Seveneves is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson published in 2015. The story tells of the desperate efforts to preserve Homo sapiens in the wake of apocalyptic events on Earth after the unexplained disintegration of the Moon and the remaking of human society as a space-based civilization after a severe genetic bottleneck.
Plot
Part One In the near future, an unknown agent causes the Moon to shatter. As the pieces begin to collide with one another, astronomer and science popularizer "Doc" Dubois Harris calculates that Moon fragments will begin entering Earth's atmosphere, forming a white sky and blanketing the Earth within two years with what he calls a "Hard Rain" of bolides, causing the atmosphere to heat to incandescence and the oceans to boil away, rendering Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. The world's leaders evacuate as many people and resources as possible to a swarm of "arklet" habitats called a "Cloud Ark" in orbit with the International Space Station (ISS), bolted onto an iron Arjuna asteroid called Amalthea, which provides some protection against Moon debris. By the time the Hard Rain begins 701 days after the destruction of the Moon, approximately 1,500 people have been launched into orbit.
Part Two Human civilization, as well as nearly all life on Earth, is obliterated. US President Julia Bliss Flaherty manages to get herself up to the Cloud Ark despite provisions that members of government would not be launched into space. Flaherty persuades the majority of the Arklets to abandon the ISS and to move to higher orbit in a decentralized swarm, in the process causing ISS to be struck by a bolide and suffer catastrophic damage that kills 300. Meanwhile, leader Markus Leuker and robotics engineer Dinah MacQuarie take a small crew to an ice comet fragment that billionaire Sean Probst has brought into Earth's orbit for the purpose of providing propellant for the space station. Probst's crew has died of radiation sickness caused by nuclear fallout from his ship's nuclear reactor. They bring the ice to the Cloud Ark, though MacQuarie is the only survivor of this mission. Using the ice comet, the remaining third of the Cloud Ark and the ISS (now dubbed Endurance) take three years to reach the Cleft, a Grand Canyon–sized crevasse on the now-exposed iron core of the Moon. By this time, Flaherty's Swarm has been decimated, resorting to cannibalism to survive, while fallout from Probst's ship has killed most of Endurance's crew. The 11 Swarm survivors, led by a woman named Aïda, negotiate reuniting the Swarm with Endurance. However, fearing ostracism by the crew, Aïda starts a battle for control of Endurance that fails, but reduces the population even further. When Endurance reaches the safety of the Cleft, there are only eight survivors, all female, of whom only seven (Dinah, Ivy, Aïda, Tekla, Camila, Moira, and Julia) are still young enough to bear children. Moira can still use her genetics laboratory to rebuild the human race by automictic parthenogenesis. They agree that each of the seven "Eves" gets to choose how her offspring will be genetically modified or enhanced.
Part Three Five thousand years later, there are three billion people living in a giant ring of different "habitats" circling the Earth. The population is divided into seven races, each of which descends from and is named after one of the seven Eves and carries distinct racial characteristics that harken back to the personalities and characteristics of the original Eves. Most of the iron core of the Moon has been used to build the habitats, while Cleft itself has been turned into the Cradle, an exclusive piece of real estate attached to a tether that occasionally "docks" with Earth along the equator. This ring is divided into two states, Red and Blue, which are engaged in a cold war. Efforts to terraform Earth for the past several hundred years have proven fruitful; although the process is incomplete, some have resettled the planet in violation of treaty agreements. "Doc" Hu Noah forms a "Seven" with one member from each race to investigate mysterious people who have been sighted on Earth. They discover that some humans ("Diggers") have survived the Hard Rain on the planet by living in deep mines, and others survived in ocean trenches using submarines ("Pingers"); the latter group descends from a separate, secret underwater ark that had been created concurrently with the Cloud Ark.
Characters
Parts One and Two
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