Dude, don’t be an asshole.
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Definitely they would have tried something like Orion in their desperation. The regular rockets would be the most common thing and good for the people, but I think every other possible method of launching lots of material into orbit would be tried. I remember in Footfall that they said the bigger and heavier the object launched using an Orion system the smoother the ride.
Stephenson was a consultant for Blue Origin so I suspect he has had conversations with people actually trying to launch things into space and discussed orbital mechanics in depth with them.
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Arjuna in the book is clearly modeled on Blue Origin.
I’m not being an asshole. I don’t really think this was posted because money changed hands, but BoingBoing doesn’t do a great job of disclosing when something is organic content and when it’s paid for.
Follow the link I posted and tell me if you think it’s purely an advertisement. The answer is that it is and you have to look at the byline to tell. When that was first posted, it wasn’t even labeled as an advertisement and instead it just said posted by BoingBoing.
So, it’s clear that some of the content here is native advertising and it isn’t always labeled as such (at least not immediately and never obviously).
It would also be nice to know if the book was a gift to Cory or if it was something he bought because it does make a difference. A gifted book is more likely to receive a positive review. There might even be FTC rules about this.
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When an SF author reviews a book around the time it comes out, you can almost always assume they were given a review copy. Hell, I’m not an SF author but used to blog book reviews a lot and I got review copies (physical ones) all the time. That’s the norm for the industry. And, no, there are not FTC rules about you being required to disclose whether you paid for a book. I’m pretty sure the FTC doesn’t have jurisdiction in London, either.
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And, no, there are not FTC rules about you being required to disclose whether you paid for a book.
I was just googling that and there are rules for bloggers. I found an article in Wired about it and they specifically mention BoingBoing and Doctorow:
For a concrete example, take BoingBoing.net, one of the net’s top blogs that is published inside the United States. Cory Doctorow, one of the site’s principal writers, occasionally reviews books there, but he’s not a professional book reviewer.
Still, readers of his reviews bought 25,000 books through Amazon.com last year, and his affiliate links to those books earned him a commission — which, assuming a $10 average price likely netted Doctorow about $20,000 a year.
But, he’s a professional writer, among other things, and Boing Boing as a blog has a larger readership than many mainstream publications who escape the FCC’s rules. Doctorow also seems to reside mostly in the U.K., complicating jurisdiction. And no one seems to have accused Doctorow of being on the take.
But do the rules apply to him? It’s very unclear.
UPDATE: Doctorow responds in the comments that he always discloses and disposes.
“For the record, I always disclose when a book review was generated from a free galley, ARC or finished book (if the book is a printed manuscript or an ebook, I sometimes skip it, since I tear off and discard sheets from the former and generally delete the latter once I’m through with it),” Doctorow wrote. “Though, to be honest, “free” books are a substantial liability, since I get sent about 20 dumb, off-topic or not-quite-right books for every one I review, and I have to pay for a PO Box and a monthly taxi to get them all to the local charity shop.”
All of that is from here. He says he discloses so I guess you can trust stuff he posts under his byline and know that he actually paid for the book he’s reviewing. It would be nice to hear him say that he isn’t the one posting ads that look like articles though.
Neal Stephenson understands contemporary space science beautifully…but he doesn’t know jack shit about technological, biological, and sociological evolution. Nor does he know how to pace or otherwise arrange books.
This is a novel that I expected to be divided into two complementary halves: the escape from Earth, and the return five thousand years later. Instead, it’s 2/3 slowly watching humanity approach extinction and play with orbital mechanics–which utterly, utterly, utterly bored me to tears, because orbital mechanics revolves around a whole lot of waiting interrupted by minutes–MINUTES–of activity…following by more waiting and number-crunching. The first part was brilliant, as Earth geared up for the Hard Rain. The second part was just an interminable series of orbital maneuvers during which everyone dies of radiation poisoning or starvation. (Once again, perfectly confirming my belief that canned apes DO NOT belong in space as they currently exist as Humans 1.0.) The end of part two where the Eves decide the Entire Fate of Humanity was a five-page scribble. After wasting how many pages on boring attitude burns and detailing the impossible rigours of keeping unmodified humans alive in space, he sums up the foregoing five hundreds pages in a handful of sentences–a brief argument between women. Wow. Anticlimactic.
The third part is sheer tacked-on drivel. It either should’ve been fully half of the book, or a totally separate novel. But even more stultifying is how Stephenson depicts the future humans. FIVE. THOUSAND. YEARS. And they’re still no more different from modern-day humans than a tiny amount of genetic tweaks? To adapt to life in microgravity habitats, the entire human genome would have to be edited, and periodically reviewed to remove mutations caused by radiation. And yet each Eve’s “race” gets only one allowed tweak? How about engineering humans with thicker corneal membranes and muscles to clamp shut nostrils and ears in case of a blow-out? How about engineering toes into functional hands? How about engineering smaller bodies that require less nutrients and space? But, apparently, in five thousand goddamn years human science has only advanced enough to refine the bare handful of technological advancements left on Izzy. What? Did humanity lose all its creativity in five thousand years?
Idaknow. After the utter tedium of Reamde, I hoped Seveneves would restore my faith in Stephenson, but it’s confirmed everything I hold against him: he knows nothing about pacing, he wastes more paper than Stephen King detailing shit that could be summed up in a paragraph, and he has no idea of what The Future is actually going to look like.
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A hundred? How about 259? As I was reading this, I noticed that a lot of space was being wasted on orbital mechanics lectures that, really, were completely unnecessary. Cool, I guess, if you’re a youngster and you want to learn about orbital mechanics, but not needed in a straightforward adult sci-fi novel. So I started keeping track of every page/scene I would have removed or shortened had I been the editor of this book. By the end of the second part, the count was 259. I really can’t estimate a word-count on that, but I’m sure it’s upwards of 20,000 words of more.
Gaaah.
Again, Stephenson needs an editor willing to stand up to him.
I actually loved Reamde. 
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Didn’t mind the whale stuff, just annoyed that they were always called fish.
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Tedium is one word I would not use to describe Reamde. It was kind of jammed up with action sequences, which I think Stephenson does well (how 'bout those Vale monks in Anathem?)
Capsule review: I read and enjoyed this book.
Full review: I read and enjoyed this book because it is eight hundred pages of STEAMING HOT MESS in terms of internal contradiction, flat-out impossibilities in every science from anthropology to zoology, and dozens of coincidences of such magnitude that they would make that guy who won Powerball three times say, “Um, well, hold on here. Really?” I cannot wait until enough of my friends have read it that we can tear it down like an Apple Watch on a tech design website.
In other words, I’m pretty much his target audience. I look forward to his next book!
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This book appears as #3 in New York Times best sellers now. See list of New York Times Best Sellers. Will it be another best seller from Neal?
I hear what you’re saying in all these posts, and you might be right that this is native advertising. In this and many other respects, there’s pretty clearly a disconnect between the happy-mutant peace-and-transparency-and-Wonderful-Things vibe, and the practices and policies of Happy Mutants LLC.
Where I think you’re wrong, or at least headed in the wrong direction, is to assume that it’s somehow worse when BB acts like the for-profit, plugged-in, by-of-and-for-the-commercial-mainstream web content provider that it is, as opposed to, say, Buzzfeed or RedState. Whatever else you might say, I don’t think the people running this site can be accused of not knowing what’s good for their business.
It’s because they’ve branded themselves a certain way that all these things can stick in your craw when you notice them happening (native advertising, clickbait, landing pages with content identical to the front page blurb to drive up page views, high-markup third-party online gift shop, omitting disclosure, page analytics and user-tracking courtesy of a company whose founder they’re pleased to label a “war crimes apologist,” content disappearances, off-page blanket disclosures of things like referral links, SEO, etc.).
The thing is, though, it’s not a 'zine anymore, Cory Doctorow isn’t a lonely voice shouting in from the fringes of culture anymore, and in the year 2015 you can probably pay to be a Wonderful Thing. You might be annoyed when Facebook regards your eyeballs as their personal property and mines your posts for psychological clues about you to sell to advertisers, but I doubt you feel betrayed, because you didn’t expect better. Branding aside, there’s really no reason to here, either.
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as a child at dinnertime, I would eat the stuff I disliked first, getting though the monotony, saving my most desired bits for last. to savor and enjoy
I still do this today. As I was reading Cory’s brilliant review of Neal’s newest offering, I realized, I am cheatin a little. cause Seveneves is sitting on my nightstand, while I plow thorugh 2 other books.
still 6 years old, saving the favorite bits for later.
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I almost stopped close to the beginning because it was too depressing, but I now take back everything I sad about it. This is a good book, but hard to take for some.
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I went to see him at a reading and I seriously considered asking him if he was familiar with it during the Q&A.
Wow, given Mr. Doctorow’s usual breathless, over the top endorsements of books, this one is practically a scathing critique. I don’t make a lot of time to read fiction so when I do I want it to be a really good book. Therefore I have, in the past, put faith in people like Mr. Doctorow to do the steering. However, over the last couple of years, I have been more often disappointed by the books that he recommends than fulfilled. In looking at who the authors are, I notice that they all tend to be in his clique (I remember him writing about having dinner at Mr. Stephenson’s house). Would he really not post a review of a friend’s book when he might like that friend to do a cover blurb for his book? I don’t know. Clearly I do not know Mr. Doctorow personally but I did not enjoy Seveneves and, based on his usual glowing reviews, I bet he did not really either. I just wonder if he is pulling any punches in these reviews.
