Seveneves

Seveneves is a science fiction novel by the American writer Neal Stephenson, published in 2015.

An unknown agent breaks the Moon into fragments. Doc Dubois Harris, an astronomer who has spent his career explaining the sky to the public, calculates what happens next: the pieces will collide with one another, spread out into a band, and then fall onto the Earth as a sheet of fire hot enough to boil the oceans away. He calls it the Hard Rain and he has roughly two years to persuade the world of it. What the world does is put as many people and as much equipment as it can into orbit, bolted onto the International Space Station and an iron asteroid brought alongside to give the structure some protection.

About fifteen hundred people get there before the Hard Rain begins, and the part of the book that follows is as much about the arguments inside that small population as about the catastrophe below: who deserves a place on the ark, who gets to decide, and what a handful of survivors has to become in order to last out the thousands of years that have to pass before the Earth can be lived on again.