The Day the Moon Blew Up • Hacker News Board

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#101

Post by pavedwalden » Wed, May 18, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

aetherson wrote: post #47

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #22

I greatly enjoyed some of Stephenson's other works, but I was actually a bit disappointed with Seveneves. The narrative is well crafted, but unfortunately I just got stuck on the whole space ark concept and couldn't suspend disbelief enough to continue. Maybe someone else can explain why it made sense to focus on an orbiting refuge, right in the path of the Moon's fragments, rather than dig a bunch of underground cit…

Well...... You'd clearly be right if you were looking at a timeframe of a few years, or a few decades, or maybe a century or two. But if you successfully establish a long term presence in space, you've got access to a lot of resources. If you're stuck in a hole in the ground for 5,000 years, and the surface is considerably more hostile than space, I think there's at least a colorable argument that space is the way to…

I enjoyed thinking about why language might not change as much in the next 5000 years as it has in the past 1000. For one thing, widespread literacy and a relatively stable canon of literature should keep successive generations mutually intelligible. In the case of the novel's space society, I find it at least plausible that media archives from earth and thousands of hours of The Saga being viewed by all educated humans would freeze the spoken language in its current state.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#102

Post by pavedwalden » Wed, May 18, 2016, 4:51 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #66

peteretep wrote: post #23

The character identification bit is interesting. I had assumed the president was meant to be Hillary Clinton until I read someone angrily complaining about his take-down of Sarah Palin...

Well, the book was written in the age of Palin more than Clinton, so the parallel is inviting - but isn't JBF a pretty well read big city liberal, generally well respected in Doobs circles? It's a very subtle dig. However, I read JBF as a catch-all figure for everything bad about politicians (generally useless, except to ferment conflict to serve their own path to power), so it's not surprising that people would proj…

When asked about the Hillary comparison at a book signing, Stephenson said that he hadn't wanted the character to represent Hillary and thought it was unfortunate that many readers would make that assumption just because there were so few alternative public figures to map the character to. He gave no hint as to there being anyone in particular she was supposed to be.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#103

Post by rtkwe » Wed, May 18, 2016, 4:56 PM UTC

knodi123 wrote: post #95

rtkwe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was covered at least in passing. The comet they capture and use to reach the Cleft provides the sources of carbon and other elements that are hard to get. Presumably long enough to build and launch slow missions to capture and redirect other sources (happens 'off screen'). > "The black stuff has all kind of goodies on it. Carbon, obviously. But also nitrogen, ptoassium---" "Micronutrients," Markus said, "that th…

but isn't it all poisoned by those pesky radioactive flea particles? Or was that problem only insurmountable due to the limited resources of the comet expedition?

The fleas caused a lot of problems even during the Great Ride but I imagine once they were in the Cleft they'd be able to figure out a way to process it to remove the contamination. it wasn't covered in the book though that I remember.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#104

Post by JPKab » Wed, May 18, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

bryant wrote: post #4

Seveneves is one of my favorites, even though it gets mixed reactions from a lot of others who've read titles like Anathem. I can't compare it to Anathem (the only other Stephenson book I've read so far is Cryptonomicon; looking to change that), but I can say I love the technical depth. Perhaps it's because it helps me suspend disbelief much more easily, though Bill's point that "if you’re the sort of reader who does…

It's an amazing book, but I agree regarding the last third of the book.

I'm hoping it's a springboard for sequels.

I want to hear more about the Pingers and the Diggers.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#105

Post by redthrowaway » Wed, May 18, 2016, 6:38 PM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #58

redthrowaway wrote: post #41

$('#ArticleDropUpshareHolder').remove()

Thanks, that's handy. I wish there was a complement to adblock that removed useless things that cover text, like email harvesting popups and other things that have to be closed manually.

The problem is that most of these things are hand-rolled. It's not like ads, where you can just block iframes that point at blacklisted domains. The ids and classes of those annoying things will be specific to each site, so it's hard to target.

You could probably remove anything that had onscroll functionality defined, and just accept that it would break some websites.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#106

Post by vessenes » Wed, May 18, 2016, 9:12 PM UTC

bostonpete wrote: post #13

vessenes wrote: post #10

My theory about the book, and the reason why there's such a tone change at the end is that this book is the kickoff to a much larger cycle. If it is, I think there's an authorial question -- when do you shift gears to the far future, and how? It makes some sense to me that readers might find the style transition jarring between volumes. Also, some of the cool stuff starts to happen later. So, perhaps -- hopefully --…

> it seems like every group of humans that went out on their own survived in some way The survival of both the other two groups seemed pretty far fetched to me.

Just wait for Mars.. :)

I had the same reaction at first. But, then I was thinking about dogs; dogs evolve really quickly under pressure. If that's not a high pressure evolution event, I don't know what is.

I'm curious to read more about everyone in any event. Here's hoping.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#107

Post by mirimir » Thu, May 19, 2016, 6:47 AM UTC

pointernil wrote: post #77

mirimir wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it's more like a quarter, or a fifth ;)

Hard to discuss without spoilers but do you mean story-time-wise or story-line-wise?

I mean story-line-wise. Specifically, group-wise.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#108

Post by mirimir » Thu, May 19, 2016, 7:01 AM UTC

vidarh wrote: post #75

mirimir wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SPOILER ALERT The second Battlestar Galactica series does reach a conclusion, sort of. It ends with a loop backward in time, through a black hole. Surviving humans and humanoid Cylons interbreed with protohumans. So history is cyclical.

I don't think that description is right. They never fall into the black hole - they jump away. Unless I'm badly misremembering, it's pretty clear that the Battlestar Galactica crew's ancestors "earth" is a different planet. At least the characters believe it is, and the Baltar and Six that appears in the epilogue also talks about it as a different planet and a new cycle. While the theme of cyclical history is recurri…

Maybe so. But the city in the epilogue does look very 21st century. That might just have reflected budgetary constraints, however. As in Caprica.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#109

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, May 19, 2016, 2:35 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #89

bryant wrote: post #4

Seveneves is one of my favorites, even though it gets mixed reactions from a lot of others who've read titles like Anathem. I can't compare it to Anathem (the only other Stephenson book I've read so far is Cryptonomicon; looking to change that), but I can say I love the technical depth. Perhaps it's because it helps me suspend disbelief much more easily, though Bill's point that "if you’re the sort of reader who does…

> the only other Stephenson book I've read so far is Cryptonomicon Absolutely recommend "Diamond Age" and to a lesser extent (but more fun) "Snowcrash". I started "Cryptonomicon" right after reading Singh's "The Code Book", and it just felt like Stephenson did a sub-par job with the subject material (perhaps especially because "The Code Book" isn't fiction, but almost reads like it). Did start "Seveneves" when there…

Snowcrash and Diamond Age are also great, relatively short introductions to the Stephenson plot style which mostly seems to be "amazing intro, great ideas in world building, then anticlimax and eventual abrupt stop or slow fizzle to the end". The fact that his books only get longer with time makes that pattern more and more confounding for me, at least.

The one reversal of the formula I felt was Anathem. It's a very, very slow build of world building (still fun, if you don't mind academic puree), but then I felt had perhaps one of Stephenson's strongest, most climactic endings.

Re: The Day the Moon Blew Up

#110

Post by saadrizvi » Thu, May 19, 2016, 9:11 PM UTC

scholia wrote: post #94

saadrizvi wrote: post #9

I enjoyed Seveneves but thought it wasn't Stephenson's best work by far. I'd rate Anathem and Snow Crash much higher than it.

Same here, plus The Diamond Age. I read them all as they came out, and the shorter earlier books (The Big U, Snowcrash) had much more impact on me than the longer later ones. Or course, it's impossible to read Snowcrash today and feel anything like the same impact because ideas that were pretty far out way back then are commonplace today.

+1 on Diamond Age - awesome book.