Anathem by Neal Stephenson
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Book Reviews of Anathem
Book Review: The Book About Everything.
Summary: 5 Stars
Is Neal Stephenson a science fiction author? His two earliest novels, "The Big U" and "Zodiac" are contemporary satire; his masterpieces, "Cryptonomicon" and "The Baroque Trilogy" are historical romances. Take away the two Crichtonesque thrillers he collaborated on under the pseudonym "Stephen Bury," and what's left is a pair (could this be a pattern?) of books, "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age," that combine the near-future info-tech milieu of 80's cyberpunk with the irony and social consciousness of 60's sf. These two, and only two, indisputably science fiction novels came out back to back within a couple of years of each other in the early 90's.
Now, thirteen years later, we get a third: "Anathem." It is the first time Neal Stephenson returned to a genre. I think it's significant that genre is science fiction. I wanted to know, does he revive the tradition of those previous two works, or has he created something new?
Actually, he has reinvented the wheel. Shockingly, it is a bigger, better wheel. And it's about time.
"Anathem" is a work of Hard SF, meaning that everything that's weird or new in it is a rigorous extrapolation of science, mathematics and philosophy. It's the kind of book Arthur C. Clarke used to write in the 40's and 50's. He wrote about rockets and satellites because scientists were working on rockets and satellites.
Most (I would argue all) recent Hard SF, however, is about "rockets" and "satellites." Science Fiction has become an exclusively literary genre, with books inspired less by new scientific research than by previous science fiction books, and, regrettably, movies. Ideas turn into tropes, and instead of extrapolation, we get variation: of the generation star ship, the space alien, the artificial brain, the parallel universe.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Writers like Ted Chiang and Gene Wolfe write brilliant books by breathing new literary life into these old tropes. But their concerns are ultimately moral. They're not interested in New Ideas About Everything as much as in the problems and choices those ideas pose.
In the last thirty or so years, the only sub-genres of Science Fiction willing to take on new science and technology have been cyberpunk and its cousin ribofunk (addressing respectively info- and bio-tech.) But recently, both these sub-genres have been petering out because, I would argue, real-world progress in both those areas has been both too fast and too gradual: fast enough to make most writing obsolete shortly after, or even before, publication; too gradual to produce anything truly transformative for the long view (we're still waiting for AI, immersive VR, and genetically modified humans.)
(This is probably why Stephenson left the field.)
Well, now he's back with his big fat (wonderful) book, and what he's done is pretty startling, because it's been done before, but not in a very long time. Instead of borrowing tropes from existing science fiction, he started from scratch. He went to the source, to the work of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and even French literary theorists, and produced a nineteen-forties-style SF book of Big New Ideas About Everything.
The result feels both fantastic and oddly non-fictional, or non-literary. "Anathem" often reads more like a book by William Gladwell or Douglas Hofstadder, or Jared Diamond. But that's okay. The ideas are real and new, and developed in exciting ways. And Hard SF is supposed to be chunky. (After all, it was Arthur C. Clarke who came up with the idea of the geosynchronous satellite.)
Don't get me wrong: Neal Stephenson can write. And so "Anathem" is also a cool, funny, and exciting read. (Intriguingly, aspects of it greatly resemble Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" and "Book of the Long Sun" and Ted Chiang's "The Tower of Babel," which could be a case either of convergence or descent. But I don't care.)
And best of all, if Neal Stephenson sticks to his pattern, there's going to be a second one soon.
Book Review: Another intellectually amazing novel from Neal Stephenson
Summary: 5 Stars
Anathem is another in a line of unique novels from Neal Stephenson. His earlier books like Snow Crash and the Diamond Age are excellent glimpses of the concept-driven novels that he has been writing for the last ten years. One weakness of his earlier books is that he didn't end stories particularly strongly (Snow Crash being a notable exception) but he has gotten progressively better at that, particularly with the System of the World, the last of the Baroque Cycle trilogy. Starting with Cryptonoicon, he started writing "long" fiction. One typical thing about these novels is that they have a slow build while you get introduced to the characters and situations. I know several very bright people who couldn't stomach the long lead-up in Quicksilver and never got to the fantastic 2nd and 3rd novels in the series, The Confusion and System of the World. Like the beginning of a rollercoaster where you need to climb to the crest of the first hill, the first sections of his novels pay off as the rest of the story becomes compulsive reading.
No spoilers to follow: Anathem finds him back in top form with a new cast of characters, a new world, and a new language. Not surprisingly, this means that the first chapters of the book are challenging and somewhat difficult, but as another review stated, nowhere near as convoluted and involved as The Lord of the Rings or (in my opinion), Dune. The more you know about history and ancient Greek thought the more you will be blown away by Anathem; and that is before the correlations to more recent philosophy and an extended meditation on zero-gravity navigation. A re-imagining of intellectual history, only Neal Stephenson can make the fine points of esoteric philosophical and intellectual minutia so much fun to read.
For me, one of the high points of the Baroque Cycle was how he made European history, the history of science, alchemy, and the history of banking and commerce so unbelievably enjoyable to read about. Anathem moves into more speculative areas by showing how the differnet ways in which we frame our thoughts have real and powerful impact on the world at large, even if it takes a long time for those speculative thoughts to produce concrete effects. I get the feeling that his novels are the product of his own intellectual curiousity about history, science, mathmatics, and now philosophy. Thankfully, he has a knack for packaging these ruminations into adventurous exciting novels and I'm incredibly happy that he's kept it up for this long. Highly recommended.
Book Review: A different kind of novel from Stephenson
Summary: 5 Stars
"Anathem" is a giant doorstop of a novel that manages to remain interesting, even compelling, throughout its entire length. It is difficult to review it without giving spoilers. As the novel begins, we meet Fraa Erasmus, the equivalent of a monk, in monastic seclusion. However, on Arbre, unlike Earth, the cloistered orders are scientific and philosophical, and the "secular" world outside is the religious world. We see Arbre through his eyes, and one of the interesting aspects of "Anathem" is how one would perceive a society based on only seeing bits of it on short occasions, as opposed to being immersed it in as a participant. I'll stop there in describing the plot; other reviews have done a better job than I have, and you will enjoy it more the less you read about the details of the plot.
Stephenson has often been criticized for the endings, or perceived lack thereof, of his novels. I used to agree with that criticism, until I returned to some of his works and "got it" the second time around. Nonetheless, "Anathem" includes a more conventional ending that most readers will find satisfactory.
The idea of "more conventional" may explain why some readers did not like "Anathem" as well as some of Stephenson's past works. Most notably, "Anathem" lacks the digressions and diversions that have characterized his previous novels - from the chapter in "Cryptonomicon" about eating a bowl of Captain Crunch, to virtually all of the Baroque Cycle. Indeed, the Baroque Cycle didn't have a plot so much as thousands of pages of stuff happening - the journey itself was the destination. In contrast, "Anathem" is much more tightly plotted and rarely gets off-track in the course of 900 pages.
After I finished "Anathem," I was reflecting on how different it was from Stephenson's past novels, and how it is not connected to any of them. However, I realized (without giving away any spoilers!) that the special gold in the "Baroque Cycle" and "Cryptonomicon" may have its origin explained in "Anathem." Perhaps I'm reading too much into certain events in "Anathem," but that's my interpretation and I'm sticking to it.
"Anathem" is SF as literature, or literature with SF elements. Although hard science is part of the story, this is not a hardware-dominated novel - in contrast to "The Diamond Age" or "Snow Crash." As such, people who do not read much SF may find this to be accessible and interesting. I recommend it highly to anyone who likes interesting, thoughtful writing.
Book Review: Whoa! What just happened?!?!?!!!!
Summary: 5 Stars
This book operates at so many levels, it's kind of hard to characterize.
In this book, "monks" and "nuns" are all sequestered, atheist, and academic, while actual religious types are ignorant, luddite blowhards. Society's leaders have set things up this way, in part as a rejection of the headlong pursuit of modernity. This all changes after space aliens show up and act as a catalyst for huge changes in the scheme of things.
At one level, it's boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-meets-other-girl, boy-loses-other-girl, boy-regains-other-girl.
At another, it's a clueless newbie venturing out into the world and getting an education he'd never imagined.
At still another, it's space-aliens threaten plant, council of war is convened, aliens are subdued, all live happily ever after.
Next there's the cautionary tail about the unexpected consequences of herding geeks together for long periods of time, especially for parking garages.
Then there's the threat by space-aliens as a chance to expound on the nature of reality.
Etc., etc. This is a monster of a book. At the end it even has a glossary and a collection of primers so the reader can fully grok what's just happened.
What I love about this book is that it works at so many levels, has so many great messages, and still manages to keep the readers attention.
Well, mostly.
The "messal" bit - about a quarter of the book towards the very end - sort of drags a little. OK, it requires the reader to stay engaged quite closely, being as it is a condensed history of the philosophical take on reality from about Plato to the present day. Since mostly geeks will be reading this book, that's fine, but the average "sline" is going to have trouble, I'm guessing.
A great book. I'm still gobsmacked. I'll be reading it again and again.
Updates after further reflection:
1. I like the notion that humans will eventually be "smart" enough to solve NP problems by collapsing reality onto a solution state. Nice.
2. It's good to know that the Y4K (or thereabouts) other cosmos still has a BOFH. Simon Travaglia would be proud.
3. Raz worries about "allswell" but never really reflects on the chemicals that keep concents neutered. Funny.
Book Review: It's only 900 something pages--and that's too short.
Summary: 5 Stars
You'll like this if you liked "Cryptonomicon",
"Snow Crash" and "Zodiac", but not novels like "Quicksilver".
For the last decade, I didn't read Neal Stephenson's works: that probably has more to do with me than with Neal Stephenson--paying less attention to history than other subjects in college, I found myself really intimidated by what I actually don't know about history while trying to read his last several books. The annoyance factor multiplied by 3,000 pages was enough to keep me away.
However, this is an entirely new story, and it's not historical. This is a thrilling and funny book full of the usual set of glossary/addendum with mathematical problems/philosophical text for days, with political intrigue and impending doom thrown in to make it more interesting; set in the midst of a an alternative-earth-religious community, it has hand-to-hand combat scenes, adolescent romance, and good descriptions of real relationships like brothers and sisters, and groups of friends involved in problem-solving and political maneuvering. As an example, one of the most compelling sequences features the protagonist watching his long-lost sister work with a five axis plasma lathe. (If you're not the sort of person who thinks that's neat, this probably isn't the book for you.)
Basically, this fires on all cylinders most of the time, and all of the elements create a page-turner, if you really like to think about specific subjects, specifically logic, philosophy, political theory, visual math, and conflicted teenagers (?).
If those aren't your areas of strength, you're going to hate this for the same reasons that non-history buffs avoided Stephenson's last three books.
Otherwise, well, I'm on page 300. I'm starting to get anxious that I only have six-hundred-something pages left!
Edit: O.k., so it's eight hundred something pages, and it is a bit of a slog. It's also a well-worth-it-slog.
I have to hand it to Mr. Stephenson, though, just when I was thinking he'd made a serious logical error near the end, he turned it into a major plot point. This is fun. It's also hard to put down. If you don't have a lot of time, wait for a long weekend or two--or you may find yourself making up for work at odd hours because you were reading this.