Getting right down to business, Seveneves blows up the moon in its first sentence, and then spends the next two-thirds of its 850+ pages in a relatable near-future in which humanity has but two short years to prepare for the Hard Rain, when the shattered pieces of our fallen satellite crash down upon the planet, burning the very skies and rendering the surface uninhabitable for millennia. Even if it's a task as daunting as rebooting the entire human race from a surviving population of only seven women. It's a disaster novel to end all disaster novels, and even though it foregrounds the sad reality that some men (and women) just want to watch the world burn, it also makes the point that we have enough grit and determination to bounce back from literally anything if we set our minds to it. Taking thematic cues from present-day anxieties about eco-disaster and the world's decreasing overall sustainability, Stephenson delivers the big-idea, hard SF magnum opus that the genre has been pining for since we lost guys like Hal Clement and Robert Forward.

Welcome to Neal Stephenson's world, where the unusual is par for the course. What is even more unusual is that, in spite of its apocalyptic story, Seveneves still manages to be an optimistic vision of the future. Tweets by may seem unusual for a man who has been so critical of science fiction's recent lack of optimistic future visions to have gone all-out with an end-of-the-world novel.