Is Neal Stephenson a science fiction author? His two earliest novels, "The Big U" and "Zodiac" are contemporary satire; his masterpieces, "Cryptonomicon" and "The Baroque Trilogy" are historical romances. Take away the two Crichtonesque thrillers he collaborated on under the pseudonym "Stephen Bury," and what's left is a pair (could this be a pattern?) of books, "Snow Crash" and "The Diamond Age," that combine the near-future info-tech milieu of 80's cyberpunk with the irony and social consciousness of 60's sf. These two, and only two, indisputably science fiction novels came out back to back within a couple of years of each other in the early 90's.
Now, thirteen years later, we get a third: "Anathem." It is the first time Neal Stephenson returned to a genre. I think it's significant that genre is science fiction. I wanted to know, does he revive the tradition of those previous two works, or has he created something new?
Actually, he has reinvented the wheel. Shockingly, it is a bigger, better wheel. And it's about time.
"Anathem" is a work of Hard SF, meaning that everything that's weird or new in it is a rigorous extrapolation of science, mathematics and philosophy. It's the kind of book Arthur C. Clarke used to write in the 40's and 50's. He wrote about rockets and satellites because scientists were working on rockets and satellites.
Most (I would argue all) recent Hard SF, however, is about "rockets" and "satellites." Science Fiction has become an exclusively literary genre, with books inspired less by new scientific research than by previous science fiction books, and, regrettably, movies. Ideas turn into tropes, and instead of extrapolation, we get variation: of the generation star ship, the space alien, the artificial brain, the parallel universe.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. Writers like Ted Chiang and Gene Wolfe write brilliant books by breathing new literary life into these old tropes. But their concerns are ultimately moral. They're not interested in New Ideas About Everything as much as in the problems and choices those ideas pose.
In the last thirty or so years, the only sub-genres of Science Fiction willing to take on new science and technology have been cyberpunk and its cousin ribofunk (addressing respectively info- and bio-tech.) But recently, both these sub-genres have been petering out because, I would argue, real-world progress in both those areas has been both too fast and too gradual: fast enough to make most writing obsolete shortly after, or even before, publication; too gradual to produce anything truly transformative for the long view (we're still waiting for AI, immersive VR, and genetically modified humans.)
(This is probably why Stephenson left the field.)
Well, now he's back with his big fat (wonderful) book, and what he's done is pretty startling, because it's been done before, but not in a very long time. Instead of borrowing tropes from existing science fiction, he started from scratch. He went to the source, to the work of physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, and even French literary theorists, and produced a nineteen-forties-style SF book of Big New Ideas About Everything.
The result feels both fantastic and oddly non-fictional, or non-literary. "Anathem" often reads more like a book by William Gladwell or Douglas Hofstadder, or Jared Diamond. But that's okay. The ideas are real and new, and developed in exciting ways. And Hard SF is supposed to be chunky. (After all, it was Arthur C. Clarke who came up with the idea of the geosynchronous satellite.)
Don't get me wrong: Neal Stephenson can write. And so "Anathem" is also a cool, funny, and exciting read. (Intriguingly, aspects of it greatly resemble Gene Wolfe's "Book of the New Sun" and "Book of the Long Sun" and Ted Chiang's "The Tower of Babel," which could be a case either of convergence or descent. But I don't care.)
And best of all, if Neal Stephenson sticks to his pattern, there's going to be a second one soon.
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