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This epic tale of survival of the human species in space after the earth gets wrecked by a “Hard Rain�� of meteorites was a real treat for me. It represents a landmark in revival of old themes of science fiction from the Golden Age of the 40s and 50s, which had hallmarks of inspiring a sense of wonder and of extolling human technological capacities and can-do spirit sufficient to break out of our fragile planetary prison. For those who have been disappointed in previous attempts to read recent Stephenson works, I see improvement in his character development and tendencies toward digression and diversion. A handful of characters here get fleshed out enough as lively personalities for satisfactory levels of emotional engagement, and the expository writing he incorporates to explain science and engineering feats are less like information dumps and more subjugated to the critical problem solving of the character’s heroic missions.

From the first line (“The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason��), the reader is placed in a marathon to prepare solutions for survival. The main characters are two women on the International Space Station, Dinah, an engineer from a company pursuing use of robots to mine asteroids, and Ivy, a physicist and NASA astronaut commanding “Izzy��. Their oddball friendship is forged as an island of sanity in the macho atmosphere of males in the complement of astronaut scientists on the station. When the modeling projections from earth experts tell them that within a couple of years that the big pieces of the moon will bash themselves up and throw off enough pieces to destroy the earth, we experience their tough emotional transitions in relating to loved ones destined to die along with everyone else. But they rise to the occasion. Ivy has to manage a massive remodeling of Izzy to accommodate as many people as earth can send, and Dinah gets tasked to use her cool array of robots to help with the engineering and to hollow out the asteroid recently brought in to the station by her company.

Another key character, Doob Harris, is a black astronomer turned into a public education whiz in the likeness of Neal deGrasse Tyson. Along with reports from Dinah’s miner father in Alaska and Ivy’s submarine commander husband, Doob contributes a lot to the eyewitness accounts of the progression of events on Earth. He is privy to a lot of meetings of the power elite and becomes tapped for inspiring cooperation and dedication to the colony enterprise, which calls for much sacrifice for survival of the few. He travels around as an official for media events associated with collecting pairs of boys and girls from each nation in proportion to their population. Though tens of thousands are selected, the sad secret is that fewer than two thousand can be sent. He is resigned to die with his family, but it turns out that his expertise in media relations and science-based propaganda are needs for Izzy’s mission.

The details of Izzy’s growth was fascinating. An image in the book shows the station bound to the asteroid at one end and a toroid which can be spun for artificial gravity, necessary for agriculture and for significant visitation by humans to avoid bone loss from weightlessness. Living space for the majority is created from modular inflatable cylinders or space capsules that can attack to station struts or fly freely in computed regulated swarms to dodge moon debris. They can be tethered in pairs and spun to make a centrifugal equivalent of gravity.



I love Stephenson’s interplay among factions on Izzy. The core of scientists and administrators making all the decisions, the cadre of mostly Russian astronauts sent up for the dangerous construction work, and the large set of youth who largely get ignored. The social and political evolution of this mix leads a number of dangerous crises. Appointment of a more powerful commander in place of Ivy becomes necessary, along with security forces to maintain order. The former U.S. president, who shows up uninvited, makes for an interesting and destabilizing villain in the factional disputes. How long can the effective dictatorship under martial law proceed? When does a constitution, bill of rights, and legal system become necessary? What is to stop a revolutionary faction from going off on their own?

Before the final apocalypse on Earth, Dinah’s boss mysteriously orders her to develop programming of her fleet of robots to work on sculpting ice. He arrives at Izzy unexpectedly and announces his bold plan to go get a big chunk of a comet to help assure the long term viability of the human space colony. He soon makes off with some of Ivy’s expert people, a small spaceship, a nuclear reactor, lots of supplies, and a lot of Dinah’s robots for this multiyear initiative. We get a big dose of science for this mission, but it’s worth it to make their brave and thrilling adventure come alive with high levels of plausibility and appreciation of its risks.

Ever since the real doom threatened by the Cold War our despair of science as a savior has only grown in response to the environmental devastations and mass extinctions arising from our human impacts in the world. Since my youth I have loved the big themes of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature and now thrive on its recent renaissance. In response to pervasive pessimism most books in this area have been on a down-bound train for a long time, often melding closely with dystopian fiction. This tale is hopeful over the ability of the species to work collaboratively to harness current technologies for achieving sustainable orbital human colonies. But it is also incorporates a realistic appreciation of the curse in man’s divisive nature and proclivities for violent conflict. Before the book gets very far, you will not only be wrenched by natural death of countless residents of earth by fiery cataclysm, you will experience a lot of losses among the space colonists due to human stupidities and competition for power. As the book blurb testifies, the nip and tuck of survival has a coda many years later:

But the complexities and unpredictablity of human nature coupled with unforeseen dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remains��
Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown �� to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth.

I will leave all details of the later part of the book unspoiled. Stephenson acknowledges his borrowing of ideas for this section:
While the first two parts of the story are a tale of straight-up global disaster and hastily improvised technology, I always viewed the third part of it as an opportunity to showcase many of the more positive ideas that have emerged over the last century, from the global community of people interested in space exploration. Many of the big hardware ideas of the latter part of the book have been kicking around in the literature for decades and will be recognized as old friend by longtime readers of hard science fiction.

Despite my appreciation of the plausibility of much of the engineering and physics in this book, I am somewhat disappointed that the biology did not get as much care. For one thing, living on reprocessed algae for generations is a bit of hand waving at the complexities involved for chemical manufacturing in a space environment. The problem of not having enough biodiversity in the human population in their final situation is handled okay with a fair projection of editing out deleterious mutations and splicing in of artificial variant of genes. However, the prospects of creating organisms and ecologies starting just from stored DNA sequences seems forever impossible to me. You will always need living cells of related species to insert any synthesized sequences into (for more information see this article from the ). E.O. Wilson in his book, The Diversity of Life, argues that an ecosystem with its interdependencies of thousands of species evolving over millions of years is unlikely to ever be something that technology interventions will ever be able to reconstitute. The idea in the end sections of generating races with different genetic proclivities in personality types also seemed not to be founded on current behavioral genetics as I understand it or likely to be founded on voluntary genetic segregation among human survivors.

Overall this book was an outstanding achievement that I will long treasure for its heights of imagination, fun, and adventure.