No, Neal Stephenson was not taking a tongue-in-cheek approach to writing Seveneves. Yes, Neal Stephenson has gone SJW, or so we are informed by a reader of his latest:
Neal Stephenson’s last novel Seveneves was just bad. His newest effort Fall is full of social justice AND bad. Thank God I got it from the library.
In this story, he has adhered to your theory that the USA will break up sometime in the 2030s, but the “Red State” area is called Ameristan, from which all smart/educated people have fled. Ameristan has no dentists, so everyone has brown or missing teeth. If anyone needs medical care, they have to sneak across the border to the “Blue Lands.” Nothing of value is produced in Ameristan, nothing is exported, everyone is dirt-poor.
Furthermore, Ameristan lives under the Levitican Law, which is a literal interpretation of the Old Testament. Even the most obscure passages from the Bible are enforced, such as executing anyone who wears mixed linen and wool. They also crucify people and burn crosses a lot. The countryside is infested with roaming bandits, so everyone has to drive around with AK-47s or even vehicle-mounted machine machine guns, a bit like ISIS territory. It’s such a heavy-handed parody it’s like something out of Saturday Night Live, but he isn’t joking.
Finally, Stephenson really lays on the feminism here. The female characters are hyper-alert for “microaggressions” (yes, he really uses that word), for instance in one scene a character “decided to let the microaggression pass without comment.” Also the women call out a male character for “mansplaining.”
At one point he talks about the bad old days, where women were harassed on the internet all the time, and men didn’t believe women could write good code. Now (in the 2040s) everyone has an anonymous public ID – no one knows your sex, even when applying for jobs – so OF COURSE it turns out that when code is written anonymously, female-written code turns out to be better than men’s code!
Seveneves pretty much took Stephenson from “buy immediately in hardback” to “borrow from library only” in my eyes. Now I think I’m just done with the guy. I guess he was probably always like this, but now has so much money he thinks he can go wild.
I don’t know. It sounds so over the top that in light of his famous account of his duels with William Gibson, I can’t help but suspect him of selling books while taking the piss out of his SJW readers.