I arbitrarily started reading Seveneves like a month ago, before I ever heard of Project Hail Mary

The first two thirds of Seveneves were great, but the level of exposition tired even me out, and I love hard sci-fi. The last third felt like he crushed a completely different novel into the same setting while overexplaining as many differences as possible, and I was really underwhelmed by it. Still worth reading though, I think Stephenson has his ups and downs but on the whole he's a good writer.

neil stephenson definitely has a unique vibe, his world-building is wild but yeah, some parts really drag. if you enjoyed seveneves, you might dig project hail mary too, they both have that epic scale but with different flavors.

Seveneves was such a massive letdown to me, I was so exicted to see how the premise would play out but it's such an absolute snoozefest of a book. It almost doesn't even feel like it has a story, it's more like 900 pages of things being described than anything.

I'm in the category where I like the long drawn out explanations. Seveneves in particular had lots of those and that makes it one of my favorite Stephenson books. I met him while he was touring for Fall and he's interesting. If you're looking for Crichton style, try Daniel Suarez. Hard to put down, cool concepts, little more fiction.

I agree. The whole concept of Seveneves was freaking awesome. I adore good concepts. But man, I do not need like 20+ pages explaining how the life pod onion things function. The in between where actual plot was happening was great though. Half the reason I read the book was for the epilogue, but it was really underwhelming. Really interesting ideas that absolutely deserved more than the 3 or so chapters it got. Couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a 1 chapter epilogue or a whole second part of the book, so it’s something in between, and it doesn’t work.

Stephenson is one of my favorite writers of all the time. I think a lot the criticism he gets for the way he ends his books is unwarranted, and is mostly left by people used to traditional narrative arcs. Like William Gibson, he is brilliant on multiple levels.

> this is a weird coincidence. Sorry if I’m missing something obvious, but what’s the coincidence? At any rate, I’d say that Stephenson is one of the greatest writers around at making *settings*, but is fairly weak at putting together *plots*. In his best work, the setting is created in such a way that it creates a plot, with *Anathem* (my favorite of his books) being probably the best example. Other times it doesn’t go so well. For instance, while I loved *The Diamond Age* and found lots of it absolutely unforgettable, I don’t think I could actually tell you much that, you know, happened in it. I felt similarly about *Cryptonomicon*, even though he didn’t create the setting so much as curate it.* Overall I liked *Seveneves* a lot. It’s certainly not fast-paced, but the ideas had enough going on to keep me reading pretty avidly. My biggest complaint is that it didn’t answer some the biggest questions, teasing a sequel that hasn’t materialized instead. *For about two thirds of the book I thought it was an alternate reality since all the American characters called Japan “Nippon”. Then I realized that Stephenson just likes calling it Nippon.

But the story summary of this sounds absolutely nothing like project hail mary.