Seveneves

It was not my plan to get sucked into an 861-page book the past couple of weeks, but when I read the first line of Seveneves—"The moon blew up with no warning and for no apparent reason"—my head was turned, and before I knew it, I was a few hundred pages deep. I hadn't read Stephenson since Snow Crash, but my understanding is that this epic is a little more streamlined, and more traditional "hard science fiction," than some of his others. It's an engineer's book, imagining in vast and fascinating detail what a heroic response to that disaster might be in the near future, and what it might lead to in the far future, when the vital questions of orbital mechanics and resource management turn to a different kind of engineering: genetic.