Short version: monks with strange powers, philosophical discussions, aliens, cults, conspiracy theories, kung-fu, and the logistics of visiting parallel dimensions mean that Anathem has something for everyone, provided they have the patience to get to it. Neal Stephenson’s Anathem is a nice pithy content-rich read with just enough action to offset the philosophy, just enough philosophizing to offset the action, and enough humor to make it an immersive and enjoyable read.
Long version: Detractors of this novel have complained that it is long. To borrow a phrase from our friends over at Mantown, they need to harden the fuck up. This book is lengthy in pagecount due to three key points
- the printer was nice enough to use a readable text size rather than tiny print,
- there’s a lot of ground to cover. The novel starts out at a monastery on some other planet that is sufficiently earthlike that we don’t need an explanation of their vegetables but do, from time to time, need definitions of some of their rarified monk-jargon, and then it ventures off into the Idiocracy-esque secular world outside the monastery, into different monasteries, and then into SPACE. to go from monastery to crazy-road-trip to a fucking space station takes some pages, son. let it happen.
- there’s a glossary of the special monk-jargon in the back
Some have also whined about the long monastic conversations. These whiners also need to harden the fuck up. These monks are a blend of jedi, philosopher, and scientist. They’re going to use big words and discuss complex issues as part of the plot. if you can’t handle that, please step away from the Science Fiction book section until you grow an attention span.
with those issues addressed, I can get into what makes this book a delightful addition to anyone’s home library. First off, the characters. We get a good smattering of plucky young monks who are glad to be away from the secular world. Outside the monasteries (called Maths), people spend all day watching teevee and yammering into cellphones. Imagine a blend of Idiocracy and Wall-E and you’re pretty close. This society of screen-potato phoneheaded nitwits doesn’t know how to handle people who want some peace and quiet to actually think about things, so every new year’s day their quiet thinker types are cermoniously welcomed into the Mathic world. Adults and teens default to the Unarian math, for monks that have contact with the outside world once a year. Children go the Decenarian math, which interacts with the outside world once a decade, toddlers get to be Centenarians and see the outside world once a century, and newborns go to the mysterious Millenarians who see the outside world once every thousand years.
The first couple hundred pages of the book are a crash course in monastic society from the viewpoint of the novel’s narrator Erasmus, a Decenarian (aka Tenner) who has discovered some sort of coverup at his monastery around the new-years’ festivities. readers get to learna bout the various factions within mathic society, how they interact, and what’s so unsual about certain things Erasmus notices during the new-year’s festivities.
This is where the coverups and secret society storyline start to come into play, and winds up with Erasmus going on an adventurous, crazy road-trip with his techie/gearhead sister and one of the once-mysterious Ita, the technicians who help maintain the monastery but don’t interact with the monks. road trip leads to encounters with various crazies from outside the monastery, there’s romance, there’s action, there’s a growing realization that a lot of smart people don’t go into a monastic life, but stay outside and become doctors, technicians, executives, and other educated types that keep things running so the idiots don’t destroy the world. Some of them even get Mathic education before venturing forth as productive, educated members of society, and some of those educated people.. gasp! … hold religious beliefs.
This is where a lot of the pithy conversations the critics complain about come in – they are explaining that yes, smart people can indeed be religious, but many realize that religious things exist outside of space and time and are thusly difficult to discuss in the context of scientific matters and are happy to just leave their personal beliefs out of any discussions on science and philosophy, and can participate in these discussions without them being a threat to their beliefs.
Other pithy conversations are moved to the appendix, because they’re not conversations at all but calcas, a monk-word for scripted thought experiments that establish a certain point about epistemology or math or one of their other fields of study. you can read the book without ever peeking at the calcas and it all makes snese, but I read them anyway, and the glossary of monk-words, because they are supplementary material that aids in immersion into that world.
After I read this book, I saw ads for Bill Maher’s new supposed-documentary Religulous, where he and a camera crew head out into public places and try to talk to people about religion, as a sort of set-up for his usual jokes about religious people. It’s an insulting comedy act posing as a documentary, and I bring it up because if you want serious discussion about the place of religion in a scientific world and vice-versa, you need to A) ignore Bill Maher, because he gets paid to offend people and B) read Anathem. By setting the discussion on another planet whose religions are not connected to our own but whose science is the same because the laws of physics are the same regardless of what planet you’re on, Anathem creates a space where these things can be explored and analyzed and tested and played with without offending anyone or being asked to set aside your own culture and beliefs.
This book has no zombies, no explicit sex, no foul language (although the monks do use “Bulshytt” to mean intentionally vague or confusing speech that fails to answer any questions or convey any meaning, and are talented at spotting bulshytt and calling it what it is), and no monsters (aside from some dragons in a thought-experiment), and despite these conspicuous (given my reading habits) absences it fucking rocks.
various places around the internet also sell a disc (or a download) of music inspired by the book, called Iolet. It’s not bad. I was expecting something more along the lines of Gregorian chants or even Buddhist sutras, but it is nothing like either of these, and suggests that Mathic music is far more abstract than the music of religious monks, which makes no sense, because the narrator at one point visits a religious monastery and remarks on how similar the religious music is to mathic music.
Tags: anathem, bulshytt, iolet, jedi, monastery, monks, neal stephenson
