Anathem
by Neal Stephenson
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Book Reviews of Anathem
Book Review: A return to science fiction, a preservation of form
Summary: 4 Stars
When a book has a glossary, it has one strike against it. A glossary means the book is full of words the author has made up or changed the meaning of. If you actually need the glossary, it has two strikes. It means that the words aren't explained enough or have so little context that you have to keep going back to hte glossary to understand what's being said.
I'm happy to say that Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" has only one strike, and perhaps only half a strike. The glossary could have been eliminated without damage to book or reader.
If you're a fan of Stephenson's last four books, you don't need my review. You've already purchased it, and are working your way through it slowly and lovingly.
If you hated his last four books, you don't need my review either, except to confirm that this one is put together much like the last four. But if you're in the middle, then read on.
Structurally "Anathem" is put together pretty much like Stephenson's four previous books. It has lots of little discourses, a stately pace punctuated by wild moments of action, interesting characters, and enormous historical depth. There are multiple simultaneous plots to be juggled and an enormous cast of characters.
On the other hand the history is all made up, a number of the discourses are actually critical to understanding the book, and the entire story is told from a single characters point of view. It's also one of the more interesting re-visits of a standard SF trope that I'd thought had been mined out.
As for what I said above about the glossary: it serves a purpose in alerting you that you shouldn't necessarily assume the words introduced don't have exact counterpoints in English. For example, Stephenson gives you a word which you quickly decide actually means "monastery." But if you're not paying attention, you miss the immediate clues that this is really some other thing which we have no adequate analog for. Hence a new word is appropriate, and the sort of short descriptions you get in a glossary are inadequate to properly describe it.
Stephenson does this repeatedly in the book. The opening pages give you an immediate impression of a monastery, with monks living in simplicity and poverty. With the next breath he gives you a couple of details which, if you stop to think about them, mean that these 'monks' are neither poor nor simple. Nor, for that matter, are they monks except in the sense of being largely separated from regular society.
Even when Stephenson uses language we're used to, it can be misleading. The residents refer to themselves as living under the Cartesian discipline. The adjective Cartesian is explained fairly quickly, but you've been fooled - in this case, discipline is meant in a sense other than self-discipline. But I can't say more without veering towards spoilers for the plot.
And what a plot that is. The Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon (if you liked them) could be described simply as interesting things happening to interesting people, with the plot almost secondary. That's not the case here, although there are certainly interesting things happening to interesting people. There are huge things afoot, and this entire world is on the edge of a critical and disruptive change.
A great deal of the joy of the book is seeing and understanding just what that change is. Stephenson's narrator is young and moderately naive, and he presents things as he sees (saw) them. You may be getting most or all of the facts, but you may not be seeing the larger picture or may lack the context to understand what those facts actually mean. That doesn't mean Stephenson is misleading you or deliberately obscuring things; no character in the book actually has a complete understanding of what is happening. That's what makes the book work so well. There are multiple mysteries in here, both in the sense of things unknown and things which are generally known which turn out not to be true.
Stephenson's discourses are an important part of this. Some of the little asides about philosophy, history and mathematics are simply that: asides. As one reviewer put it, Stephenson likes to wear his erudition on his sleeve. But others are actually laying critical foundation for you to understand what's going to be happening later in the book, and you'd better be paying attention or you're going to be lost.
This is not to say that every mystery is tied up in a neat bow. In particular, one critical set is only partially explained. We know that what of what happened, have some implications about the why, and only glimpses as to the how. This in general is a good thing. It's a messy and complex world that Stephenson has created for us, and tying everything off neatly would be a false note and a disservice to the wonderful complexity he's built.
I liked it a lot. It made me think a lot while reading it, and I find myself mulling it over again and again. I will almost certainly re-read it, and soon. It's not for everyone, but if you are a patient and observant reader with an appreciation for scientific and mathematical concepts, this is your cup of tea.
Book Review: A review for Stephenson fans who are leery about this book...
Summary: 5 Stars
I feel compelled to write a review of Neal Stephenson's latest work, Anathem, because quite simply it is one of the best, most eye-opening books I've read in the last five years.
Now, this qualification comes with some qualifications of its own.
First of all, if you're the average kind of guy with a short attention span, who gets angry when internet discussions get side-tracked by people who're talking about something you don't understand, then this book is not for you. If you've read and enjoyed Neal's other work, but wish he'd just get on with telling the story instead of providing the reader with endless descriptions of, say, the techniques involved in breakfast cereal degustation, then this book's not for you.
If, on the other hand, you enjoy Stephenson's insights into western history, culture and philosophy - especially rational, scientific philosophy - then you'll want this book in your suitcase on your next holiday to wherever it is you go to read Fun Stuff.
I feel compelled to point out that it is not necessary to have a deep background in math or science to read this book, as some reviewers have claimed. Frankly, it was these claims (by people who otherwise enjoyed the book) which put me off of reading Anathem and made ultimately buying it a bit of a shot in the dark for me, even though I'm a rabid Stephenson fan. What I feared were long discourses on, say, numbers theory and the like which I would not be able to follow at all.
I'm happy to say that this is not the case.
I'm a social scientist with a nodding acquaintence with philosophy - enough that I could probably identify one out of every five philosophers that Stephenson uses in the book. And that's not much. I mean, I'm savvy enough that when Stephenson talks about "Gardan's Steelyard", I understand that he's referencing what our world calls "Occam's Razor". I know that the "Protans" are probably stand-ins for our world's "Proteans". But that's really about it: the level of knowledge anyone who had to sleep through a freshman "philosophy of science" course should have. As a social scientist, however, my math skills don't go beyond what was required to get me through my sophmore "Statistics for Sociologists" course and of physics, I know next to nothing, having dropped that as a senior in high school.
But I was still able to read this book quite easily and with great interest. In fact, I think it would serve as a fun primer for one of those freshman-level philosophy of science courses. It's certainly made me want to read more of Stephenson's sources.
So if you've been holding off reading Anathem because you were afraid of the depth of the material, I'd say give it a shot. A simple undergrad university-level education should be more than enough for you to get through this and to enjoy the journey.
One thing I should add, however, which pleasantly surprised me, is Stephenson's continuing maturation as a writer. In Anathem, the "worst" of those long "side tracks" which Stephenson so loves to engage in are sequestered off as seperate appendixes which can be read if, as and when the reader feels up to them. They reward attentive reading, but are dry enough to pose huge stumbling blocks to the story. By shunting them off to the appendixes, Stephenson has made the book much more accessible and enjoyable to the average reader without depriving the rest of us of the übernerdity which we so enjoy in Neal's work.
This was a very good and mature decision of the writer - or his editor - and should be applauded.
Also, this is the first Stephenson book which I've ever read that has a coherent sense of closure - obviously something Neal really worked at bringing about, given the book's last sentence. Normally, this man's books are a bit like roller coasters: one reads them not because of where they lead, but because of the thrills along the way. Anathem, however, comes to a logical and satisfying ending with all loose ends nicely tied up except for those upon which reasonable and rational sequels might normally be hung. Again, this strikes me as a definite advance for Stephenson in terms of his writing skills.
All in all, Anathem is a great book - perhaps a real science fiction classic on the level of LeGuin's "Dispossessed" or Asimov's "I, Robot". If you like Neal's work and haven't read it yet, or simply enjoy well-thought out and rigorously researched science fiction, pick it up now!
Book Review: magnificent, but flawed
Summary: 4 Stars
Anathem is the story of another world, similar to ours, in which all pure science is done inside "maths" (monasteries) by the "avout" (monks). Thousands of years ago, the maths were created to protect the avout from outside interference. Since then, maths worldwide have been sacked three times for various reasons. Each time, new rules were put into place to control what could be done inside the maths (i.e., no matter creators, no computers, etc.). By the time Anathem opens, the maths have gone almost a thousand years without any technology whatsoever.
The maths themselves are split into several groups based on how long they go before opening their doors to the outside "extramuros" (non-avout) world. This might be 1, 10, 100, or 1000 years. The Thousanders who populate the 1000 year maths are (obviously) rarely seen or heard from, and no one knows quite what they might be up to.
Stephenson's worldbuilding in Anathem is great. The world itself feels very different from our own, but certain rules from our world obviously hold true in theirs. These range from the creation of the Reticulum (Internet) to the presence of Gardan's Steelyard (Occam's Razor). Arbre, as the world is called, is an extremely interesting place, populated with wonderful characters.
Stephenson's trademark ability to build characters that you relate to and would love to be around is here in full force. Fraa ("Brother") Erasmus, a Tenner (from a 10 year math) is the main character, and by the end of the novel I was sad to see him and his friends go.
The book itself is made up of 13 Parts, but to me there were four main sections: The Setup, The Adventure, The Lecture, and The Final Adventure.
The Setup is an interesting, tough read. It's here that Stephenson introduces most of his characters and the world itself. Because of this, not much actually happens in this section. Instead, Erasmus goes about his mostly mundane life while the reader tries to take in all of the unfamiliar terms (even for familiar concepts), and get a grasp on the history of this world. There are actually two ways to read The Setup. You could just power through it, ignoring the things you don't understand and hoping they come back to you or you get a sense for them as you go on, or you could stop at every new term and look it up in the extensive dictionary and/or timeline to see what it means and what its backstory is. I chose the second approach, which made the first couple hundred pages of Anathem quite slow. However, this becomes fully worth it when you get to the second (and largest) section of the book, The Adventure.
I won't go into what happens in the book's second section, but at this point the novel becomes an exciting, thrilling page-turner. If you've ever read Stephenson, you know what I mean. When he gets it going, he really gets it going.
Unfortunately, once The Adventure ends, it leads straight into The Lecture, the most downright tedious section of any Stephenson book that I have read. This section consists of over a hundred pages of some of the least interesting characters in the story having several "Dialogs" (formal discussions) on metaphysics. Maybe some might find this interesting, but I found it pretty boring. This section of the book is where my reading stalled for over a month.
But don't quit reading! The last section makes up for the detour of The Lecture, with another incredible adventure. An in fact, the contents of The Lecture do become quite important to the end of the novel. I understand why Stephenson put it in there, but I think he could have shortened it to about a third of its actual length.
Thankfully, the last couple hundred pages are another Stephenson page-turner, even more exciting than the first one. Everything comes together beautifully, and the ending is quite satisfying.
Anathem weighs in at 937 pages. This is actually pretty concise for Stephenson, considering that the Baroque Cycle took up almost 3000 pages across three books. But it is a long novel, and not an easy read, at least at the beginning. It is, however, well-worth the effort. There are several scenes, characters, and situations which will stay with me for quite awhile.
I highly recommend Anathem to any Stephenson fans or fans of complex world building. However, for those who have never read Stephenson, I would probably suggest Snow Crash as a better starting point.
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: Good but not the best, need to read it in sections
Summary: 4 Stars
Anathem, Neal Stephenson's latest work explores theoretic physics, cosmology as well as an alternative universe in the world of Arbe. Stephenson combines these different ideas into a powerful narrative that can be a challenge to get started but well worth it. You can think of this book as a bit of a cross between an academic discourse on physics, cosmology, theology and religion combined with a personal quest and the revelation of a broader worldview.
Anathem is Sophie's World, meets Hawking's a moment in time, Plato's dialogues, meets any number of personal quest novels. Given the books length and complexity I would like to offer a review focusing on how to get the most from this book as its easy to lose interest in the beginning
The book can be thought of as having four parts. The first 200 pages or so can be thought of as "welcome to the world of Arbe." The opening of the book builds the context and construct of Arbe, the society, the role of the maths, etc. You will need to make an investment in this first section in order to get the payoff of Stephenson's writing in the latter chapters. That payoff is smart observations that come from the reader being suddenly able to connect with the character in a personal way. Stephenson's other books did not need this big build up because they dealt with an extension of our world either in to the future or the past. This originally makes the first 200 pages tough going, but once you break out of this first part.
The second part could be called the "quest" or "chasing Orlo" and it picks up the pace and brings the reader along. These 200 or so pages are more like Stephenson's other books, particularly the second book in the "Baroque Cycle." The movement and exercising of the ideas and world built up in the first part really come to life.
With the context established and the characters in motion, the next part shifts gears as the nature of the antagonist is revealed. This third can be thought of as "the tutorial" where the characters actions settle down, but their minds and ideas run ahead. This part contains the dialogues and explanation of cosmology, physics, metaphysics that form the ideas in the book. This slowing down and the weight of the ideas read more like the book "Sophie's World" This part is like the first part and you have to pay attention, but the payoff is even bigger.
In the final 200 pages or so comes the conclusion that brings it all together. True to form, Stephenson puts the players in motion and their actions illustrate and provide examples of the ideas discussed in the third part. The way Stephenson brings ideas of cosmology, causality, physics and philosophy together is simply unique and enjoyable.
When you get to the end of the book, you realize that the book itself is an illustration of the ideas it discusses and the expression of ideas between worlds. It's rare that the object becomes the expression of the idea and that is what makes it special.
I am glad that I made the early investment in the book. Anathem is good, but its not Stephenson's best book. Anathem is like Zodiac, one of Stephenson's first. That book, which I highly recommend, is a good story but it reflects a story line that is less developed than his latter works.
In many ways Anathem is like Zodiac. Anathem is Stephenson's first novel exploring creating an artificial universe and it shows a number of same aspects of this early novel. Zodiac was a great book and the progress that Stephenson made from Zodiac to Snowcrash makes him a singular writer. If Anathem is his first effort at creating complete universes, then we have much to look forward to.