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.