Seveneves (2015)

A catastrophe forces engineers, scientists and political leaders to plan for survival in orbit. Stephenson gives equipment, trajectories and cascading failures sustained attention, while alliances and loyalties influence who gets a chance to live. Choose it when you want very high technical density and can tolerate a large cast giving way to a radically different final section. Its central disaster is an unexplained premise; the long orbital struggle supplies much of the methodical problem-solving.