Narrated by Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron, Seveneves by Neal Stephenson has a runtime of 31 hrs 55 mins on Audible.
Publisher’s Summary
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon comes an exciting and thought-provoking science fiction epic—a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years.
What would happen if the world were ending?
A catastrophic event renders the earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space.
But the complexities and unpredictability of human nature coupled with unforeseen challenges and dangers threaten the intrepid pioneers, until only a handful of survivors remain . . .
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.
A writer of dazzling genius and imaginative vision, Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, technology, psychology, and literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary and eerily recognizable. As he did in Anathem, Cryptonomicon, the Baroque Cycle, and Reamde, Stephenson explores some of our biggest ideas and perplexing challenges in a breathtaking saga that is daring, engrossing, and altogether brilliant.
© 2015 by Neal Stephenson. ℗ 2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.
Audiobook Details
- Narrated by: Mary Robinette Kowal and Will Damron
- Length: 31 hrs 55 mins
- Publisher: Brilliance Audio
- Release year: 2015
- Audible category: Science Fiction & Fantasy / Fantasy / Science Fiction & Fantasy
Listener Ratings
Seveneves holds an average listener rating of 4.3/5 from 25948 Audible ratings.
On Audible, ratings for this title break down into narration performance and story separately:
- Performance (narration): 4.4/5
- Story: 4.2/5
- 5-star ratings: 52% of all ratings
What Audible Listeners Are Saying
3/5 stars — “Odd narrator choice”
This is a tough one to rate. There are long stretches of the book that are fascinating and fast moving. And there are stretches that feel even longer that are dishwater dull. Stephenson is usually able to keep technical discussions interesting — Cryptonomicon, for example, deals with heavily complex subjects but doesn’t get boring. Seveneves does. Not sure about who I’d have read it instead, but Ms. Kowal made some very strange choices for main characters’ voices. The producer/recording engineer/whoever was sitting in the booth also wasn’t paying close attention–there are more than the usual number of garbled and mispronounced words. I get it; it’s a long book. But this is not anywhere close to the best of all possible recordings.— Josh Mitchell, Audible listener
4/5 stars — “Good hard sci-fi with a human touch”
Seveneves will rightly take its place in the sci-fi cannon as one of the best post-apocalyptic novels written. From the demolition of the moon, the abandonment of earth, settlement in space and the troubling re-claiming of earth, Stephenson’s saga gives the hard sci-fi lover exactly what they crave in terms of exquisitely researched, cogently fictionalized detail of space-flight, orbital physics, and planetary geology while, at the same time, providing with fans of soft, social science-fiction with a nuanced glimpse into the personal, socio-political and even genetic and epigenetic ramifications of an apocalypse. Some may quibble about the science, or Stephenson’s extrapolations, but no one can accuse him of not having expended serious levels of effort in gaming out all the possibilities. <br/><br/>That being said, Seveneves does suffer slightly from some long, dry bits of character introspection and some divergences that could have benefitted from an editor’s pen. Nor can anyone accuse Stephenson of attempting much in the way of artfulness when it comes to the prose. But on the whole, it is a competently told story. Structurally, it might have benefitted from some timeline insertions. The first two thirds of the novel chronicles the expanded space-station’s survivors landing on a suitable chunk of the fractured moon and then jumps five thousand years into the future, when the ancestors of those early exiles return to a revitalized earth. Although an attempt is made to fill in the gulf with some rather telling flashbacks in the third part, it does suffer a little from some rather blatant info-dumps that occur a little too conveniently to hide their necessity.<br/><br/>Seveneves provide the reader with some strong characters at both the beginning and in the later part of the story. One cannot accuse Stephenson of producing characters with great psychological depth, but neither can he be accused of producing altogether cardboard heroes or villains. Its fair to say that, sometimes, the choice of which characters he chooses to provide rounded portraits for are not always as narratively satisfying as they could be. <br/><br/>Stephenson takes on some very interesting social themes, from the uses, abuses and limits of power to the consequences of directed genetic manipulation. He also does a good job of extrapolating on the evolution of connectivity, social media and the part narrative plays in shaping our expectations of the future as well as the way we look at our histories.<br/><br/>If I had to put my finger on what prompted me to leave off a star from what, in all fairness, is a pretty magnificent book, it was the ending. It is an iconically satisfying hollywood ending in which all major threads are almost too neatly tied up. And, of course, we are left with the tease of a whole parallel survival saga to be satisfied in a sequel<br/><br/>None of my criticisms should put you off reading this novel if you’re a fan of hard sci-fi or post-apocalyptic fiction. Its structural and narrative flaws don’t outweigh its merit as one of the very best treatments of the end of world scenario.<br/><br/>Narration: the female narrator’s attempt at regional and foreign accents poor and sometimes a little frustrating, but it wasn’t enough to put me off listening.— Madeleine, Audible listener
4/5 stars — “What happened to the end of the story?!?”
This book was very interesting with great characters and plot. It’s super long and you really get into it. However you get towards the end and all this development is still happening and bam it just ends. Maybe I missed somewhere that this was going to be a series. But if not this book ends like the author was tired of writing so he just quit. Hopefully it is a series and I’m just stupid.— Kalia Kinser, Audible listener
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