The Hard Rain’s arrival, perhaps surprisingly, does not offer much disaster-porn catharsis. When Ivy is replaced by one Markus Leuker, the novel explains sardonically: “The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man.” Stephenson populates his space station with a lovable cast of determined, snappily talking geeks, the coolest of whom are women: Ivy, the unflappable station chief Dinah, the robot expert and Tekla, the sarcastic Russian cosmonaut. There are amusing asides about how living in the End Times is affecting global culture: “The home improvement market had gone bust.”

There is an enjoyable strain of nerdy distrust of officialdom, and we learn much about ballistic coefficients and orbital mechanics. It involves a lot of politicking on Earth, and a lot of clever manoeuvring of robots, comet cores and the like up in orbit. This is all established in the novel’s early pages, so the suspense of the story lies in exactly how the plan will be accomplished by the deadline, and who will survive. Luckily, however, we have people in space: a plan is hatched to send up more people and equipment toenlarge the International Space Station and turn it into an ark, where a tiny proportion of humanity can continue to live. And then the Hard Rain will continue for millennia. All life on the planet will be extinguished. Dubois christens this the “Hard Rain”, and it is even worse than the one Bob Dylan foresaw. In two years’ time, a huge storm of moon debris will rain down as meteorites on the Earth. More and more chunks causing more and more collisions causing more and more chunks. A media-friendly astronomer, Doc Dubois, calculates that this rate of collision will increase exponentially. Then one chunk bashes into another chunk and breaks it in half. The story begins with admirable rhetorical swagger: “The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” Something – perhaps a tiny black hole – has caused the moon to fragment into large chunks.

Neal stephenson seveneves review