Seveneves

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Bizarre Alien Biology: The Pingers have adapted to aquatic life over the 5,000 years since Zero. They appear to not have external genitals, though they're probably just hidden by skin flaps.

Ulrika Ek: A Swedish project manager of the construction of Cloud Ark. She refused to provide separate religious worship pods, earning the ire of every religious group, and limited it to an interfaith pod. She dies from a stroke during the journey to cleft.In 1992, Snow Crash mixed cyberpunk, memetics and Sumerian myths against a virtual landscape. 1995's Diamond Age was steampunk before it existed and wildly imaginative. Reamde and Cryptonomicon were as detailed and complex as books can be; some of the best writing ever -- and that is not limited to Sci-Fi. I'm not even sure they were Sci-Fi.

Chekhov's Gun: When Ivy and Dinah first rescue Julia, Dinah notes that Pete Starling was wearing an empty shoulder holster. Later on, Julia ends up firing the gun from said holster at Tekla, injuring her, and Aida's group uses it to kill one of the survivors when they invade Izzy. Stephenson populates his space station with a lovable cast of determined, snappily talking geeks, the coolest of whom are women: Ivy, the unflappable station chief; Dinah, the robot expert; and Tekla, the sarcastic Russian cosmonaut. When Ivy is replaced by one Markus Leuker, the novel explains sardonically: “The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man.” Underwater City: Kulak of the Red is that, at least during construction. And though we never see it, it's clear the Pingers have created a major underwater civilization substantially larger than that of the Diggers, though still much smaller than that of the Spacers.

Tropes used:

By the time the Hard Rain begins 701 days after the destruction of the Moon, approximately 1,500 people have been launched into orbit. After the moon inexplicably explodes, Dubois Harris and others figure out that they have around two years before the debris starts raining from the sky and ends all life on the planet. This causes a world-wide scramble to put everything possible into the Cloud Ark.

The descendants 5,000 years in the future in the Distant Finale speak "Angliski," a pidgin of English mixed with Russian, but which is still mutually intelligible with that of the present day and with those of the descendants of the other isolated surviving communities. Justified in that the Epic is almost entirely in English, is extremely well documented, and is central to Spacer culture. It is highly likely that English would become the lingua franca as there is no other language spoken by more than one of the final eight survivors, apart from possibly Russian which is Tekla's native language and which Ivy and Dinah would have had to learn as astronauts. But then subverted: in the reveal Doc makes, he notes the Seven are expecting Cyrillic characters mixed with Roman ones, and later on the Red diplomatic envoy to the Diggers is specified as speaking "Pre-Zero English," so what we're really dealing with is a Translation Convention. Our Mermaids Are Different: The Pingers are a race of people who have modified their genetics to swim underwater for long periods of time. Our Presidents Are Different: Julia is the last President of the United States, and the ancestor to a religion-obsessed race aligned with the Blue. Readers of Stephenson’s previous work definitely know what I mean. This is not a writer who does things in half-measures. The author of “Snow Crash” and “Cryptonomicon,” and many other similarly imposing books in the past couple of decades, Stephenson seems to know how to do things in exactly one way: all the way. He publishes fiction by the pound. Famed In-Story: Everyone from the first two parts of the book are heroes of "The Epic," in the final part, The Epic serving as half-documentary, half-Bible for the Spacer civilization.Aristocrats Are Evil: The only remnants of Aristocracy on the Ring Habitat are Aritaics, a subrace of Aïdans, almost universally allied with the Red. It's not exactly clear whether Red is actually evil, however.

United Space of America: The US doesn't survive the Hard Rain though Blue/Dinan society is in a sense Space America. The Orbits of Seveneves" (PDF). PRINCIPIUM - Issue 20 (February 2018), p. 16–18. The Initiative for Interstellar Studies . Retrieved 17 December 2018. Diggers: Descendants from people who survived the Hard Rain in underground shelters, including Dinah's father and his family.Stephenson first began planning his novel around 2006, while he was working at Blue Origin. He observed: "Some researchers had begun to express concern over the possibility that a collision between two pieces of debris might spawn a large number of fragments, thereby increasing the probability of further collisions and further fragments, producing a chain reaction that might put so much debris into low Earth orbit as to create a barrier to future space exploration. Having been raised on the idea of 'Space, the Final Frontier', I was both appalled and fascinated by the possibility that it might instead become an impenetrable ceiling only a hundred or so miles above our heads." [2] Such a collisional domino effect of satellite destruction is known as the Kessler syndrome. Because at least this way, I wouldn't have to wait a long time for a sequel when I wasn't satisfied with the first. Can you imagine, or do you remember when Hyperion came out and you got to the end and went, "Huh?" with no Fall of Hyperion to complete it? It's the same deal, although, I'll be honest, Hyperion is still better than this novel. (If you peeps haven't read it, then do so. It's still very high praise to be compared to it, even in a lesser capacity.)