349 of 374 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Book About Everything., September 15, 2008
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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400 of 430 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
no spoilers review, September 9, 2008
First off, I'll let slip that I am a big Neal Stephenson fan, although I did not enjoy the Baroque Cycle. Anathem is, in some respects, "difficult" to read. Yes, there is language here that Stephenson made up, although he didn't take it to the same level that Tolkein did in his Middle Earth works. (There is an glossary of terms at the back, and entries from a dictionary are spreckled throughout the book.) And Anathem may be "slow" in that it takes approximately 200 pages to get to the core of the plot. However, I never found myself bored with the writing.
It is a difficult book to describe to others. In some ways, I felt like I was reading a novelization of "Goedel, Escher, Bach". There are some complex ideas here, some of which are expanded upon in appendices, which contain dialogues (ie in the Socratic sense of a philosophical or mathematical discussion between two people of differing views). I find such discussions intriguing, so I never found the book dry or boring, though strictly speaking, much of the material could have been removed to focus strictly on the plot. (This would, however, have weakened the reader's understanding of the plot.) Such digressions are quite characteristic of Stephenson's work (ie the discussions of language theory present in Snow Crash), and for a certain audience, it is quite enjoyable. If you have a tolerance for (or perhaps even enjoy) side-discussions of interesting material, and enjoy speculative fiction, then none of this should put you off. If you read xkcd, or liked Snow Crash, or the Foundation series by Asimov, then Anathem is likely a good bet for you. If mathematical or philosophical concepts make you cringe in fear, then you would probably not enjoy Anathem (or anything else by Neal Stephenson for that matter).
This review is based on an advance copy.
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198 of 212 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Another intellectually amazing novel from Neal Stephenson, September 10, 2008
Anathem is another in a line of unique novels from Neal Stephenson. His earlier books like Snow Crash and the Diamond Age are excellent glimpses of the concept-driven novels that he has been writing for the last ten years. One weakness of his earlier books is that he didn't end stories particularly strongly (Snow Crash being a notable exception) but he has gotten progressively better at that, particularly with the System of the World, the last of the Baroque Cycle trilogy. Starting with Cryptonoicon, he started writing "long" fiction. One typical thing about these novels is that they have a slow build while you get introduced to the characters and situations. I know several very bright people who couldn't stomach the long lead-up in Quicksilver and never got to the fantastic 2nd and 3rd novels in the series, The Confusion and System of the World. Like the beginning of a rollercoaster where you need to climb to the crest of the first hill, the first sections of his novels pay off as the rest of the story becomes compulsive reading.
No spoilers to follow: Anathem finds him back in top form with a new cast of characters, a new world, and a new language. Not surprisingly, this means that the first chapters of the book are challenging and somewhat difficult, but as another review stated, nowhere near as convoluted and involved as The Lord of the Rings or (in my opinion), Dune. The more you know about history and ancient Greek thought the more you will be blown away by Anathem; and that is before the correlations to more recent philosophy and an extended meditation on zero-gravity navigation. A re-imagining of intellectual history, only Neal Stephenson can make the fine points of esoteric philosophical and intellectual minutia so much fun to read.
For me, one of the high points of the Baroque Cycle was how he made European history, the history of science, alchemy, and the history of banking and commerce so unbelievably enjoyable to read about. Anathem moves into more speculative areas by showing how the differnet ways in which we frame our thoughts have real and powerful impact on the world at large, even if it takes a long time for those speculative thoughts to produce concrete effects. I get the feeling that his novels are the product of his own intellectual curiousity about history, science, mathmatics, and now philosophy. Thankfully, he has a knack for packaging these ruminations into adventurous exciting novels and I'm incredibly happy that he's kept it up for this long. Highly recommended.
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