Neal Stephenson

(Photo by Kelly O'Connor)

On the first page of Neal Stephenson's new 880-page novel, "Seveneves," the moon blows up. At first, it seems as if, despite that fact, life on Earth can continue pretty much as before. But is soon becomes evident that, within a couple of years or so, the surface of the planet will become an uninhabitable firestorm, and it will remain that way for millennia.

The effort to get as many of the most appropriate people, and a suitable long-term habitat for them, into orbit forms the spine of the first two-thirds of Stephenson's book. With the same epic scope, scientific rigor, and narrative invention he brought to "Crytonomicon," "Anathem," and the epic, three-volume Baroque Cycle, Stephenson has crafted another mind-nourishing page-turner.

The last third of "Seveneves" follows a huge plot twist that would be even more breathtaking if you had no idea it was coming. In the following interview with Stephenson, some of the details of that fascinating final act are inevitably revealed. You've been warned.

Questions and answers have been edited for length, clarity, and to remove some of the juicier spoilers.

You have a predilection for crafting strong, memorable female characters, which is something of an anomaly, unfortunately, in the world of speculative fiction. And this is especially true of "Seveneves." Is that something that you consciously set out to do when you're creating a cast of characters?

To be fair, it varies quite a bit from book to book. "Anathem" for instance, is relatively weak when it comes to female characters. In this case, the basic premise of the story made it automatic that I was going to have to develop a cast of female characters, purely for biological reasons.

Not all of these women, though, turn out to be totally morally upright. In fact, some of them are incredibly flawed, if not downright evil.

I actually did an interview a couple of years ago with Jason Pontin of Technology Review in a lecture hall at MIT. One of the questions he asked was: "Supposedly you're cracked up to be good at female characters, but how come all your female characters are good people. If you really were a legitimate feminist, you would give women enough equality to be bad." It's not true; there are some bad female characters in my earlier books. But it was a funny conversation, and I was actually thinking about it while I was writing this book. In the back of my mind I was saying "I'll show you, Jason.

The jacket copy on the galley of "Seveneves" calls it "a grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years." That 5,000-year leap doesn't happen, though, until nearly 600 pages into the book. When it does happen, it's a great moment, but I couldn't help but wonder how much more breathtaking it would have been without that information from the back cover.

It's always a little bit of a tussle to decide what is going to go on the flap copy and how much to reveal. Let me check my copy of the actual book, which I just got a few days ago ... Yeah, there it is: "A grand story of annihilation and survival spanning five thousand years..." Hmm.

I hope I haven't caused you any anxiety by pointing that out -- it's still a very cool moment. That last third of the book reminded me of a quote from geneticist Craig Venter: "If the 20th century was the century of physics, the 21st will be the century of biology." The novel shifts from having a lot to do with orbital mechanics and the movements of bodies through space to being concerned with humanity's genetic legacy. This includes some potentially troublesome ideas about the way behavior and personality can be affected by heredity. Were you nervous about wading into those waters?

This is a trope in both fantasy and science fiction already. You read "The Lord of the Rings," for example. The dwarves and the elves all have different behavior patterns which are determined according to their racial identity. Likewise, in "Star Trek," the Klingons and the Romulans and the Ferengi all have that linkage. It's almost a universal thing in fantasy and science fiction to do that, but if you stand back and think about it for a minute, it's an inherently racist habit of thinking.

Just the fact that they're referred to as different "races" rather than different species is interesting.

Yeah, so this goes on all the time in fantasy and science fiction. The people who are fans of the genres -- though this is controversial now -- many of them are quite politically sensitive and aware. And yet they love them some grouchy dwarves and some greedy Ferengi. It's almost like this is a protected sphere in which it's permissible and normal to engage in that kind of racially based thinking. So this is sort of me playing with that.

"Seveneves," like all your work, doesn't stint on details when describing the science. How do you decide how in-depth you can be and what you can assume a reader knows? Do you have an awareness that your readership allows you to assume a bit more sophistication with that stuff than most novelists?

I may have a little bit of leeway there, but that doesn't mean that I have to use it. You can never get it perfectly calibrated for every single reader, so there will always be some who are rolling their eyes at too much technical stuff and others who want more. As a yardstick, I try to make it somehow of service to the story. In the maneuvers that they have to go through during the middle section of the book, where there's a lot of talk about delta-v's and that kind of thing, those technical considerations have very real consequences for the occupants. It's part of the physical environment that they're dealing with and the challenges they have to solve. As long as it's in service to the story and helps create a more visceral description of the world and provides plot points, then you can get away with more of it.

Most of the science in "Seveneves" is of the relatively realistic, day-after-tomorrow sort.

I try to be a bit of a stickler for legit physics. There are a few places where I cheated, and some of my more sophisticated friends have gleefully pointed them out to me already. This is a book where there's no jumping into hyperspace, you don't have a teleporter, you don't have a lot of the other non-realistic technology that appears in other science fiction books.

The first sentence of "Seveneves" is "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason." There's some theorizing by characters about this, but the book never provides a definitive answer. Do you have a specific cause in your mind that you chose not to include, and if so, what is it?

That's a place I'm not going to go right now. It's a place that we could go, maybe in the future. But I didn't want it to be a book about that. I wanted it to be a book about something really bad happening that we just had to deal with, without a lot of thinking about the whys and wherefores.

We see the best and worst of human behavior over the course of "Seveneves," bravery in the most harrowing of situations and pettiness at the most crucial moments. Overall, would you say the book presents an optimistic or a pessimistic view of human nature?

I'm trying to reflect human nature as I see it. We've got a few bad traits that are very, very bad when they get triggered -- tendencies towards scapegoating and mob violence, for instance. And there are some people who are really good at triggering them, by playing on the worst aspects of human nature. And that's not going away. So the systems that work best tend to be those that have some firewalls and backstops built in so that when that happens, when things starts to go sideways, there's someone around to say "Wait a minute, you can't cross that line." It's sort of like chess versus tic-tac-toe. Getting people to behave badly is like tic-tac-toe. You can put up a Facebook post with inflammatory language, and very reliably, a lot of people will just go after it. Counteracting that is like chess. It's much more complicated to fight back against that sort of behavior, to calm people down and get them to listen to reason, than it is to trigger it.

Speaking of Facebook, you've described yourself as a "sociomediapath." There seems to be a recent surge in the backlash against social media. Is it a wave that has crested?

This has been happening just in the month since I've finished the book. There have been more and more people talking that way. There is a kind of fatigue setting in. I think it's increasingly obvious to the more sophisticated users that the system is being gamed by people who want to rack up political victories, or who want to sell something, and so people are starting to wall themselves off a little bit from social media.

Your last novel, "Reamde," and this one, feel like the most movie-adaptable books you've written. Has there been any movement in that direction? Or maybe an HBO series based on The Baroque Cycle?

There was an effort made to sell a TV adaptation of "Reamde," which faltered, so that's not going anywhere. Obviously, almost everything I've ever written is too big for a movie, but the renaissance in quality of long-form television series has caused people to go back and look at things. Nothing has come of it yet, though. "Seveneves" hasn't been optioned.

Reading: Stephenson reads from "Seveneves" at 7 p.m. May 19 at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, the same day "Seveneves" goes on sale.

Marc Mohan is a Portland writer.