A book review! This is the end of days.

At the end of 2015, I finished off a novel and realized it was the fourth book that I had read in the year. This represented both a success and a failure. I didn't get through four entire books in 2014, so go me! But I probably could have done better. My count for movies was close to 50, and I polished off eight multi-season television series, about twenty seasons in total.

2016 will be different. Two full weeks into the new year, I have finished a 1300 page book. It was an ebook, but it was by Neal Stephenson, so it's listed at 880 pages in the dead tree editions. Woot! It compares interestingly to a couple other movies, so spoilers ahead.

Where we're going, we don't need books.

At least dead tree ones. They're heavy. And flammable.

Seveneves is an apocalypse book. Something blows up the moon. The resulting seven pieces start rubbing against one another making little rocks that will eventually become Saturn-like rings. However, that transition is bad news for Earth because a whole number fraction of those rocks will fall into the planet's gravity. The volume of those rocks burning up in the atmosphere will turn the planet into a fiery hell for a couple thousand years. This is called the Hard Rain.

The Hard Rain divides the first two thirds of the book, which move pleasantly and quickly through the logistics of getting a breeding population up to space, then dealing with the population that finds itself in space. A couple of the characters are stand-ins for real folks, including a astrophysicist science-populizer, a conniving female politician, and a teen Muslim education advocate/gunshot survivor. Some of their fleshing out as characters isn't on the page. There are long expositions about orbital mechanics and the needs of radiation shielding that get repetitive. At times it reads like a mantra.

Or a prayer. Which is interesting because the last third of the book deals with the descendants of these survivors - these Seven Eves - in the distant future. These descendants use the term The Epic to describe the times and stories around the Hard Rain. In a way, the first part of the book reads like the Bible that spends swaths on lineage or the old epics that spend verse after verse on the capacity of ten dozen ships sent by whichever city-state to support the war.

Being an aficionado of apocalyptic stories, I can say that this mechanical approach is pretty standard. Most alien and zombie movies get through a good portion of their run time by detailing the race for security and breaching that security for resources, then only deal with emotions when there is a lull in the action. Flood stories are all about preparations - think cubits and breeding pairs - before the storm.  It's all about getting set up for the survival on the other side.

Interestingly, quite a few apocalypse stories deal with the immolation of the Earth, whether by God or aliens or nature. But Seveneves is one of three stores that have popped up concerning the TOTAL immolation of the planet. Which is kind of interesting.

Knowing came out a couple years ago. It stars Nic Cage's hair, who spends some time unraveling a code buried in a time capsule that predicts major disasters. The last reel is flustered and unbrushed, where Nic figures out that global doom was inescapable for all but two that didn't include him. The climax washes the earth with a global firestorm caused by solar flares. Here's the scene:

It's a pretty impressive scene in a fairly terrible movie.

More recently, These Final Hours is an Australian movie that could very well be a part of the Seveneves universe, what happened on the ground in the Hard Rain. It's a pretty devastating movie, a slow burn on what happens when the lifeboats are all gone. There is a house party scene that is fairly spot-on about how we would expect most people to act. Here's the trailer:

These are pretty terrible scenes in a fairly impressive movie.

I enjoy stories of the apocalypse because of how much they deal in the mechanics of survival. We imagine ourselves being heroes in short-run disasters. Keeping things stable until we can get the lights back on.

Alas, this particular branch of apocalyptica is novel and particularly reflective of our times. These books and movies don't leave much behind, which turns the individual survival question into a species survival question. Can we be heroes for humanity?

For most people, their decisions would be made for them. Whether by wealth or class or just bad luck, they wouldn't have a choice in putting the survival of the species ahead of their own. They would be quickly wiped out in whatever fast cataclysm was occurring.

But what if that disaster was attenuated, slowed, extended over time in a way that small decisions by many individuals today COULD actually change the outcome? Could we think species-wide in a slow-moving disaster? People who could make that choice are truly heroes.

Drawing such a message from these stories really make them a function of the world we live.  Of course, that's just dreaming. Heating up the planet to become uninhabitable is just science fiction.