book review: Anathem
Anathem
by: Neal Stephenson
I read about 1/4 of this, then took a “break” in the middle to read Battle Cry of Freedom. The reverse of what I usually do – break a history book up with a fiction or two… but this one started off a bit slow and BCoF was very engaging (for a history).
Once I came back to it and got back the first 1/3 or so, things really picked up. The first section is… well, I don’t want to call it “bogged down”, but kind of bogged down by all the new words introduced for the story. There are like 50-100 of them, at least two dozen of which get used regularly, so you need to remember those at least. Luckily, many of them sound like “normal” words… Stupid me though, I didn’t find the glossary until after I finished the book, so I went through most of it having forgotten what some of the earlier introduced words meant and too lazy to dig them up and find their introduction points.
So yeah, he made up his own terminology here, and I think I get why he did it (can’t say without spoilers), and it mostly works for me. However, I was a little confused as to why he renamed pretty much all the nouns (pda phones, systems for watching & recording videos, and uh… labels?) but none of the verbs or adjectives?
It’s written more like “literary science fiction” than standard sci-fi I think… in that it should probably be filed where ever Eco’s books are filed, as it had a similar feel to some of the Eco books that I’ve read (Pendulum and Rose), but less obnoxious than Pendulum. However, since Neal’s other stuff is filed in sci-fi, so is this.
I guess everyone here is white, since nothing about skin-color is mentioned – although it does mention that people “look different” or are identifiable as being from a certain region, but doesn’t tell you how.
One thing I wondered about was that the main character’s behavior did not seem quite consistent in and out of his dialogue styles. I.e. his actions in the world didn’t necessarily seem to match the intelligence he displayed in a philosophical debate. Then again, this may have been intentional, as having a clueless MC seems to be a rather common way to ease the readers introduction to a new world.
Overall, I really enjoyed it and recommend it for the philosophical and physics minded (there’s a bunch about some 6 pointed system of notation that I guess is big in quantum physics or something? I’m horrible, I know. I’ve already forgotten it. Hey, it was a week ago!)
THREE AND THREE QUARTER STARS
I want to give it 4, but I would have liked to see at least another 50 pages of detail paid to the encantors and rhetors. I mean, Jesus. There was basically nothing about the rhetors. Seriously, 50 pages out of 900+ wouldn’t have been that big of a deal.
I get that the way he leaves it to the readers to fill in a lot of the blanks is interesting and all but dammit, I’m a detail guy. Sometimes I’m paying for thoseo blanks to be filled in. With money.
I actually treated “Anathem” exactly the same way I treat Eco, which is to skim a bit when it gets too far over my head. *laugh* I did the same with Stephenson’s other books, too, particularly “Cryptonomicon.” It’s hard to be a Stephenson fan who actually flunked out of 11th grade math!
As for the protagonist having some social difficulties while being a genius, well (a) he was basically a monk, albeit a co-ed one, and (b) see also: geeks worldwide.
Now I want to go re-read it… I don’t think I’ve read it since it was new and I’ve gotten better at reading Stephenson books since then!
Hi K! Welcome to my little corner of the world :).
I admire you for reading Crypto, I haven’t had the guts for it yet. Nothing about the subject matter is of interest to me… although I tend to like the writer and his style. It’s a strange conundrum for me to have, but I haven’t been able to make myself engage yet.
I wasn’t referring to the main character as having social difficulties so much as I was to his inability to apply some of his reasoning abilities to the situations at hand. At one point he made mention of the chemical everyone supposedly ingests to make them complacent…. but he never came back to that. I couldn’t tell if that was just propaganda or if such a product really existed. At first I was inclined to take it at face value as existing… but due to some of the later revelations I question that as maybe another way to keep the avout separated. If it DID exist… then that explains a lot, and probably should have been a much more noticeable part of the last portion of the book. I mean, most of the characters are operating under a weak drug-haze…right??
[edit: I did not realize you had a blog too! Adding you to the webring if that's OK.]