Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has been called a space opera, but that seems inaccurate. The characters eventually make it out of the atmosphere, but time is the subject of the book – not space. Some of the best parts are about contemplation, piecing together puzzles and following the threads of deductive logic through to a conclusion. A long character-building scene has to do with an art project where the characters recreate a famous battle by planting a garden full of weeds that will battle for dominance and advance their growth in predictable ways. The kind of ideas where events play out over months, years and centuries hardly belong in space opera. It is Long Now fiction.
The Setup
In a world far far away, the monasteries are a place where mathematicians, scientists, and rhetoricians have sequestered themselves away from the working world. They practice a method of separation that allows for regulated exchange of ideas between the monasteries (called concents) and the outer world. Each concent has a series of gates and subdivisions, all regulated by an enormous clock designed to run on a millenial scale. For some, the gate opens once a year for a week. For others, the time between openings is 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000. This lets the secluded folks work away at their ideas without being interrupted or polluted by popular culture. The setting projects timelessness, order, safety and ritual. Obviously, that isn’t going to last, but it’s an idyllic sort of world for nerds, one where you can devote yourself to a higher purpose, abandon ambition, and be recognized solely for the worth of your mental work. There are analogues between much of what monks do and what these guys do, and lots of the same sort of psychological motivation.
The Gripes
Actually, let’s take a moment to discuss the biggest failing of the book. The vocabulary is tedious. There’s a lot of vocabulary and world building going on here, and most of it is a waste, a distraction from the ideas and the characters. Sure, it’s set in a faraway world and they have different word’s for different things. But why? In the end, there’s no real need for this story to take place on a different planet: if set here on Earth you’d have a history for free, you could reference the work ideas of folks like Plato or Pythagoras directly and you’d only need to invent new words for concepts that are actually new. Too much of the book is set on giving alternate histories for ideas like Platonic ideals, too little on explaining the actual new ideas in the work. Stephenson’s books are generally not great storehouses of characterization – they are a box of whizzy fireworks for your brain to set off.  That’s great – it’s fun. But if that’s what you are going for, get to it. The reader doesn’t benefit from learning that in this world the science monks are called “avout” rather than “devout” and their convents are called “concents”.  With so many analogues between the avout and the monastaries that we know, why not just use those words and explain the differences? Stephenson’s path means he’s got to explain both the similar and the dissimilar, which draws the plot to a stop. That’s why it takes a third of the book before our hero gets moving and the action starts forward.
The Push
Or rather, it shoots off like a rocket. Once things start moving, they pulse on for 600 pages. Ah, there you go. That’s the rush you were waiting for. Once it starts moving you’ve got dashing stories of survival, ninjas, instructional parables of math and geometry, explorations of Graham-Everett-Wheeler Cosmology, etc. There’s a lot going on. Like “Snow Crash” or “The Diamond Age”, Stephenson’s technique is to ramp up the book in a hyperbolic fashion. Picture an asymptotic curve where there is a long flat head as the book builds the world and characters it needs, then a sudden rising motion when the real story begins to show. As you near the end, the drama, intensity and stakes have risen to staggering heights. Unlike the previous books, this one actually seems to end. With a real ending. And there is resolution for the characters. This is a pleasant surprise, given the past performance of Stephenson’s novels.
The Good
Once the action begins, it kicks hard and continuously. Danger and excitement are ever-present, the nature of reality is challenged, exploded, put back together, and then smashed to bits again.
The Bad
You have to read 300 pages of setup. This isn’t unpleasant, in fact these are some thoroughly written stories and they lay a great foundation for the rest of the book. The vocabulary choice is also grating.
The Ugly Conclusion
I dug it, but I’m a fan of everything the guy’s written. Some of the best bits of the book surface once you’ve completed it. The length and complexity speak to the ideas of the Long Now, which apparently inspired the book. The constant mapping between concepts and words of our culture and the book world brings to mind the Godelian mappings that I finally began to understand in Doug Hofstadter’s “I am a Strange Loop”.  Also, no, Enoch Root doesn’t appear in this book.
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I’m curious to know how one would go about referencing the works of pythagoras directly, since he has no extant writings and legend has it that he never wrote anything.
Good point – I was referring to the ideas, not written texts. I corrected the sentence to reflect that, but perhaps I should have even written it as referring to the ideas of the Pythagoreans, since we don’t really know what he came up with vs what his colleagues originated.
They certainly were a secretive bunch of numerologists.
I appreciate your quibble in the spirit in which it was given.
“But why? In the end, there’s no real need for this story to take place on a different planet: if set here on Earth you’d have a history for free, you could reference the work ideas of folks like Plato or Pythagoras directly and you’d only need to invent new words for concepts that are actually new.”
My take on this (I’m working on my review at the moment) is that translation is a central theme of the book, and the alternate-ness of Arbre intensifies that theme. Every time you start reading a book, you’re engaging in a form of first contact — you have to learn how to read it — and in sf that problem is more acute than in any other genre. And Stephenson gets to have some fun playing with our preconceptions of how social structures would translate — the ways in which concents are *not* convents, for instance, or the etymology of “saunt”.
Moreover, it strengthens the argument about the platonic/hylean theoric world that runs through the novel — if Arbre’s philosophers came up with the same ideas as Earth’s philosophers, it lends some support to the notion that those ideas are being transmitted to both worlds from somewhere else. Placing the ideas in a new context also allows him to examine them from fresh angles; this is the sense in which “theorics” is a combined discipline, in which while the underlying knowledge is the same, the subject areas into which it is divided aren’t quite the same as they are in our world. And, for me at least, abstracting the ideas makes his erudition a bit less intimidating.
But then, I enjoyed the first 300 pages very much, thought it dipped in the middle, and then picked up again around “Messal”.
Niall, I had similar thoughts. There is the translation between concepts, the translations between cultures, all sorts of mappings going on. I’m a little torn between a review of the book as a story and a review of the book as art.
Art-wise, the mappings and length are great. Story wise, they detract a bit.
Given that there’s an explicit comment up front (can’t remember whether it’s in the acknowledgements or the reader’s note, offhand) to the effect that Anathem is best viewed as a fictional framework for ideas, rather than as a story, I tend to err on the side of art on this one. :)
Dude, am I just thick? I didn’t really get that ending – I mean, I kinda got it, but the way that the whole thing just sorta rapidly changes from storming the ship, to popping into existence with Fraa Jad about to blow the whole thing up, to Fraa Jad having been dead the whole time? WTF? I mean, I know that there was that whole discussion on quantum narrative divergence and all that but why did Fraa Erasmus suddenly seem to be jumping between them? Did he die and then pop up in another one, or what? I mean, that book too WAY too long to get through just to be confused.
Except for that, I really dug it.
I think I was a little better prepared for that ending because I had just read Greg Egan’s “Quarantine” that year. Eigenstate fiction is complex to read!
Actually, I like the strange vocabulary. Most of it is cleverly done, especially if you know your Latin. For instance, they’re called “avout” rather than “devout” because “devout” comes from “deos”, meaning God, and they don’t believe in God, and I think “concent” is probably a play on “concentric”.