Fid for a day

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.

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Beam me back down

From about the ages of 10 to 25, I went on sporadic science fiction reading binges with months or years in between.  I think watching first-run Star Trek episodes may have set them off.  My first sci-fi books came from Arrow Books and the Scholastic Book Club catalog that was passed around my elementary school homeroom every month.  At some point, I discovered the Greats of that era:  Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Bradbury.  The first two I enjoyed right away.  Bradbury took longer to appreciate.  I’m still waiting to grok Heinlein.  Technically, I’m a “child of the 60s,” but I was literally a child at the time and didn’t have to choose between the hippies and the establishment.  Heinlein was too adult and, to my ear, too oddly written to reach me.

My mother, a high school English teacher, later taught a science fiction course.  She had her kids read books as diverse as A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.  I followed her list, reading some of the books and getting bogged down in others.  I also acquired an anthology from the “Golden Age” of science fiction and became absorbed with its lurid tales of mayhem and solitude, usually the result of a single scientific extrapolation gone horribly wrong.  There was John W. Campbell’s Who Goes There?, which became the movies The Thing From Another World and John Carpenter’s The Thing.  There was Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sentinel, which later got developed by Clarke and Stanley Kubrick into the movie 2001:  A Space Odyssey.  And there was my favorite ripping yarn, though no literary masterpiece, He Who Shrank, in which a guy gets smaller and smaller until he cycles around to a nanoverse that strangely resembles our own.

Competing with sci-fi for my attention were the vicissitudes of youth and “real literature.”  The latter, I thought, should not be so well-defined as to exclude science fiction.  I had to admit that nothing I had read in the genre struck me as great from a poetic or mythic point of view, but sci-fi, I thought, ought to lend itself to great myth-like creations and great reflections on the human condition, and to beautiful prose.  Clearly science fiction was waiting for its transcendent exponents, its Homers and Dantes and Faulkners and Prousts.  It was still a relatively young artform whose time would come.

However naive that youthful expectation, I’ve begun to wonder, 25 years later, whether it might have come true.  All right, not with a Homer or a Dante, but would it kill someone to be science fiction’s F. Scott Fitzgerald?  So I decided to read, say, ten sci-fi novels over the next couple of years.  I would pick them the way I do anything else:  on the internet.  What I ended up doing was some googling and mungeing of numerous lists of “best sf novels of the decade,” and here’s the combined and reduced list I came up with, in no order of preference:

• Anathem, by Neal Stephenson
• The Alchemy of Stone, by Ekaterina Sedia
• Glasshouse, by Charles Stross
• Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, by Susanna Clarke
• Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks
• Perdido Street Station, by China Miéville
• Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge
• Stories of Your Life And Others, by Ted Chiang
• The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

To this I’ll probably add Little, Big by John Crowley.  It’s a fantasy novel (as is Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell), but it has a strong reputation, and Harold Bloom has called it “the most enchanting 20th-century book I know.”  The truth is that I may never read this whole list.  I don’t want to prejudge based on reviews—also gleaned from the net—but I’ve heard some dissuading stuff about a couple of items.  The Miéville, for instance, apparently devolves into a “bug hunt” for the final hundred pages or so.  That doesn’t sound enriching, although for all I know the bug-battle descriptions are as good as Homer’s account of the Trojan War.  An audio clip of a Ted Chiang story struck me as hard-boiled or glib, but maybe he’s the sf Elmore Leonard.  So these deserve a chance, I suppose.  I’ll probably prioritize the list and at least knock off the most promising titles, then maybe do another search.  Will post my reviews here, naturally.

Further recommendations are welcome, by the way, even though I know no one reads this blog.

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