongly reminds me of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s seminal Footfall, minus the elephant-aliens.
Seveneves begs to be read slowly and deliberately. If Stephenson’s writing were any denser, it would pass the Schwarzchild radius and devour us all. For those of you who haven’t read any of his stuff, I say “dense” in the kindest way possible—like Gene Wolfe turned up to eleven. You may have heard critics accuse Stephenson of slipping into tangents in which he goes into meticulous detail about language, culture, history, science, mathematics, or whatever else he finds pertinent to the plot. Well, yeah. That’s, like, kind of his shtick. The info dumps are so absurdly long, they eventually become amusing.
You likely won’t find a novelist who knows more about anything, but particularly orbital mechanics; Stephenson literally had a job tracking the trajectory of space debris. And boy, does he take every opportunity to remind us he knows what the hell he’s talking about.
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