seveneves fixfic

 

today i slay the perfidiouf brainworm. Spoilers ahead.

Cool shit:

• society of interconnected orbital habitats, forming a ring around an uninhabitable hell-planet
• entire human race bottlenecked thru 7 women
• all-female society supported by genetic engineering and parthenogenesis (I don't remember what Stephenson's justification for this was but apparently men are poorly suited to life in space? rolling with it for now

The Eves were most experienced in robotics, applied physics, genetics, and scheming. They also had access to a sociologist who they rarely used.

Like all the worst scifi characters, the Eves in charge look down on politics, religion, and the uneducated masses. There is no world in which they could govern more than 40 people.

There are no historians on the ship: imagine all of human history as recollected by 8 traumatized astronauts (4 americans, 1 brit, 1 italian, 1 soviet, and 1 generic-muslim-country-stephenson-doesn't-specify).

 

The first generation is raised under close supervision. 8 women raising dozens of children in a space station, while also working full time to prevent said space station from exploding. Poor Luisa, post-menopausal, has to keep the children from killing themselves and the Eves from killing each other.

How do they prepare their children for life without their guidance? What happens to their vision of the future when they die? How does a generation ship survive a generation shift?

 

You live in a habitat on the ring. False sky to simulate light (or maybe that biological need has already been edited out), subsistence farming to keep you busy. How often do you need to leave the habitat? Who is your family? How many kids will you have; what will they be like? You need to consult the habitat authority, and receive the blessing of their geneticist- their Moiran (not a direct descendant of Moira's, but a disciple of her craft)

In the novel, all of humanity worships 5000 year old security cam footage of the Eves. The reader is informed that this does not count as worship because they're all enlightened atheists who know everything about the evils of organized religion, and also they have video evidence that the Eves are real. (This sucks. I have no real argument to make, it's just lame.)

They also have a big chunk of human history stored digitally. How long does this storage last? How often do they read/write? What happens when they need to transfer to a new format?

Ofc the first generation doesn't actually watch the security footage: their mothers are right there, they remember what happened. It's an oral tradition with a scaffold of data, until the hard drives rot that is.

The important, salient stuff passes down. It's a Use it or lose it situation.

 

You are the first daughter of the last eight women in the universe. Expectations are high- it's tough keeping dead weight on a nascent space station. Your parents are the top 0.0001% smartest of humanity- the odds to impress are stacked against you. And if you aren't smart, or disciplined, or empathetic, you've got dozens of sisters on the way.

The Eves start experimenting with trait augmentation after the first flunkies reach puberty: Ivy sees her daughter fail continuously to grasp calculus, and asks herself what is to be done with human error

A culture's myths describe its present, not its past. There are only 8 people in the pantheon of Eves: that's 28 mythohistoric two-person relationships.

We can draw a line between JBF (betrayer) and Aida (cannibal) and the rest. Moira and Tekla are lovers. Ivy and Dinah have known each other the longest. Camila and Luisa are peacemakers. Ivy is the de facto leader for resource management and risk assessment: JBF covets her position and Dinah flouts her authority. Camila redeems Aida.

They also embody their own mythic archetypes (in order from most to least social capital):

• Ivy: leader, judge. In hard times, a reluctant tyrant
• Dinah: impulsive and clever hero, king-challenger
• Moira: sage with existentially important, ethically troubling task. Easily led astray

(These are the three "hard" scientists, they rule via soft meritocracy; the rest are outcast or self-effacing)

• Luisa: elder peacemaker, first of the dead. Deferred to on some social matters
• Tekla: stern warrior, king-defender
• Camila: apprentice peacemaker, record-keeper/archivist (i think she was a journalist?)
• Julia: oft-embarrassed schemer (evil vizier)
• Aida: monster, trickster

(sidebar: it's pretty fucked that both of Seveneves' villains are chalked up to mental illness- unmedicated depression for JBF and bipolar for Aida. I'm not really sure how to handle this yet)

 

Before fully being mythologized, the Eves have many children. Half of the first generation is baseline, no edits [myths 1-6: the eves convincing Moira one-by-one to edit their children for various reasons → culture: control of mothers over their daughters]. These children fill a few more mythic roles (mother's names in parentheses):

• Dawn: the first (Dinah)
• Calliope: the fool (Ivy) [myth 1: disappointing daughter inspires mother to edit her future children → culture: meritocratic, intellectual]
• Atifa: artist-historian (Camila) [myth 7: Atifa rescues a large part of the archives during the first information extinction, thanks to her active study of the past]
• Hannah: mad scientist (Julia) [myth 6: learns Moira's craft and pushes them to an extreme: Julia never edits her children, but Hannah does and she does it a lot]
• Tatiana: law-maker (Tekla/Moira) [myth 8: daughter elected to leadership as mothers loosen their grip → culture: pseudo-democratic succession]
• Alexandria: pariah child (Aida) [myth 2: her daughter's treatment "forces her hand", Aida edits her future children to be better and more independent]
  
• Fatima: sibling-slayer (Camila) [myth 5: Fatima kills one of her sisters, the first murder of the new age. Inspires Camila to edit her future children]
  
• Gabrielle: religious revivalist/prophet (Dinah) [myth 9: revelations gleaned from the workings of Atifa]
• (12 more)
  
• Tesla: the first of the gene-edited children; first of the numen (Ivy)
  

Some of these may be combinations of multiple historical children, focusing in thru a mythic lens.

[note: Gabrielle opposes the Prowsian (he didn't write this but did inspire it) view of the arklet-swarm-as-supernatural-entity with the historical evidence that the arklet swarm fucking sucked, comparing it to the golden calf. Her teachings are monotheist and anti-computer intelligence: not sure how much it catches on but she gets into a big ass fight with her mom over it]

 

7 eves → 21 mythohistoric ancestors (rootstock human daughters + Tesla) → 100+ numen (new human) strains

 

The governing council of the Cradle began as a round table of the Eves. As their children reached maturity, they were invited to join the council, but even partial attendance became unwieldy, and the Eves continued to wield unequal power as the eldest and wisest members.

Planning for the future, Dinah, Camila, and Aida advocate for direct democracy. Moira, Tekla, and Julia advocate for an elected council. It doesn't really matter who wins, humanity schisms within the next 100 years anyway.

There's a vocal minority who wants to balance a 7-to-19-part council based on Eve lineage. This is muddled by the existence of blended-genome Moira/Teklans, Ivy/Dinans, and so on. Rest assured, eugenics-based policies rear their ugly heads countless times over the next 5000 years.

Over the course of the first millenium:

• The first data extinction wipes out a large chunk of data not committed to memory or physical media as part of the conflict between the Humanist (those who want to recreate society from old earth history) and First Millennium (focused on present day issues and immediate needs) factions.
• Roughly a quarter of the asteroid-mining robot swarm develops spontaneous distributed intelligence and goes rogue. (suspected plot by Dinah herself, to achieve immortality thru her creations; she always liked her robots better than her kids)
• Technological advancements and linguistic drift lead to the second and third data extinctions (slower than the first but just as deadly).
• Construction begins on the first orbital habitat (in the novel this takes ~4000 years but that seems crazy slow to me) but is delayed by opposition from the Maids of Humanity sect (you repeat the swarm's mistakes! we mustn't exceed our grasp!) and political concerns about the first ringworlders being political minorities who want to claim independence from the ISS.
• The population exceeds 1 million people.
• Single strain supremacists, identical clones of the thirty-fifth nu-man called Nikita, elect Nikita-119 as council member. In 4 years, she invents the role of president for herself. In 4 more years, she is assassinated by a gunwoman (the ISS collectively shits itself: guns were purged from Central Storage in the fourth data extinction, the Moral Extinction, but they are remembered in the Journey Myth.)

You live in a habitat on the ring. You wake, grind your mattock, and return to patrol-- the border between you and Greenwich is thin, and young 'wiches often cross to make trouble. Today, blissfully, it is quiet. You sacrifice the rest of lunch to the Eves in a portable cookshrine: your prized possession. You see a tiger in the orchard. You hurry home to report to your Teklan (not a direct descendant of Tekla's, but a disciple of her craft)

Nikita-119's last four years were marked by a serious push towards human experimentation, with the goal of reviving extinct animal species from before Hard Rain.

The tiger they produced was a striped apex predator, based on the feline DNA they had left over, that could have been the terror of siberia. 4 rounds of lossy compression and storage fuck-ups meant they were mostly starting from scratch, and using their imagination. Nikita-119 proudly kept a private zoo full of creatures like this: half-myth, half-mad science.

[does it cheapen glorantha to steal so much from it for the sake of 7eves, or is it just another testament to its quality?]

Most of ringdweller society is organized into clades, tight-knit mostly self-sufficient communities. They are ruled by councils of seven, each member practiced in the craft and emulation of an Eve:

• The Ivyn is the leader.
• The Dinan is the robot-whisperer.
• The Moiran is the child-giver.
• The Teklan is the war-chief.
• The Camite is the story-keeper.
• The Julian is the omen-reader.
• The Aidan is the trickster.

Small clades are usually short a role or two, coloring their interactions with each other. (Ringdweller adage: A clade with no Camite has no past. A clade with no Julian has no future.)

Many honor important Evesdaughters similarly, such as appointing an Alexan (scapegoat role, beat with sticks to keep spirits high) or Teslan.

5000 years later, the technologies of the world are very different from those envisioned by the Eves.

• Epigenetic switches: some women are able to switch between 2 or more genetic makeups by changing their diets or taking certain drugs
• Quantum seeds (or "pings") that send messages backwards or forwards in time
• Librarians: people with books encoded into their DNA, providing redundancy against information decay. (In Decimal City, everyone is a book.)
• Robot exoskeletons
• The philosopher's stone
• Piggyback CPUs that help you think faster
• Piggyback CPUs that let you think so fast you see the future 
• Child prodigies who stop learning at age 13
• Maglev hovercraft that can drift on any metal surface
• Infinite water elevator (like in minecraft) to the earth's surface 
• self-sustaining orbital habitats
• all the bioengineered war-fauna from Scott Westerfield's Leviathan
  

Mythologically speaking, these were all invented by the Eves and their daughters during a brief period of explosive innovation. "First Century Artifact" is the default explanation for any weird technology discovered in the Ring.

 

A Dinan is required to interface properly with the hundreds of robots that crawl around you at any given moment. Like bees, they hum along to a shared low frequency tune, maintaining the habitat or executing some esoteric construction. They are more indigenous to the habitat than any vine or bird.

Communicating with them, or convincing them to do something for you, requires written and sign language (maintenance bots rarely have ears) and a higher priority level than their current task. The Dinan cultivates priority like the Teklan cultivates discipline. The highest priorities can, with a wave of their hand, build a bridge of living metal across any gap or crevasse.

The functions of the bots are understood to be natural and important. A smart Dinan doesn't flaunt their access unnecessarily; when job queues are disrupted, it attracts attention, not only from other Dinans (who can read the movements of bots to track their own kind's movements)

 

The Good Mom tierlist: (argue in the comments below)

1. Camila, no real competition
2. Julia. Controlling and paranoid, but she's old and only has time for one kid, whom she lavishes with affection
3. Moira. Compassionate, occasionally preoccupied with work. A busy mom doing her best.
4. Ivy. Has very high expectations for her kids. Solid B tier.
   
5. Tekla. Old-fashioned ideas about discipline. Moira evens out her more controlling inclinations.
6. Dinah. Workaholic, bordering on absent. Loves her robots more than her kids, but would never say it to their faces. 
7. Aida. Genuinely unstable, plus her reputation does her children no favors.

 

 

Upon the Ring sits the Eye, a skyhook-space-elevator-thing that can slide back and forth along the habitat ring, connecting the dangling Cradle of Man to whatever habitat it wishes. It belongs to what remains of the Yustekan Empire- once a sprawling superpower, now reduced to a parasite-capitol feeding off of the ringworlders by plague (the price of a highly strain-homogeneous society).

Two more Eyes rest upon the ring, restricting the movements of once-powerful Yusteka. These are Ferran and Born, similar in aims but separated by a vast stretch of depopulated debris unsuitable for habitat use: the Pashishi Boneyard. (smaller boneyards are all over the ring, but this one is a proper sahara, confining active habitation to only 40% of the ring.)

 

The recreation of the Y chromosome was not so hard, but it took a while to figure out a good reason to do it.

A clade without a Moiran is certainly full of men, although a clade with men does not necessarily lack a Moiran. Sexual reproduction does occur out in the ring on occasion, but the advantages of cloning numan women (why clone a man, when they are so often barred from holding council positions?) continue to depress the male population wherever parthenogenesis is an option.

Rumors tell of all-male clades in the most remote arcs of the ring.

The dance of the 7 Eyes turns them ever around the charred planet below (that is Hell, they say. If you are bad, your soul will burn upon that pyre after death)

This divides time into seasons: time spent over the Great Pass is Dry Season, and time spent over the habitats is Wet Season. None of the eye-states can stop moving, or their Dry Season would last too long, or else the eye behind them would catch up with and set upon them. The dance of seasons continues.

For the habitat-dwellers, their calendar tracks which eye is about to pass over them, and whether they are about to contend with a kind or cruel people.

• The Inwar Eye looks toward Hell, and dreams it green and blue. They plan to invade the surface, and slaughter the demons they are certain inhabit its battered crust.
• The Red Eye looks toward Farai, Hell's crimson twin, and amasses rocket fuel for their projects.
• The Born Eye demands tribute: they want to let their creations roam your habitat, and will get angry if said creation is dead when they come back around.
• The Ryl Gabad Eye plots the end of the calendar system and the birth of new empire. Toward this end, they arm the ring clades to commit proxy warfare.
• The Eye of Yusteka maintains their distance, cloistered away in their cradle.
• The Oltec Eye 
• and one more

The creation myth goes as follows: once, all of humanity lived in the Garden of Pleasures, and made many marvelous things. A cruel and jealous Opponent turned their paradise into Hell, but the seven eves escaped (alongside many other doomed creatures) on an ark. Through their ingenuity, they rebuilt civilization upon the bones of the Opponent.

The creation myth goes as follows: once, the universe was all floating rocks. The Eves sorted thru them, taking the bad and rolling them into the ball that would be Hell. Then, they took the good and slingshot them around Hell, forming the ring. (Aeve, the queen of the gods, wields a slingshot as her weapon of choice) Then, they took the very best and shaped their daughters, each from her own mineral

The creation myth goes as follows: once, the ring arrived in the solar system, piloted by the Ef, a race of godlike beings. A brutal titanomachy tore the ring apart, destroying 99% of the habitats and casting almost all of the Ef into the space between, which became the Hell that burns with their sin as kindling. The survivors were the Eves, who rebuilt civilization in their own image.

Quantum seeding is performed using very specific rituals to establish quantum entanglement between the self and another person in a different place and time. The Julian's job is to catalog, design, and perform these rituals, and then read omens from them.

Omen-reading is better understood in the Eyes, and made more accurate and potent thru use of quantum coordinate machines. The "primitive" clade approach eschews theoretical quantum mechanics entirely, but it still works, and it works well.

THIS is the 2900th word in this post. At 320 words per page, that's 9 pages: a little over 1% of Seveneves, or ~4% of the really bad part of Seveneves. I don't plan on writing 24 more of these.

I don't have a thesis statement or gameable core. Let this car crash of knee jerk reactions stand as a monument to my love-hate relationship with this book, as well as my love for these two very GOOD things:

• Glorantha as written by Greg Stafford, and as run by Loch of Nothic's Eye
• Lanthanide Horizons per Archon's Court

behold, 3000 words