Is the second paragraph of TFA spoiling the whole book, or is that just part of the premise that is set up during the first chapter or so? Because it just sounds like a massive spoiler.
The moon breaks up in the opening sentences of the book. But the realization that it'll destroy the planet doesn't come for some time later. That part is a bit of a spoiler. But the moon blowing up just can't be good for the planet long term, so maybe it's not too big of a spoiler.
I checked it out on Amazon, and the threat to the Earth is out in the open by the 27th page of the story in the hardcover edition. It's also literally the first sentence in the blurb on the back cover.
I am not really sure where this idea of "Spoiler alert" needed when discussing stuff in text is coming from. Maybe it makes sense when people are beginning to talk about a book, movie, etc. It gives someone else that is listening the time to say, "Hey I have not read/watched that yet, let me have time to get out of ear shot before you guys start discussing it." But if one is discussing a creative work and there is nothing "spoiled" then really there is nothing of interest said. Spoilers aplenty in any essay worth reading. As long as the author states what he/she is writing about before writing any "spoilers", and this writer does that in the second sentence, you should just stop reading at that point if you don't want to have the work "spoiled" for you.
The title: "The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason" could be a legitimate cause for complaint as one reads it before knowing what the topic is, but in this case it is not as it is the first sentence in the novel. This fact is conveyed to the reader in the second sentence in the essay.
It's pretty common to discuss creative works in a useful and productive way without spoilers. Just about any worthwhile movie or book review pulls it off.
In fact, you are commenting on an article discussing a work which has no spoilers for that work, so case in point right there.
I guess I don't have a fine tuned sense of what is a spoiler and what is not. If I know I am going to see a movie based on say, an actor I like being in it, I don't want to know anything about the movie ahead of time. Everything is a spoiler. If I start to see a preview of that movie, I'll close my eyes and try not to concentrate on the sound. If I don't know if I want to watch a movie and start reading a review about it to see I should go, I stop reading as soon as I decide I'm going to go and don't finish reading the review. Same sort of situation with books. If the thing you are reading is not meant to be a review to help you decide to go and read/watch, then writing/talking about a work of art without discussing details seems pointless. Why mention the work in the first place. This article is not a book review.
If you consider the standard three-act structure (setup, confrontation, resolution), a spoiler is typically any important plot point from acts 2 or 3. Information about act 1 is much less important, because expectations are still being created at that point, so there isn't much room for twists yet.
For example, the fact that The Tortoise and the Hare involves a race between the two animals isn't a spoiler, because that's part of the setup. The fact that the tortoise wins because the hare is overconfident is. (Or it would be if the tale wasn't thousands of years old and familiar to essentially everybody already.)
In this particular case, the plot point in question is revealed less than 30 pages into the book and can comfortably be considered part of act 1. It's even described on the cover blurb. So, not a spoiler.
You can discuss quite a lot only using details from act 1, and being more vague (or ignoring) acts 2 and 3. In this particular article, everything is from very early in the book, so no spoilers are present.
Not only is it just the premise but it's basically treated as this event that just happened for an unknowable reason. The rest of the article discusses events that take a few more pages to get to but still aren't really spoilers. A few pages in a Stephenson book don't amount to much :-)
