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Seveneves by Neal Stephenson Book Club
162 Plays1 year ago
Special guest Christy joins us to talk about Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, about the human response when the moon is destroyed in an unpredictable cataclysm. The main characters must build habitats in space to preserve the human race until Earth is restored. We discuss the traits of humanity that we want to preserve for future survival and the love of Earth strong enough to guide 5,000 years of human history.
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Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
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Transcript
Introduction and Spoiler Alert for Seven Eves
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello listeners, this is your spoiler warning. We will be spoiling Seven Eves by Neil Stevenson.
00:00:11
Speaker
It's going to be tough emotionally when the hard rain hit and we have to say goodbye to all that was. It's going to be tough afterward when the Arkers have to learn how to work together and make hard choices. By far the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, but will survive. We'll use what's up there to build incubators for our heritage to live in, to grow, and to improve on what we brought with us.
00:00:36
Speaker
and eventually the day will come when we return. By that point, many generations will have devoted all of their hopes and their creative genius to the problem of remaking the world as well as, or better than, what we see here. The real goal is to build Earth again and build it better.
Hosts Introduce Themselves and Book Themes
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome to the Book Club Podcast. Today we are discussing Seven Eves by Neal Stephenson.
00:01:01
Speaker
I'm Caroline and I absolutely love the can-do attitude of this book. They take on a huge project. Earth is going to be destroyed. People are going to have to live in space for 5,000 years and then repopulate Earth and they do it. I'm Carly and I love this book. I love Stevenson and his very intricate descriptions of how technology works.
00:01:25
Speaker
Hi, I'm Christy, longtime listener, first time discussant, and I'm really excited about the questions in this book about what it means to be human and what parts of being human do we think are the most worth preserving. Surprise! Welcome, Christy, our first guest.
00:01:44
Speaker
Yes. Welcome, Christy. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me here.
Catastrophe Strikes: The Moon's Explosion
00:01:48
Speaker
All right. So the book is divided into three parts. The first part begins when the moon explodes in an unpredictable and ultimately unexplained catastrophe. A woman named Dina is on the International Space Station developing robots to mine asteroids. A woman named Ivy is her supervisor.
00:02:05
Speaker
On Earth, there's a man named Doc Dubois who is a scientist and TV personality, and he witnesses the moon explode while at a fundraiser in Los Angeles. He figures out that the fragments of the moon will continue to collide and break into smaller pieces at an exponential rate until they form a white cloud of fiery debris called the hard rain that will make life on the Earth impossible for thousands of years.
00:02:30
Speaker
and they realize they have about two years before this is gonna happen. The nations on Earth then coordinate to save as many people, cultural artifacts, and genetic material as possible up on the space station. Dr. Bois estimates that they only have two years to do this. The plan is to have a lottery with a young man and young woman from each country chosen to live in small habitats up there called arklets, and together they will form the cloud ark.
00:02:56
Speaker
I say Dinah. I'm probably not going to be able to break that habit. So Dinah's family are miners, and they prepare to survive 10,000 years underground. Ivy suspects her fiancé Cal, who has control of a submarine, is building a shelter deep in the ocean.
Struggles and Tensions in Space
00:03:12
Speaker
In part two, Dr. Boss spends the year before the hard rain on the cloud arc working on a plan to move the space community to one fragment of the moon with a deep valley that can protect them from radiation and asteroids.
00:03:24
Speaker
Arklets arrive with lottery winners, beginning to occupy them. The people on the space station say their final goodbyes to their friends and family on Earth. Marcus, the new leader on the space station, declares the Earth dead. And shortly after, they find the former US President, Julia, stowed away in an old space shuttle, having violated all the treaties. And the structure holding all the human genetic material has been damaged and exposed to space.
00:03:47
Speaker
While Marcus and Dinah go to wrangle a comet of ice to bring back as propellant, Julia, the former president, is manipulating a class division between arcies, the tributes living in arclets, and the professionals on the space station. The swarm arclets are able to grow food, and the endurance isn't. So there are occasional trades between the two of them. But after three years, only 28 people are left on the endurance.
00:04:15
Speaker
Ada is the new swarm leader, and she tells them that there are 11 people remaining out of 800. She is visibly starving, and she asks to join the Endurance on Cleft. They have resorted to cannibalism to survive. Ada and her group join the Endurance under false pretenses. They attack the crew, and they cause even more casualties. Dr. Bois is able to make one last spacewalk on the Cleft, where he imagines the future Dome City.
00:04:44
Speaker
before he dies of cancer from radiation from all of his time and space. There are eight women surviving, Louisa, who has already been through menopause, so can't be one of the seven Eves. The seven are Ivy, Dinah, Moira, Tekla, Camilla, Julia, and Ida. They come to an agreement that each Eve will be able to genetically engineer one trait that she would like passed on to her offspring, in addition to
00:05:12
Speaker
fixing degenerative diseases that they're aware of already in the genetic material of the women and the other samples that they have.
Repopulating Earth and New Races
00:05:21
Speaker
So from there, we jump 5,000 years forward. Very bold.
00:05:26
Speaker
The Seven Eves have succeeded in their intentions and they've created seven races with distinct characteristics. The Dinans, for example, named after Dinah, tend towards leadership. The Ivans, after Ivy value intelligence, the Moirans are unique in that they have the ability to adapt dramatically to their environment using epigenetics.
00:05:47
Speaker
The Teclons are physically strong and disciplined, while Ada, or the Aidans, had many children who compete with the children of the other of Dinah, Ivy, Teclon, and Mora. In fact, one of her experiments was to recreate Neanderthals who could compete with the strength of the Teclons. Camites are non-aggressive, designed for living in close quarters in space,
00:06:10
Speaker
whereas the Julians after Julia are strategic, but at times a bit paranoid. All the seven races live and cooperate together with ease. It's treated as different cultures almost. The time between when the moon was destroyed and when the endurance arrived at Cleft is called the epic. Videos from the swarm and the space station taken during this time are shown constantly in public spaces and told like
00:06:33
Speaker
Bible stories. So at this time, 5,000 years in the future, a ring of habitats rotates around the earth, housing 3 billion humans. The seven races have segregated themselves into different habitats and eventually split into red and blue, two nations that don't really communicate with one another.
00:06:51
Speaker
They have cleaned up the space around Earth and captured ice comets to refill the oceans. They've genetically engineered plant and animal life. And there are also people living on New Earth, having landed illegally as soon as the atmosphere was breathable. And those folks are called indigens. Our new character, Cath II, is a surveyor collecting data on how the genetically engineered flora and fauna are adapting on the surface. She's recruited to a mission to explore New Earth.
00:07:18
Speaker
in the area where she saw a human from an unknown community. There's a group of seven, one person from each of the seven races, exploring this area. And they are approached by a young Ivan indigen named Einstein, who tells them he knows of an artifact from before the moon exploded. He tells them it was an 18-wheeler, and he shares his theories on how it survived. But when they arrive at the spot, they discover it has already been excavated by a tribe of diggers,
00:07:46
Speaker
who they determine are descendants of Diana's family who built a shelter deep underground to survive the hard rain. And the diggers attack them, killing two of their members. The Julian team member reveals that she's a secret agent from Red and escapes to space. Cath II goes into hibernation, and then Red descends a delegation full of pomp and circumstance. The survivors of the Seven and Einstein escape during that ceremony.
00:08:13
Speaker
Then we meet one of my favorite characters, a digger teenage girl who has memorized the Encyclopedia Britannica from sonar to tax law. And she tells the remaining delegation that the diggers were on their way to the coast to respond to a message left by the pingers, people who live in the ocean.
00:08:35
Speaker
So this girl, the psych, gives them a history of the diggers because their underground shelter was limited. They developed a culture with very strict rules around procreation. As a representative of the blue, the team rushes to meet the pingers who are the descendants of Cal.
00:08:52
Speaker
who have evolved to live successfully in the ocean the same way that the diggers have evolved successfully to live underground. The book ends with the sort of tacit acknowledgement that there are actually now 13 races counting
00:09:08
Speaker
two new races, the diggers and the pingers, plus the multiple subraces of Ada, including the Neanderthals. And we understand that Tai and many of the other characters who are a little more shadowy are serving something they call the purpose, the theory that humans have a higher calling.
00:09:27
Speaker
So I also get to ask the opening question today. And as I hinted at, one question I'm very curious about is how we think Stevenson wants to limit what he's willing to call human. I think in Stevenson's view, he considers all of these characters to still be a kind of human, but there's a huge range between them. And in some cases, 5,000 years of
00:09:54
Speaker
no genetic intermixing between them. So I think there's a question about what does it mean to be human. There's also another question of the deliberate preservation of certain characteristics by the Seven Eves, as opposed to sort of the deliberate
00:10:12
Speaker
preservation of characteristics that the diggers I think are just doing through rules on who's allowed to procreate or something like what the Pingers did, which is additional genetic modifications to what the next generation of human beings looks like. So Carly and Caroline, thanks for having me here. And I'm excited to hear what your ideas are. Yeah, I mean, I agree. Stevenson seems to think they are all still human.
00:10:41
Speaker
and they all share some common trait. I do wanna mention that the Pingers, probably out of all of the groups of people who are pretty different from another, but the Pingers are the most so, right? They seem
Humanity and Genetic Engineering: What Defines Us?
00:10:54
Speaker
to, they sound more like mermaids and mermen, right? They have different skin, maybe different breathing apparatus. There were a number of things that would suggest they are physiologically very different at this point.
00:11:09
Speaker
Right. They have skin flaps to cover their sensitive organs and orifices. That's right. To swim in the water. Like they can't communicate as well because they communicate very high pitched sounds and it's the only race that requires a translator really. So that creates distance too. I almost want to say that the communication more than like the genetics is what separates them because they can't, how do you form a treaty? How do you form an alliance?
00:11:37
Speaker
If you can't communicate, which they can, they figure out how to talk to each other, but it just, it adds an extra layer of complication. I'm going to suggest as alternatives for the most distant from what we think of maybe as the rootstock humans.
00:11:49
Speaker
The partially Neanderthal race seems perhaps not quite as far as Mermaid's Merman, but still very different. And also, the Moirans' ability to have epigenetic huge changes that they undergo in their lifestyle is one of the
00:12:08
Speaker
coolest ideas in the book, but also something that makes me wonder how different from a human being as we think of them is someone who can basically go into a kind of hibernative state and then perhaps completely change their entire personality, their interests, their abilities in a very short number of weeks while they're sort of going through a huge individual shift that
00:12:33
Speaker
as it's described in the story, sometimes makes people unrecognizable almost even to their loved ones as the person that they were before this shift occurs. And we see it with the character of Cath II becoming Cath III. And she's similar in some ways, but I think we're supposed to understand that shifts can be even larger than the one she experiences and the one she experiences is very large. That is a good point because I would think consistency of personality is very important for how humans relate to one another.
00:13:03
Speaker
And therefore, for maybe what it means to be human. Well, yeah. And she says Cath 2 is dead. Cath 1 is dead. That person is gone. But she still has the memories of that person, which is interesting. And then, I mean, there was that moment where they're traveling from space to this location where Cath 2 first saw what we know as a digger.
00:13:24
Speaker
And they stop on this island, which is, I think, in Polynesia. And there's a community of Moirans and Camites there. And they have this very strong reaction to the Moirans who have adapted to the location. They're very slow speaking. And they spend a lot of time studying the sky and the wind and the plants. Kath, too, feels racist. She says, oh, this is what racism is, this alienation from another human.
00:13:52
Speaker
And how weird that was, like, I just wanted to bring that up as like, these Moirans are unrecognizable to the community in space. Even to other Moirans, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a particularly interesting example because to answer the opening question, I would say,
00:14:08
Speaker
that the love of Earth seems to be shared by all the humans and that's certainly very strong at the beginning of the book where we see Earth threatened and where they develop this ideal of we'll go into space and then we'll come back and we will reseed Earth, regrow the plants, recreate the animals. We have our standard solar punk trope about the beauty of the breeze and you know standing on Earth and being able to feel that because you don't get that in the space stations. So I would suggest that is at least
00:14:38
Speaker
a defining factor is love of the earth. Alad, I was really surprised that there's a little team that leaves the cloud arc to go and try to settle on Mars. And you could imagine another book that went in that direction. But in this book, it was like, nope, that's a non-starter. Those people are probably all dead. And we're not going to focus. This isn't another story about
00:15:05
Speaker
how humans can terraform Mars and make Mars like another Earth. This was very much a story about we have gotten kicked off the planet through no fault of our own, but how do we get back? Yeah, because we love it so much. That's what we're interested in.
00:15:21
Speaker
Well, is it love it so much, or is it cannot possibly exist somewhere else, right? Well, they are existing in space, right? So they could go anywhere in space, right? Yes. And CathTube's traveling around on this huge station where they have these replicated environments. Do you remember when she goes to find Doc, her mentor?
00:15:46
Speaker
And it's like walking city blocks and one block is a desert and one block is a jungle. But I think that was all built that's testing out these plants and animals that they can then be sent to Earth. And then there was also a mention of a philosophical argument about how to reseed Earth. Do they want to completely recreate animals the way that they were before the moon was destroyed? Or do they want to create something like those animals and let them
00:16:13
Speaker
evolve naturally. I mean, I think there's the parallel there of, first of all, the Moirans have like a speeded up way of letting their genetics respond to the environment. They can do it several times in one lifetime. But I think that's what we expect to see of all the humans returning to Earth, like Cath II
00:16:32
Speaker
And while she's experiencing the breeze and the sunrise, she thinks to herself, have humans evolved past the point of being able to be on Earth? There's so much stimulus. There's so much air and light and smells. And as humans who have lived on in space for thousands of years, can they even come back to Earth? She kind of questions that a bit. And so I think there's a lot going on with like the whole epigenetic conversation that
00:16:58
Speaker
The animals and the plants have to go and bounce off of each other and react to each other and and then evolve. And that will develop a whole new ecosystem. And it feels like my assumption was that's what's valuable about Earth is that you have all of this complexity where life can evolve and iterate. And that's where humans belong in that kind of environment. I really loved how the idea of Earth as a character changed between the two parts.
Earth: From Escape to Restoration
00:17:24
Speaker
In the first part, Earth is something that's about to be destroyed that we have to get away from. And there's this focus on, well, how do we do that without losing everything? And then you get this huge shift with the bold 5,000 year leap, right? Where Earth is this thing that they're deliberately trying to figure out how do we, in some sense, preserve sort of what's sacred and beautiful about the Earth, but also recognize that
00:17:54
Speaker
It can't be what it was before. Yeah, it's kind of tragic, right? Because they've spent 5,000 years hanging around, preserving what genetic material they could of the plants and animals to take it back to Earth. And now, you know, you come face to face with the realization you can't do that. You can't preserve perfectly anything in the past. It's going to be different.
00:18:15
Speaker
But that's true now. Yeah, I do think it's interesting clearly what you said about have we evolved past the earth? There was that comment. But I think there were also a number of comments to the effect that humans evolved, you know, for the earth on the earth in this type of environment. And that is still so deep seated that the 5000 years haven't gotten rid of that, even with
00:18:37
Speaker
a deliberate attempt, especially in the early generations on the part of some of the Eves, to make their children extra suited for survival away from Earth, right? So this distance that Cath II experiences at the beginning is in part a fact of 5,000 years of being away, but in part a fact of deliberate choices over thousands and thousands of years
00:19:04
Speaker
of people trying to make their culture and their children have a way to thrive away from Earth, which actually I think makes the Moirans, in a sense, the ones that are probably most able to reconnect because of this interesting ability to epigenetically reinvent themselves. And so Kath-2 is such an interesting character because she, in a sense, has a capacity within her lifetime to experience
00:19:34
Speaker
a way of fitting better in a circumstance that she's dropped into that normally it at least takes like a few generations for someone else to get there. There's an interesting comment about Einstein as well. So Einstein is the young Ivan who was born on new earth and lives there. And then he immediately falls in love with the sick, the teenage digger. So Tai is observing them and sees like Einstein is pretty smart.
00:20:02
Speaker
But if he tried to go to space and be with his fellow Ivans up in space, he would be considered like backwater. His intelligence would not be valued up in space because he'd be competing with a different kind of intelligence. But when he talks to the sick, like they can share information with each other in a way that's very satisfying because they were both born on Earth.
00:20:23
Speaker
The indigents have been on Earth for maybe 100 years. That is a couple of generations where they've sort of created their own culture. But that was interesting, too. Is there something tragic in losing the space culture, too? Should we feel sad about that? That's a good point. I mean, it's a highly effective culture. It has a lot to offer. It's 5,000 years old. I don't think everyone will come back to Earth.
00:20:45
Speaker
And I don't think Stevenson necessarily wants us to think that they will, but I think there is this possibility. And it would be interesting to see if certain of the races decide to be more permanently space-like or other races decide to be more permanently ground-like. That's something you could imagine happening as the space people come down to Earth and think, you know what? Maybe this isn't for me. Maybe I like space life better.
00:21:13
Speaker
It does seem that there will be still more division in the human race. You've had thousands of years. It seems of this one drive for three billion people is to get back to Earth. Maybe that's not the right interpretation, but once you have people actually living on Earth, that motive is gone. You've succeeded. So then what happens? You mentioned in the introduction or the summary
00:21:36
Speaker
that Stevenson really loves to describe the infrastructure and the vehicles that everyone gets in and the technology that they're using. He really goes in depth on all of that. But one of the functions of that, or something I noticed,
00:21:53
Speaker
is that when he's describing the Earth as it sits in space, it now looks different from a distance. It has a ring now, right, from the leftover, you know, basically an asteroid belt leftover from the moon. And it also now has these orbiting human structures, right, that are huge. It is not the same Earth. It does not even look like it anymore. And yet the breeze is still there. The experience of the breeze by the human is still there.
00:22:22
Speaker
I'd like to talk about a quote. I feel like this has been around this whole conversation. Dr. Guo says to Julia that, even if we had perfect knowledge of every single one of those statistical parameters, we still wouldn't be able to predict the future, because we have an end of one.
Earth's Unique Opportunity for Humanity
00:22:37
Speaker
Only one cloud arc, only one Izzy to work with. We can't run this experiment 1,000 times to see the range of different outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don't exist, and we find meaning in randomness.
00:22:51
Speaker
And I thought that was really intriguing. The Earth is an end of one, right? And that's true for us. That's been true in all of our Solarpunk books as we talk about how to build a better culture and society. It just like is really extreme in this book that only having one chance is just so stark and not having a backup plan.
00:23:11
Speaker
and restoring the earth is the plan. So I feel like that's what I've been struggling with in this whole season of Solarpunk, is you have to decide how you're going to spend your time, and you have to decide where your focus is going to go. And you can't know what the answer is, and you can't know statistically what the best route is in many cases. So it feels like it's always an N of 1. I was just wondering if you all resonated with that as much as I did.
00:23:36
Speaker
I love that quote because it's very much reminding us of the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our ability to predict things, even when we really want to be able to predict things. But I actually found the second part a little more optimistic in that we do find the diggers and we do find the pingers.
00:23:56
Speaker
There's a way in which I think the suggestion is that we actually did have more than one shot and it's easy to tunnel vision into thinking space is the shot, right? But it was a good thing. I think that the diggers got perhaps literal tunnel vision. This is our one shot and Cal knowing he's never going to go up into space, thinks, okay, I'm going to take this shot.
00:24:21
Speaker
And there's something, again, and things that I think make humans distinctly humans or things that we want to preserve. I kind of loved that Cal didn't just say, oh, well, I've been given my job and I'm going to do my job. Or the Dinah's descendants didn't say, well, we'll send everything up into space and we'll make that our mission. There's sort of people all along the way who aren't
00:24:47
Speaker
going along with the plan. But that's a good thing because different things end up getting preserved and different things end up getting to change and make a difference. So I thought it was a little more stark in the first part, this idea that we've got one shot and when you get down to the room at the end of the second part and there's seven women, eight women, seven who can reproduce and no men and you think
00:25:15
Speaker
This is it. This is humanity's chances in this room right now. But then later on, you get to realize, actually, there was more than that. There were other people who had other ideas who were trying to save different things. So I found that very stark in the first part. And then when I took a break between the 5,000 years
00:25:35
Speaker
I got to come back and say, oh, if Dinah had gotten feisty and blown up the women in the room just because she was feeling like a vengeful goddess, I think is the phrase, that actually wouldn't have been the end. It would have been the end of something, but there were other beginnings in other places as well. Harley, did you think that when you found out about the diggers and the pingers, or did it still feel like so much of the preservation of
00:26:04
Speaker
what was human came from the space and the space cultures and the descendants of those people. What stood out to me is the diggers say, you guys abandoned Earth, you mutants abandoned Earth and fled. And so the Earth is ours now. And my thought was, we just learned that the spacers have been meticulously cleaning up the asteroids so that they sped up the process so that they could come back to Earth.
00:26:28
Speaker
thousands of years earlier. Like Dr. Bua predicted that the hard rain would be 5,000 to 10,000 years. And so essentially they like sped it up and shortened that timeframe by using their technology to remove bolides and to then send ice to refill the oceans and to reseed the flora and fauna on the planet. And so I wonder how much longer could the diggers have survived underground if they couldn't come out
00:26:57
Speaker
and breathe the air and hunt the animals and eat the plants that were salvaged by the people in space. Yeah, they might not have been able to go the next 5,000 years, whereas it seems like the people in space kind of could have been in a more indefinite holding pattern, whereas the digger culture doesn't seem like a great place.
00:27:20
Speaker
and another 1,000 or 2,000 years of that might not have lasted. The Pingers we know less about, I think, but I think Stevenson kind of indicates that they might have had something that could be a little bit more long-term. But you're right, in some sense, the Diggers, they might not think of it this way, but they are going to hugely benefit from what the Spacers did. Well,
00:27:42
Speaker
That's true, but in a way they've all worked together to recreate the sort of complex environment that the earth provided originally, right? Like they're all providing different inputs that none of them are really controlling because it's other people and other cultures doing it. And it is producing the same sort of complex environment that you used to get on earth, either in terms of the physical environment, plants and animals, but then also the very complex cultural environment that people create.
00:28:11
Speaker
So it's a bit of an aside, but if you had to choose between being a spacer, a digger, or a pinger, what would you choose? These are all hard choices, right? I want to be a Moiran specifically. I think that's so awesome. I don't know if I could handle the idea of my current self dying.
00:28:32
Speaker
and there being a lack of continuity with my next self. I think that would actually be kind of hard. For me, that life in space, the first couple hundred years or whatever it was, maybe the whole thing seemed awful. There was a part of me who was like, just let me die on earth. Like, let me die in the environment I was designed, built for, looking up the sky. Maybe I'm too claustrophobic for that space or stuff.
00:29:00
Speaker
Well, all of them are claustrophobic. Right. That's why I'm going to just die on the surface. I'm not going under the ocean. I'm not going into a hole. I like to think I'm not being too influenced by the recent Little Mermaid movie, but I feel like The Pingers might actually have had it the best, right? Like once you could evolve to be able to be out in the water, right? Like it wouldn't feel so claustrophobic. And also deep sea is so interesting, right? It seems like if you could
00:29:30
Speaker
get to the point that you could function pretty well underwater. It would be a very different life from being on Earth in the ground, but diggers are definitely my last choice, right? I might even choose being part Neanderthal before I would choose to insert myself into what we see of the digger culture, even though I love the idea of somebody's life being as a living encyclopedia. I'm just going to know everything from
00:29:56
Speaker
this part of S to this part of T, and that's my job. There's something, I do think, kind of charming about that, but the lived experience of it doesn't seem like it would be very good. The Neanderthal, I'm really curious, you keep bringing this up, Christy, because the Neanderthal character that we got, he's interesting. He's intelligent. He has a sense of humor. So I'm just curious why that stands out to you.
00:30:20
Speaker
I think it was less about the character that we see who's a Neanderthal 5,000 years into this and more imagining what the first couple generations of Neanderthal looked like and what their kind of experience was. Clearly there's still a lot of racism, I think directed more towards the Neanderthals than the other
00:30:43
Speaker
races so clearly the people who aren't neanderthal are responding to the neanderthals in a very different way than they're responding i think to the other
00:30:54
Speaker
descendants of Ada. I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I definitely felt that the Neanderthal character that we actually got to see didn't necessarily seem like he was representative of Neanderthals and even he seemed like it had been rough, right? That most people weren't treating the Neanderthal descendants, the partially Neanderthal descendants.
00:31:17
Speaker
in the same way that they were treating the other descendants. Ada kind of in some sense makes her own curse come true in that people are always going to be distant from her descendants in part because of what she did, but also in part because of the strategy she chose of being so genetically aggressive towards the descendants of the other women in the room.
00:31:40
Speaker
I'm glad you brought up the curse because I think it's really fascinating how 5000 years later these conversations have been recorded and so their descendants can hear them word for word and have built up these cultural identities around
00:31:57
Speaker
these interpersonal conversations of people during the epic and the curse did it come true because people would have would not have forgotten that Aida was a violent cannibal or did it come true because it was recorded and people watched it over and over again like
00:32:14
Speaker
How much of the cultural identity is part of the genetic and attachment to one's Eve and how much of it was retelling these same old stories and reinforcing these bonds, because there are bonds between Moirans and Teclans and between Dinans and Ivans, and then also the animosity.
00:32:32
Speaker
I think Stevenson did a really good job of leaving it open to being in large part cultural, which, you know, was a relief to just not read something that was sort of like racial determinism or something, right? I mean, he makes the point that people celebrate the birthdays of their Eve. They're very, you know, aware of everything she said or did, photos she was in, videos she was in, things like that. So it seems cultural as well. Yeah, who knows what is
00:33:02
Speaker
predominant. Can I just read the curse for the listeners? Yes, please. I'll try to make it dramatic. She says, this is on 563 in my version, this is not a curse that I create. It is not a curse on your children.
00:33:18
Speaker
No, I have never been as bad as you all think that I am. This is a curse that you have created by doing this thing that you are about to do. And it is a curse upon my children, because I know, I see how it is to be. I am the evil one, the cannibal, the one who would not go along. My children, no matter what decision I make, will forever be different from your children.
00:33:42
Speaker
Because make no mistake, what you have decided to do is to create new races. Seven new races. They will be separate and distinct forever. As much as you, Moira, are from Ivy, they will never merge into a single human race again, because that is not the way of humanity. Thousands of years from now, the descendants of U6 will look at my descendants and say, ah, look.
00:34:06
Speaker
There is a child of Ida, the cannibal, the evil one, the cursed one. They will cross the street to avoid my children. They will spit on the ground. This is the thing that you have done by making this decision. I will shape my children, my children, for I shall have many, to bear up under this curse, to survive it, and to prevail. I mean, you can't have a, what would we, like a Garden of Eden story without a curse, right? Can't start humanity anew without some kind of curse.
00:34:35
Speaker
So to me, I find that very touching because here's a woman who was forced all of the sudden, she is in this central situation. She is going to be the mother of generations, billions of people, a race. And she's done some things that weren't great, that were bad, and that's never going to be forgotten for her or for them, right? Like think of the weight of that. I mean, I think in some ways, if you have children, if you want children, it's
00:35:04
Speaker
soothing to think of, you know, whatever I have done, I will fix it and they will not be like me in the bad ways and they will get to go forward and have and do better things than I could do and did. But that's not true in the situation she's in, right? I do think it's interesting that she doesn't even think that she could be forgiven. She doesn't think that there's a path of repentance that would, I guess, be honored by the other women there.
00:35:34
Speaker
There's something very dark in the belief that you have done something so bad that not only could you not make up for it, that there could be no reconciliation, not only for you, but that your children forever
00:35:51
Speaker
are going to partake of that evil in a way that they'll never have the experience of reconciliation or forgiveness. And she's right in the story that's written, she's correct. But I thought it was really sad that they might have created a world where
00:36:07
Speaker
there isn't the possibility of forgiveness or repentance or reconciliation. And she sees that maybe even earlier than the other ones. That's a sad place. And that's also something that if they really have created a world where that's not possible, I think they actually have lost something that's beautiful about what I think humans are capable of. And maybe the situation has killed that possibility because the stakes are so high for every individual.
00:36:37
Speaker
But I like to think that there could have been a path for her that wouldn't have made her an evil one and made all of her children evil ones too. But I don't know if Stevenson allows for that possibility. I like the idea that this situation she finds herself in is
00:36:55
Speaker
not an Earth-like situation. I mean, it's so artificial. They're in this historical and genetic bottleneck where all the focus is on them and their actions. Whereas Earth is about complexity, abundance, and a literal ability to walk away, right?
Living in Confinement: Physical and Mental Challenges
00:37:15
Speaker
That you don't have up in space or not in this version of space.
00:37:20
Speaker
And I think that's relevant. I think that obviously things would have been different if they'd been on earth, but even down to feeling the weight and the sort of imprisonment of their own actions, that seems like a side effect of being in these environments that are claustrophobic, not just physically, but psychologically, historically claustrophobic, right? There's just so much attention and pressure on everything they do.
00:37:47
Speaker
I kind of like that Aida adds this dissension. I wonder if the seven races would have survived if all of the Eves had been of one mind. Having it built into the culture that whatever that person does, I'm going to try and find the opposite way to do it. I wonder if that pushes them to more innovation, which then means that you have more safeguards. You have more opportunities to survive.
00:38:17
Speaker
I mean, it is some built in diversity, for lack of a better word, some built in complexity, because there's going to be seven and really, like 11 or 12 when you count the sub races, types of human society, I guess. So in that way, it sort of reproduces some of the complexity of Earth. But then it's not it's a limited complexity, right? It's intellectual.
00:38:40
Speaker
Yes. That's such a cool idea, Carly. I kind of want to think about that a little more about how having this conflict in terms of not just interpersonal conflict, but conflict in terms of how do you think about something and how do you try to find a solution and what solutions are ultimately satisfying to you that you don't necessarily
00:39:05
Speaker
try to continue to solve how that's a part of the humanity that we needed to keep for multiple generations. If it had all been Ivans, or I think is it Camilla at one point that suggests maybe we should just genetically engineer everyone to be the kind of people who get along and can find spaces. You sort of think, yuck, right? That doesn't sound like a good idea, but maybe a different group of
00:39:35
Speaker
women or a different group of people would have said, yeah, actually, we need to value the literal survival of everyone so much that we can't allow these bigger conflicts. But by preserving not only the history of these big conflicts, but also reinvesting in sort of the
00:39:59
Speaker
the genetic manipulation that's going to preserve these conflicts is actually a way of mimicking perhaps what humanity was more like on Earth, but also preserving something that is an essential part of the human experiences is having us and them and trying to create solutions to problems in different ways.
00:40:24
Speaker
I was really glad they didn't listen to Camilla and not make men for thousands of years. Right. Are we ready for genre themes? So I mean, I think I'll say that this is different from the other Solarpunk books into in some substantial ways, right?
Solarpunk Themes: Hope and Society Rebuilding
00:40:41
Speaker
The Earth is destroyed for
00:40:44
Speaker
sort of a random reason that's never explained and is no one's fault, right? Unlike most of the solar punk where, you know, it's pretty clear that humans have destroyed the earth in some way, to some extent. Other than that, I think there's a lot of overlap with what is solar punk. First of all, in hope, right?
00:41:02
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, we talked about in The Fifth Sacred Thing, the idea of trying to make decisions today so that 5,000 years from now, there will be a better society for humans. And then in this story, we get the 5,000 year jump. And so the idea of hope and Dr. Bois, I keep thinking about him, like he's embodiment of hope. Even though he starts out very cynical, he still gets
00:41:29
Speaker
infused with hope somehow. Like it's so funny in that in a couple of pages he's thinking about how the human genome archive is a bunch of nonsense and then he talks to his wife and now he's super motivated to have their embryo preserved in the human genetic archive. It's something that is not
00:41:47
Speaker
part of his conscious will. It's a hope that he it like guides him more deeply than it's not a choice that he makes. It's just it's there and it affects the way he behaves and then he ends up it's his idea for them to be on cleft and that's what saves them. So it's an interesting way to think about hope and faith in that way for me. Yeah, I like what you said. It's not a conscious choice. It kind of sometimes it just comes upon people.
00:42:11
Speaker
maybe out of a natural desire. Well, and I think also other people are being hopeful, right? It's sort of a passing of the torch. If someone's being hopeful, we don't have to all be hopeful every moment, right? We can let ourselves get dispirited, but someone else can bring it back for us because they're hopeful at that time. I loved the beautiful human weirdness of that section of the book where he makes this shift between saying none of this is going to work and
00:42:40
Speaker
we're all going to die and everything I care about is going to be gone. But then he like sees a path and then he sees another path. And then all of a sudden he's no longer like the people on earth. He's, he becomes sort of a spacer in, in a, in a intellectual sense, right? He, he sort of the earth, him sort of dies almost. So I want to make a comparison between
00:43:08
Speaker
the epigenetic shifts that Cath goes through and what happens to Dr. Bois. I'll suggest it and you guys can shoot it down, but sort of Earth, Du Bois has to die in order for Space Du Bois to live and to contribute. And he contributes so much, right? He has this quiet heroism that manifests itself in sort of doing the hard work day after day, but Earth, Doc,
00:43:37
Speaker
had to die. And he even has this character, right, that he says he's outgrown this character of the kind of science guy who's explaining stuff. And so he too sort of experiences these deaths as he goes along. And that's part of what allows him to become the kind of person that gets the people to the cleft in the end. And one of the things I love that Stevenson did is he let Dr. Bois see
00:44:05
Speaker
his success right before he dies. That was kind of like a beautiful author's gift to his character, right? To let him think that maybe he succeeded. I love what you're saying about the connection between the death of a former self and the new self is absolutely necessary. I think that's also often an explicit theme in Solarpunk because unlike
00:44:32
Speaker
There's tropes out there of wanting, of not liking our current society, but then wanting to go back to simpler time, right? Go back to something back pre-industrial or medieval or whatever. And I think Solarpunk very much doesn't do that.
00:44:50
Speaker
I mean, because you can say, I want something different than what this current life is. But the option isn't just going back, right? You can pick the things that are good about maybe pre-industrial societies, or lightly industrial societies.
00:45:05
Speaker
But then you can still go forward using a lot of the technology and the know-how from this current one. There's a lot of small little deaths in that, right? Like you have to let a romanticized idea of the past go. You have to let the past in general go. Take what you can, what you absolutely need, and go forward, which is very much what they did in this story. They had to do. I think Tecla is a good example of that too, right?
00:45:30
Speaker
I wish I could find the part in the book where she says it, but for the listeners, she's a Russian character and culturally very different from the other Eves. And she knows that her Russianness will not survive, but she also knows that her Russianness and the culture and the language that she has will basically survive by mingling with all of the other cultures.
00:46:00
Speaker
see after the 5,000 jump there's Russian words that are still used or there's other sort of evolutions that came from the fact that she was one of those women and she held on to her culture and her identity and that actually made a difference 5,000 years later if she hadn't been one of the seven women
00:46:23
Speaker
none of that. You can kind of, I think, make the jump that none of that would have been like that. And so the preservation of those things that are central to her and perhaps precious to her, they only survive because they get deeply integrated into the other things that are happening, the other languages and the other cultures.
00:46:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's true.
Practical Skills and Engineering in Survival
00:46:44
Speaker
So hope, definitely a theme. I think the can do attitude, also definitely a theme, right? It's not just, you know, society is not just made of like poets and authors, like in a lot of books, right? No, these are like engineers, they are solving problems. They may also have the sentiments and the skills of authors and poets, but you gotta do both. And everyone has to work and we are building something, right? We're not just feeling feelings about it, we are building.
00:47:12
Speaker
I think that is true in all of the solar pump books. There is a huge importance placed on having a skill and doing the work.
00:47:18
Speaker
We talked about just being in nature, being rejuvenating already. So that's definitely the Chandra theme. I mean, it's been every single story we've read. There's a moment where a character stands up and looks up at the sky and feels the breeze. And I think that's hilarious. And I hope it continues. I hope we buy that in every single book. Yeah, I hope so too. We also talked about this, but another theme is the deep connection between
00:47:47
Speaker
humans and earth in a way that supersedes any particular environmental or historical context. That one actually was a bit of a surprise to me in Stevenson. Maybe it shouldn't have been, but I feel like he could have written a different book where it was just space, space, space forever. So it was
00:48:08
Speaker
interesting to see him give his characters and give the story this sort of earth grounding because there's a sense in which someone who loves technology and exploration and engineering that much, it could become
00:48:24
Speaker
different book like there's the people who settled on Mars and then there's the people who just have spaceships that last forever. There are the people who do all these other things that a lot of times in science fiction you see this getting away from what Earth is but there's clearly a focus from him on
00:48:44
Speaker
getting back to something that is earth-like even if it can't actually be earth again. I didn't necessarily expect that and I think you could read the entire first part and second part and imagine that in 5,000 years people didn't care about the earth anymore but the earth
00:49:02
Speaker
clearly is a thing that for whatever reason, whether it's genetic or culturally or socially, that becomes their end game, is getting back to it and reviving it in whatever way they can, even if it has an asteroid belt,
Innovation Through Letting Go of the Past
00:49:18
Speaker
right? Even if the oceans will never be the same, this desire to come back and make the earth
00:49:24
Speaker
flourishing again. All right. Any other final thoughts? I certainly will keep thinking about the idea of something in the past has to die so that we can make the next epigenetic shift. And I think Solarpunk is about choosing
00:49:39
Speaker
Okay, well, what is it going to be? And what are we going to keep? I mean, I think that's a very optimistic perspective that you get to choose what we keep. Yeah, they didn't. They did a little bit, but not as much as they wanted. One thing I thought was interesting about the women's choices is
00:49:58
Speaker
None of the women chose not to do something different with their offspring. And I think about that a lot in terms of how much control do we want or think we want over what happens next. And sort of there's a sense in which it shows kind of a dismissal of something that might be a little bit sacred.
00:50:22
Speaker
the idea that you can control what happens and that you should control what happens and your dictates are not a kind of hubris, that you can make a choice like that and predict and somehow feel like you've made the right decision. There's sort of a flattening out of this idea that we don't always know what's best or what should be preserved. There's none of that kind of humility.
00:50:51
Speaker
here, especially in very key moments. And I found myself thinking, is that a result of sort of this engineering mindset that a lot of the characters have? Is that a result of just this deep fear and the need to control something that you can control in these circumstances? But is there a kind of, I think, another like deep, important human thing that can get lost, this sort of idea that I might not know what's best, and I might
00:51:20
Speaker
cause harm instead of making something better. I'm trying to think if there was a moment in a book where I saw a character sort of trying to be deeply humble about the limits of their ability to predict the outcomes of their actions and I'm not sure there is one. And maybe those are also the kind of people who survive and thrive in these moments are the people who don't have that. I did want there to be a sort of humility about what can we predict about
00:51:49
Speaker
the outcomes of our actions. I thought that was something that I found myself thinking again and again when characters would do stuff. Like, you have no humility in this moment, but sometimes they have to be like that, right? We haven't talked much about when Sean takes his gamble or when Marcus takes his gamble, but especially in the first part of the book, I think you kind of need these characters that don't have those moments of doubt, I guess critically you'd call it doubt or
00:52:16
Speaker
Kindly you would call it humility because sometimes stuff just does need to get done in those moments.
00:52:22
Speaker
I feel like that's kind of connected to Ada's curse because I think what she wanted, she wasn't necessarily, it wasn't necessarily about humility, but what she had lost was the ability to have a human heritage from her going forward that she could sort of get lost in. Like what if for her it was enough that humanity was going to continue, but now she's being told it's your descendants in a very specific way that will always be associated.
00:52:47
Speaker
Like, that's a loss. You can love the general heritage. Kind of wanted to wash out the story of your individual sins, and then she didn't get that, right? That seems related to what you were saying about not knowing how the future is going to unfold. That's actually comforting in a lot of circumstances, and she didn't get that comfort.
00:53:06
Speaker
Well, and I was thinking about Julia and, you know, at the Council of the Seven Eves, Julia seems so defeated. Like she took this power and then she lost so many lives. And then she was violently overtaken by Aida. I mean, they find her with like a metal pole in her tongue so she can't talk, you know, like just like horrible.
00:53:32
Speaker
And even then, like, if anyone was supposed to look back on their life and say, boy, I made some mistakes, I would expect it to be Julia because she's old enough and she's had enough experience to be there. And yet she still has her race
00:53:48
Speaker
She says, no, no, my paranoia and my depression are valuable. Humans need these things to be able to survive. And she holds on to that even stronger. And I think that's that's really fascinating. So but I like the idea. Like, what is what is sacred? Like these seven women, I really wish we had heard from Louisa a bit more in this time period. Like, what was Lisa doing? Because she was a therapist, a counselor. Like, I bet she was very busy.
00:54:19
Speaker
Maybe it was self-imposed, but it's like,
Seven Eves' Burden and Legacy
00:54:22
Speaker
it is your responsibility to make sure humankind survives. And when it's on them, how can they not make a choice about the best way to do that, right? Like, I mean, that would be the most extreme form of humility to say, I don't know what it takes, I'm just gonna like,
00:54:37
Speaker
fertilize some eggs and grow them and hope they do well. Like it feels almost like an abdication of your responsibility. True. But I don't necessarily, like I don't necessarily agree with that. I do think, Kristy, I don't want to like, I totally agree with everything you said about like, we don't know, like accepting your own inability to truly know. This definitely, in my opinion, kind of an engineer's book.
00:54:59
Speaker
Right. There's a number of things like that thing, the fulsome descriptions of all the technology that they might be using. And then I think also there's probably not enough attention given to how culture would change over time. Like five thousand years. How much do you think you have in common with someone from five thousand years ago? But that was that was one of the conceits of the book and it was a very interesting one. So I was happy to go along.
00:55:28
Speaker
I agree completely. I think that he sets up a conflict a couple times between engineer types, and I think he calls them political types, right? So it's the sort of the Dinah's versus the Julia's in a sense, or maybe even the Dinah and the Ivans versus the Julia, Julian's. And he clearly comes down hard on the side of the engineers, and I find that
00:55:53
Speaker
delightful to read it. But I also think from listening to your other podcasts in the Solar Punk season, I think that also makes him a little bit unique among the authors you've read too, is this sort of kind of giving some respect to the tinkerers, to the engineers, to the people who when you don't have five years to make sure that the rocket is right, get out there with whatever they have at hand and they make
00:56:21
Speaker
the circle fit in the square, right?
Engineers as Heroes in Crisis
00:56:23
Speaker
Because that's what they have to do. And we didn't talk a lot about the adventure that Dinah goes on with Marcus, but there's a lot of great moments in there of you do what has to be done, even if it means your cancer is gonna kill you, even if it means that you're not gonna be coming home. You save the people you can save. And even in little ways, we see that as the men slowly die,
00:56:50
Speaker
on endurance, right? They go out for more walks. They take the more dangerous jobs. And there's even a line where I think he says in the end of every argument is you can have children, right? That you need to be protected because you can do something that we can't.
00:57:09
Speaker
I'll just say I love all of those descriptions of the technology. Again, I think I've said it before, but I love them. I love imagining how all of the arms of the robots work. I didn't quite do it, but there were several times I was like, should I draw a diagram of this? But then there were pictures provided, so I didn't have to.
00:57:31
Speaker
Like I enjoy that so much. It makes me feel so much smarter to read that and it gives me the impression that maybe I actually know something about engineering. I have to remind myself I do not, but like reading all of those very detailed descriptions, I enjoy it a lot. But I know a lot of Stevenson fans kind of gloss over those portions too. I think he does a great job of if you are even a little bit interested, he
00:57:57
Speaker
will get you in there, right? And he will get you excited about the things he's describing. But I think he also, you know, it's very easy to skim a few paragraphs and pick the story after, but I love those too. And I think they give you ideas that you've never had before, like the idea of
00:58:15
Speaker
experiencing an epigenetic shift so dramatic that you're unrecognizable to yourself afterwards, right? So what are the human experiences that are like that? I mean, in some sense, I think puberty is like a shadow of that, right? I think, you know, for some women, being pregnant is kind of a shadow of that. But to think about, we're going to take this idea that you
00:58:41
Speaker
have a dramatic reaction to your environment. That's a cool idea and he gives you enough to really think about it. I want to add deconstructing from a face, like leaving a face is like that too. Yeah, there's a death, but there's also something after the death that's different.
00:59:00
Speaker
Listeners, what did you think of Seven Eves? Have you read any other books by Neal Stephenson? What do you think about Solarpunk? Let us know by recording a voice memo and emailing openingquestionatgmail.com. You can also comment on our sub stack, our email newsletter at bookclubpod.substack.com. We will read your responses and play your voice memos on our feedback episode at the end of the season.
00:59:26
Speaker
Our next book discussion will be about Earth Abides by George Stewart. Read with us. You can get your copy using the affiliate link in our show notes. The Book Club Podcast is produced by me, Carolyn Gorman, and Carly Jackson. Music and audio editing by Alex Marcus. Special thanks to our guest, Kristi Horbidal. Thanks for listening.