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That pretty much sums it up. This book is basically two stories. The first part revolves around nerdy orbital dynamics descriptions with a sprinkle of politics and psychology. It makes sense and is mildly interesting but a bit much. The background research is, as usual for Neil Stephenson, quite impressive. The sorry elements is not the main part of this book. There are a few surprises in the beginning and end of each part. But most of the book is rather straight forward.

All-in-all Seveneves is an interesting series of what-ifs and an elaborate exploration of what these ifs could lead to.

It's a fairly slow paced presentation of a long series of events with a couple of sudden twists at the end of each part. This presents a sudden moment of "huh...?" at those points.

Rather light reading, probably targeting a wider audience. The main story was ok, with some cheap tricks to grab your attention early on. Phrases like "If only they hadn't..." and "They were the lucky ones..." are used frequently which to me felt more like spoiling the surprise than anything else.

Some characters develop pretty far but sometimes this is very sudden and hard to accept. The book is loosely based on the computer game, but this is mainly by mentioning some tech here, and some civilizations there.

A large portion of the environmental description focuses on describing what seems like misunderstood concepts in astrophysics. While that doesn't necessarily mean poor sci-fi, this book gave me the impression that the author skimmed through some out-dated low quality popular science magazine as the background research.

All in all and ok read.

Let's see if this is worth reading...

I wasn't at all impressed by this. After reading Ender's shadow, this book didn't add that much new. It introduced some new perspectives and angles on events, but not too interesting. The new story elements were (appropriately?) overshadowed but the main plot in Ender's game. Maybe it would be more interesting for someone who hasn't already read Ender's game.