This review assumes you know things about Neal Stephenson’s science fiction novel Anathem that have already been widely discussed in announcements and reviews: the monastic “maths” peopled by monkish “avout,” the separation between the mathic and “extramuros” worlds, the discussions of familiar philosophical issues, the plot-significance of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, the parallels between the planet Arbre and earth and between the Arbreans and earthlings, and so on. What many reviews only mention in passing is that the Arbreans’ humanoid physiology is, not coincidentally, like ours; indeed, we (or our descendants) make an appearance late in the book. Since the role of humans as polycosmic counterparts of Arbreans and other humanoid races is only a provocative sidelight, not a Planet of the Apes-style revelation (when Chuck Heston murmurs, “Oh, my God!” as he espies the Statue of Liberty poking up through the sand) that defines the work, I don’t feel I’ve spoiled too much.
Let me get down to brass tacks: Anathem does some things very well as a sci-fi entertainment, even though I can’t hail it as the paragon of literary sci-fi art I was hoping to discover as I began my 10-book reading project.
Foremost among Stephenson’s gifts as a writer is his ability to construct a big plot (Anathem is about a thousand pages long—a “thousander,” to misappropriate one of the book’s myriad terms) with an even more massive backstory, and to keep the behemoth moving along at a steady pace. He uses the first-person perspective of Erasmas, a young avout, as a channel through which to trickle background information about the novel’s world, from the architecture of the concents (monasteries) to the habits and beliefs of the avout to the ways of the outside world to the political and intellectual history of Arbre. Stephenson’s writing applies an engineer’s precision and economy, page count notwithstanding, to the crafting of a novel. Nothing wrong with this, although to some tastes it produces a monster less loose and baggy than is called for in a novel.
The Erasmas character is a kind of perfect-fool-everyman who excels at reporting facts and drawing just as many clever conclusions as Stephenson wants to let us in on. One of my few difficulties in reading this book was the age group of its narrator and how his milieu is handled. Erasmas is perhaps the equivalent of a college sophomore. Owing to his contemplative mathic upbringing, he’s probably a few years ahead of a 19-year-old earth lad when it comes to book-learning, but emotionally he’s right on track, maybe even a little behind the curve from lack of hang time at the mall. He spends time with other dweebs, such as Jesry, the alpha nerd. The young “suurs” in Erasmas’s peer group are of course the developmental superiors of the “fraas.” Erasmas learns this when he falls like a ton of bricks for one of his lady-friends, who has been planning their union for months.
Although developments like this are amusing and simply wrought, the level of social interaction is about that of an after-school special. And this is my main reservation about Anathem: It doesn’t give adult humanoids much to dwell on and learn from, so it’s not literature that rewards the reader, except as light, entertaining spec-fi (“speculative fiction,” Stephenson’s and others’ preferred expansion of “sf”).
The plot goes all over the Arbrean map, and then some. Erasmas is drawn out of his concent (“evoked”) and into a sprawling quest across Arbre and into outer space, where he meets aliens from nearby possible worlds who are like himself and us (some of them is us). Along the way, philosophical conversations (“dialogues”) and musings in Erasmas’s head reveal that the history of ideas and physical theory on Arbre essentially tracks our own. The book has an extensive glossary, much of which is devoted to mathic equivalents of familiar philosophical and scientific concepts—”Gardan’s Steelyard” for “Occam’s razor,” “Protas” for “Plato,” “Adrakhonian” for “Pythagorean.” I can’t deny the considerable delight for the nerdish reader in discovering these equivalences, and another of Stephenson’s talents is an ear for le mot juste when it comes to alien-spoofing neologisms. In fact none of the Arbrean terms is supposed to be a verbatim re-creation of their language; in the introduction to the book, Stephenson spells out that the special words used in the narrative are meant to capture the flavor of Arbrean thought in terms resonant to the terrestrial reader.
It might seem as though the philosophical themes bandied about in Anathem would be of special interest to a philosophy student. But since controversies such as nominalism vs. Platonism and the catastrophe that is postmodernism are introduced without being plumbed, much less advanced, I can’t say I experienced more than a feeling of solidarity with these aliens from our shared intellectual predicament.
My bottom line on this book is that I don’t regret reading it, yet I wonder whether reading another NS epic will be worth the time spent. I’m also interested in computers, so I may at least begin Cryptonomicon, which I already own.