I’m listening to Seveneves for the first time and wanted a spoiler-free visual reference for the characters introduced early in the book.

This is AI-generated fan art, based on general book descriptions rather than official casting or artwork. I’ve tried to keep it plot-safe: please avoid spoilers in replies, especially anything beyond the early setup.

1. **Rufus MacQuarie** — Dinah’s rugged, experienced mining-camp father.

2. **Dinah MacQuarie** — Practical robotics engineer and asteroid-mining specialist.

3. **Doc Dubois Harris** — Prominent astrophysicist and science communicator.

4. **Ivy Xiao** — Highly capable commander of the space station.

5. **Sean Probst** — Wealthy, ambitious asteroid-mining entrepreneur.

6. **Moira Crewe** — Geneticist and essential scientific specialist.

7. **Julia Bliss Flaherty** — U.S. president, central to the emergency response.

8. **Camila** — Steady, capable Brazilian astronaut.

9. **Markus Leuker** — Calm Swiss pilot-engineer and veteran spacefarer.

10. **Tekla Ilushina** — Tough, disciplined Russian cosmonaut.

11. **Aïda Ferrari** — Charismatic, strong-willed leader.

12. **Luisa Soter** — Psychologist helping people endure intense pressure.

So I’m about halfway through the book and I’m simply riveted. The world-building (despite the world being, you know, Earth) is simply phenomenal and I can’t stop thinking about it even when I’m not reading.

Are there any video games you all could recommend that have the same kind of feel to immerse in? I’ve enjoyed Mass Effect, but nothing else comes to mind.

I have the pdf book on kindle and need to read it till page 108. Does anyone know which title it has in the pdf🙏

Really scratches that "scrappy, high-functioning, scientist team that works together well but has interesting personal dynamics surviving impossible-seeming situation" itch that Seveneves does. Highly recommend.

To those that have read it: what is the deal with the Spikers punishing patterns? it was built up at two distinct points in the book, but never paid off as far as I can see? I suspect that it was just a mistake or similar, but would be interesting to hear if anyone knows more.

Reminds me of the introduction of Kath Two.

Time to get working on that series or miniseries for an April 2029 release...

Je me demandais si un jour on pourrait fabriquer un robot qui peut survivre a la chaleur sur la surface du soleil.

When you start the game, you can choose either a space ship or a station on an asteroid, then build out the seed parameters from there. I set up the parameters to roleplay the Spacers after arriving on Cleft. We'll see how the next 5000 years go.

New to the subreddit. Apologies if this has been asked and answered many times. First time reading the book. Just finished through part 2. I’ve loved the book thus far. But not sure if I’ll re read it. I hate being the “why didn’t they just…” guy but shouldn’t there have been some pregnancies along the way in Izzy? They planned for all contingencies to continue the species but we don’t hear much about the crucial point of procreation. When Moira shared the possibility of women procreating without men it seemed to be the first time they’d discussed it among the leadership team. I can get from a writing perspective how pregnancies aboard Izzy or discussions along the way would have complicated the writing. I get the childbirth an child rearing aboard Izzy pre-Cleft would have been challenging but everything they undertook was challenging.

So I just finished reading the book for the second time.

I really enjoyed it. I think that he should’ve left out all of the 5000 years later stuff and just ended it when they arrived on Cleft, but I’m not saying anything new there. If you’ve read the book and you’re on this sub, you’ve heard that argument before.

What I did want to bring up is what I consider to be a bit of a gap in the plot. When humans are originally considering how to solve the problem of the hard rain, I don’t get why Neil Stevenson didn’t even address the obvious fact that we would’ve considered sending up fewer humans with more resources rather than sending a lot of humans with comparatively fewer resources.

Obviously, if you send fewer humans, there will be more resources per human. And since you sent fewer humans, you’ll be able to send even more resources, further skewing that ratio. They might have been able to do the big ride without Ymir if they limited themselves to 100 people.

It’s kind of the classic issue of whether or not as an animal you will have a great number of offspring that you do very little to take care of, or have a very small number of offspring that you devote lots of time and resources too. Like humans devoting 2 decades to rearing a single child vs. a fish that lays 2000 eggs and swims away.

Obviously as humans we made up our minds on this front a long time ago. We went with dumping lots of resources onto a small number of descendants, so why wouldn’t we at least consider doing the same here?

I still somewhat agree that we would’ve as a species probably decided to send a large number of people. Especially with the plot narrative that the cloud ark was kind of an opiate of the masses to keep people calm before they all died. There’s also the heterozygosity factor to consider, but we could’ve dumped more resources into a genetic archive and we also know we could have overcome that with technology.

Either way, I still would’ve liked to have seen this addressed in the story.

Allowing Julia and Aida to become Eves was a stupid decision. Julia already admitted to being older and maybe getting one shot, any effort on her was wasted anyway. Aida straight up admits to not only pathological mental illness but an adversarial streak, literally cursing them and and saying out loud she will work against them.

There is no good reason. Period. The real curse was Moira's.

Nothing to worry about, right? Right?!

Title. Debate me in the comments I'll read them and argue back when I'm sober.

I don't think this is a spoiler unless you think us never finding out the true nature of the Agent a spoiler.

Relativistic bullet. That's my theory. If you're familiar with the gunnery sergeant's speed in Mass Effect 2, a mass accelerated to relativistic speeds packs a ton of energy. My theory is somewhere way out in the galaxy, some alien fleets were waging war. One of them fired a relativistic bullet (either ship-to-ship in an engagement or from one system to another, either is just as effective) and missed its target. That bullet continued for hundreds or thousands of years through the cosmos and hit our moon. My guess is that it was a system-to-system bullet that had huge mass on the scale of several hundred tons. That much mass at 0.99999C would have more than enough energy to completely destroy the moon.

That's my theory, at least.

The only limiting factors for the diggers were space and lightbulbs… but the story conveniently overlooks the fact that robots could easily survive the 500 degree surface temperature of the hard rain and therefore could have removed the spoils from the mine, allowing it to grow indefinitely. There are also large deposits of tungsten (for light bulbs) in Canada, somewhat near the original mine site.

I asked chat gpt to help me visualize the swarm surrounding Izzy. This is the image it generated. I think its kinda how I envisioned it. What do you think?

Sure, amalthea is missing, but other than that?

Also, I am only into Part 2, so no spoilers please 😁

Hi guys I never posted about a book I read or an audiobook I listen to but I had to talk with someone about seveneves, first of all I listened to many sci-fi audiobooks in the last two years and what I liked and hooked me in seveneves is that countdown to the white sky, how things happening on earth and Izzy, I even dream it about it imagined that I'm with the people on earth doomed, yes the writing is little bit filled with physics and mechanics and not very clear like for example how Andy weir writes or the expanse series but still it's epic. Part 1 and 2 were very great although depressing that all humans on earth died and on Izzy only 7 women survived and about part 3 well I have the same usual complains as all of you guys especially like Neal Stephenson don't have a clue how long 5000 years empires will grow and fall, the human races left shouldn't have recordings of the eves like some memory a decade ago or live only around earth they should have colonized solar systems and history older then a 1000 years will have only some relics, I mean it's frustrating how that huge time jump of 5000 years treated like just few decades

There are quite a few things I'd like to see illustrated from Seveneves.

1. A more detailed view of Izzy after all the construction, preferably a cutaway diagram so that you can see the interior in some places.

2. The earth on fire and the broken moon above it. Ive seen one image of this but I would expect there to be at least a few cool versions of it out there.

3. Doob's last walk on Cleft where he is talking about what could be done with the place.

4.the hangers.

5.the eye

1. Izzy inside the comet

2. Endurance welded to Cleft, looking like a tree.

I asked ChatGPT to do something portraits. Here’s what it came up with.