A few thoughts on Anathem
Posted on October 11, 2008
Filed Under All, Taking Faith, Technology |
A lot of commentary on Anathem, Neal Stephenson’s latest, has come my way lately. One correspondent shied away from it, agreeing with Washington Post reviewer Michael Dirda: “much anticipated, in places quite brilliant, but ultimately grandiose, overwrought and pretty damn dull.” Others are put off by the sheer size of the work (937 pages), and the effort to get up to speed on the language, byzantine customs and people who inhabit planet Arbre, where the tale is set.
Another found it perfect for a flight from the UK to Asia via the U.S., without saying whether he liked it or not [turns out he loved it]. Another said he’d given up on all Stephenson’s writings halfway through the Baroque Cycle, citing what he regarded as the author’s ’smarter than though’ attitude. The Chron’s Michael Berry calls the book impressive, but cautions that “many who tackle the book, including some longtime Stephenson fans, may find that it doesn’t stimulate their reading pleasure centers the way they had hoped.”
As for me, I’ve reread Stephenson’s incredible Snow Crash perhaps a half-dozen times, and The Diamond Age twice. I vividly remember the wonderful opening pages of Cryptonomicon, wherein a hard-bitten Marine tries to compose a haiku while barely clinging to a wildly careening truck bulldozing its way through the streets of Shanghai in front of a rapidly advancing Japanese Army.
To the point of Mssrs. Dirda and Berry, I didn’t come away from Anathem with the same visceral thrill that those earlier efforts evoked: however, I do find myself continuing to go back to many of the themes in the book, both marveling at and trying to further process the offered information. One example: the notion of human-like people being able to navigate the multi-threaded, multiple-simultaneous-outcome universe posited by quantum theory. (Theres no ‘live’ and ‘die,’ there’s only ‘present’ and ‘not present’).
Another is the book’s treatment of religion. We see 2 populations: the avout a monk-like order who inhabit spare concents but who are not, for the most part, religious, and the extramuros the outside world population ruled by the saecular power, a population that regularly booms and crashes, driven by waves of frenzied ‘pop’ religions, mega-consumption, casinos, climate disasters and war. The avout possess most of the planet’s pure reasoning in math, physics, cosmology, philosophy et al. The external population, divided into wealthy burghers and lower-class slines, embraces diverse, schismatic and fiercely competing religions. Much, much to consider in Anathem…
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Oh it is brilliant, I love it. Tying the philosophical discussions and tropes to local ones is worthwhile.
Duly noted,Adrian!