Seveneves. Neal Stephenson

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Seveneves - Neal Stephenson


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      SEVENEVES

      Neal Stephenson

       Copyright

      The Borough Press,

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2015

      Copyright © Neal Stephenson 2015

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2016

      Cover photograph © Shuttershock.com

      Illustrations by Weta Workshop; copyright © Neal Stephenson 2015

      Lead Illustrator: Christian Pearce

      Creative Research: Ben Hawker and Paul Tobin

      Neal Stephenson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008132545

      Ebook Edition © May 2015 ISBN: 9780008132538

      Version: 2019-03-01

       Dedication

      TO JAIME, MARIA, MARCO, AND JEFF

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Casting of Lots

       Cloud Ark

       Part Two

       White Sky

       Hard Rain

       Ymir

       Endurance

       Cleft

       Part Three

       Epilogue

       Artwork

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by Neal Stephenson

       About the Publisher

Part One

       The Age of the One Moon

      THE MOON BLEW UP WITHOUT WARNING AND FOR NO APPARENT reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.

      An amateur astronomer in Utah was the first person on Earth to realize that something unusual was happening. Moments earlier, he had noticed a blur flourishing in the vicinity of the Reiner Gamma formation, near the moon’s equator. He assumed it was a dust cloud thrown up by a meteor strike. He pulled out his phone and blogged the event, moving his stiff thumbs (for he was high on a mountain and the air was as cold as it was clear) as fast as he could to secure the claim to himself. Other astronomers would soon be pointing their telescopes at the same dust cloud—might be doing it already! But—supposing he could move his thumbs fast enough—he would be the first to point it out. The fame would be his; if the meteorite left behind a visible crater, perhaps it would even bear his name.

      His name was forgotten. By the time he had gotten his phone out of his pocket, his crater no longer existed. Nor did the moon.

      When he pocketed his phone and put his eye back to the eyepiece of his telescope, he let out a curse, since all he saw was a tawny blur. He must have knocked the telescope out of focus. He began to twiddle the focus knob. This didn’t help.

      Finally he pulled back from the telescope and looked with his naked eyes at the place where the moon was supposed to be. In that moment he ceased to be a scientist, with privileged information, and became no different from millions of other people around the Americas, gaping in awe and astonishment


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