‘Well, obviously that is very hard news if it is true,’ the president said.

The only way to survive is to get away from the atmosphere. The entire surface of the Earth is going to be sterilised. ‘Those fiery trails we’ve been seeing in the sky lately, as the meteorites come in and burn up? There will be so many of those that they will merge into a dome of fire that will set aflame anything that can see it. ‘It is going to be a meteorite bombardment such as the Earth has not seen since the primordial age, when the solar system formed,’ Doob said. But Doc Dubois Harris (‘Doob’), a popular TV scientist (think a down-home version of Carl Sagan), works out that those collisions will become worse over time and eventually most of the moon will fall to Earth. The pieces of the moon still hang together in the same orbital path, colliding gently with one another every now and then. Seveneves begins with ‘Zero’: the moon blows apart for unknown – and perhaps unknowable – reasons. The back third – frustratingly – not so much.

The first two-thirds contain one of the best science fiction novels I’ve read this year. His latest work, Seveneves, is a huge book, and not just in concept. Since then he’s established his credentials with a range of novels tackling, and often melding, diverse subjects such as cryptography, nanotechnology and cybercrime as well as a three-volume historical sequence – The Baroque Cycle – about the dawning of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Neal Stephenson came to the fore with his third book Snow Crash, which gave William Gibson a run for his money in the cyberpunk stakes. This science fiction epic combines cutting-edge science and technology with strong characters and high stakes.