And Sean Probst, the unlikable genius behind Arjuna Expeditions (clearly modeled on SpaceX’s Elon Musk), while not officially invited to the party, has deep enough pockets and a large enough ego to write his own ticket into the action. Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris, a leading astronomer who is also a popular TV personality with a knack for making astronomy palatable to the general public (Think Neil deGrasse Tyson, since this is who the character is most assuredly based upon.), is a key technical resource in authoring humanity’s exit strategy. Her counterpart, Dinah MacQuarrie, whose miner father “taught her mathematics, military history, Morse code,” is a robotics genius employed by Arjuna Expeditions, a private asteroid mining company. Two female characters lead the charge aboard the ISS: Ivy Xiao, a tiger-mom-raised astronaut with “the motor control of a chopper pilot and the mathematical mind of a physicist,” is the commander of the station. Neal Stephenson musters a team of brilliant protagonists who will pull off this seemingly impossible task and save humanity. Little time is wasted on hysteria as the human race pulls together for the Herculean task before them: select young representatives from the nations of the world to be sent into space to inhabit a “cloud ark,” a network of space vessels built around the International Space Station (ISS), where, with luck, they will ride out the next five thousand years. The moon’s explosion sets a clock ticking scientists predict just two years before a “hard rain,” an apocalyptic meteor shower that will end all life and leave the Earth uninhabitable for thousands of years. William Morrow, 2015It’s a sight that no human in history has ever beheld and one no one wants to.

Seven eves