“Reading Anathem is a humbling experience.” — Washington Post on ANATHEM
“A sprawling disquisition…[a] logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic.” — Kirkus Reviews on ANATHEM
“Stephenson’s expansive storytelling echoes Walter Miller’s classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, the space operas of Larry Niven and the cultural meditations of Douglas Hofstadter – a heady mix of antecedents that makes for long stretches of dazzling entertainment.” — Publishers Weekly on ANATHEM
“A magnificent achievement. ” — Booklist (starred review) on ANATHEM
“Clever and intricate...truly ingenious...it’s brilliance is undeniable.” — Locus, Gary K. Wolfe on ANATHEM
“A masterpiece...mind-bogglingly ambitious...readers will delight in puzzling out the historical antecedents in philosophy, science, mathematics, and art that Stephenson riffs on with his customary quicklsilver genius...it’s one of the most thought-provoking novels I’ve ever read, and also one of the most engaging.” — Locus, Paul Witcover, on ANATHEM
“The Seattle writer is kind of a cross between William Gibson and Richard Powers, hard-wired to tell stories, explore technology and riff on anything that catches his fancy.” — The Oregonian (Portland) on ANATHEM
“[O]ne of Stephenson’s best novels…a captivating blend of culture clash, deductive reasoning and pure action.” — Columbus Dispatch on ANATHEM
“What ever happened to the great novel of ideas? It has morphed into science fiction, and Stephenson is its foremost practitioner. A-” — Time magazine on ANATHEM
“[R]iveting idea porn.” — Details on ANATHEM
“The cult legend’s newest book, Anathem, [is] destined to be an instant sci-fi classic.” — Popular Mechanics on ANATHEM
“He mashes up genres with the flair of Thomas Pynchon and the intellect of William Gibson.” — Winnipeg Free Press on ANATHEM
“Blending quantum physics, phenomenological philosophy and various other fun hobbies...Stephenson’s enthusiasm to share his theories and explanations is infectious...think “The Name of the Rose” crossed with “Dune”...genuinely fascinating brain food.” — The Oregonian (Portland) on ANATHEM
“Stephenson writes in twists and turns, double-backs and cul-de-sacs, winding tunnels and fast-moving tracks. It’s a Rube Goldberg sort of book: intricate, sometimes difficult to follow but always fascinating to read.” — Grand Rapids Press on ANATHEM
“Anathem duly marries extensive dialogues on quantum mechanics and the nature of consciousness to literal cliffhangers, hi-tech warfare and derring-do.” — Leicester Mercury on ANATHEM
“Anathem is a challenge: Make yourself one of the avout. Make yourself a scholar, and try to understand the world a little differently.” — Eugene Weekly on ANATHEM
“Stephenson displays his ingenuity when it comes to mixing science, sociology and satire with swashbuckling adventure. Anathem marries extensive scientific and philosophical dialogues to cliffhangers, hi-tech warfare and derring-do.” — Sunday Sun (UK) on ANATHEM
“It’s almost impossible to not be impressed by Anathem; there’s simply too much erudition, wit, craft and risk-taking.” — San Francisco Chronicle on ANATHEM
“In Anathem, Stephenson creates a religion for skeptics and nerds.” — Austin American-Statesman on ANATHEM
“Anathem is a brilliant, playful tour of the terrain where logic, mathematics, philosophy and quantum physics intersect, a novel of ideas par excellence, melding wordplay and mathematical theory with a gripping, human adventure.” — London Times on ANATHEM
“Anyone who has read Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle will be familiar with his ingenuity when it comes to mixing science, sociology and satire with swashbuckling adventure, and ANATHEM duly marries extensive dialogues on quantum mechanics and the nature of consciousness to literal cliffhangers, high-tech warfare and general derring-do.” — The Examiner (Ireland) on ANATHEM
“As with Stephenson’s previous work, plot and character are wrought to the highest standards of literary fiction but they’re scarcely as fascinating as the worlds he conjures up. If there’s anything more readable than ANATHEM it should probably be banned.” — Word (UK) on ANATHEM
“Learned, witty, weirdly torqued, emotionally complex, politically astute, and often darkly comic…ANATHEM is an audacious work by a highly intelligent imagination, a delightfully learned text.” — Edmonton Journal (Alberta) on ANATHEM
“A daring feat of speculative fiction…ANATHEM offers the reader a luscious arrangement of words, jokes, and speculations.” — Boston Globe
“This is a book about science and philosophy which demands the full concentration of the reader -a worthwhile, smart, exciting read.” — Time Out London
“A tour-de-force of world building and high-concept speculation, wrapped around a page-turning plot.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch on ANATHEM
“[R]avishingly brilliant, outrageously ambitious…ANATHEM is thought-provoking fun, at turns a post-graduate seminar of philosophy and physics, and a rousing yarn with characters you care about.” — Orlando Sentinel on ANATHEM
“Suddenly, novels of ideas are cool again.” — io9 on ANATHEM
“The world Stephenson builds is richly visual, its complicated social politics are convincingly detailed, and its cool and conflicted heroes struggle with thrilling intellectual puzzles while they are tested in epic physical adventures.” — Slate, Best of 2008 List, on ANATHEM
[R]avishingly brilliant, outrageously ambitious…Stephenson embarks on a mission of world-building, and he is thoroughly successful at it.” — South Florida Sun Sentinel on ANATHEM
About the Author
Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . .Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Anathem
By Neal StephensonHarperCollins Publishers
Copyright © 2010 Neal Stephenson
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-169494-3
Do your neighbors burn one another alive?” was
how Fraa Orolo began his conversation with
Artisan Flec.
Embarrassment befell me. Embarrassment
is something I can feel in my fl esh, like a hand-
ful of sun- warmed mud clapped on my head.
“Do your shamans walk around on stilts?” Fraa Orolo
asked, reading from a leaf that, judging by its brownness,
was at least fi ve centuries old. Then he looked up and added
helpfully, “You might call them pastors or witch doctors.”
The embarrassment had turned runny. It was horrifying
my scalp along a spreading frontier.
“When a child gets sick, do you pray? Sacrifi ce to a
painted stick? Or blame it on an old lady?”
Now it was sheeting warm down my face, clogging my
ears and sanding my eyes. I could barely hear Fraa Orolo's
questions: “Do you fancy you will see your dead dogs and
cats in some sort of afterlife?”
Orolo had asked me along to serve as amanuensis. It was
an impressive word, so I'd said yes.
He had heard that an artisan from extramuros had been
allowed into the New Library to fi x a rotted rafter that we
could not reach with our ladders; it had only just been no-
ticed, and we didn't have time to erect proper scaffolding
before Apert. Orolo meant to interview that artisan, and he
wanted me to write down what happened.
Through drizzly eyes, I looked at the leaf in front of me.
It was as blank as my brain. I was failing.
But it was more important to take notes of what the arti-
san said. So far, nothing. When the interview had begun,
[4] n e a l stephenson
he had been dragging an insuffi ciently sharp thing over a
fl at rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo.
“Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated be-
cause they were seen reading a book?”
Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the fi rst time in quite a
while. I could tell that the next time he opened it, he'd have
something to say. I scratched at the edge of the leaf just to
prove that my quill had not dried up. Fraa Orolo had gone
quiet, and was looking at the artisan as if he were a new-
found nebula in the eyepiece of a telescope.
Artisan Flec asked, “Why don't you just speel in?”
“Speel in,” Fraa Orolo repeated to me, a few times, as I
was writing it down.
I spoke in bursts because I was trying to write and talk
at the same time: “When I came— that is, before I was
Collected— we—I mean, they— had a thing called a
speely . . . We didn't say 'speel in'— we said 'cruise the
speely.' ” Out of consideration for the artisan, I chose to
speak in Fluccish, and so this staggering drunk of a sen-
tence only sounded half as bad as if I'd said it in Orth. “It
was a sort of—”
“Moving picture,” Orolo guessed. He looked to the ar-
tisan, and switched to Fluccish. “We have guessed that
'to speel in' means to partake of some moving picture
praxis— what you would call technology— that prevails
out there.”
“Moving picture, that's a funny way to say it,” said the
artisan. He stared out a window, as if it were a speely
showing a historical documentary. He quivered with a si-
lent laugh.
“It is Praxic Orth and so it sounds quaint to your ears,”
Fraa Orolo admitted.
“Why don't you just call it by its real name?”
“Speeling in?”
“Yeah.”
“Because when Fraa Erasmas, here, came into the math
ten years ago, it was called 'cruising the speely' and when
I came in almost thirty years ago we called it 'Farspark.'
The avout who live on the other side of yonder wall, who
anathem [5]
celebrate Apert only once every hundred years, would
know it by some other name. I would not be able to talk to
them.”
Artisan Flec had not taken in a word after Farspark.
“Farspark is completely different!” he said. “You can't
watch Farspark content on a speely, you have to up- convert
it and re- parse the format. . . .”
Fraa Orolo was as bored by that as the artisan was by
talk of the Hundreders, and so conversation thudded to a
stop long enough for me to scratch it down. My embarrass-
ment had gone away without my noticing it, as with hic-
cups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was
fi nally over, turned to look at the scaffolding that his men
had erected beneath the bad rafter.
“To answer your question,” Fraa Orolo began.
“What question?”
“The one you posed just a minute ago— if I want to know
what things are like extramuros, why don't I just speel in?”
“Oh,” said the artisan, a little confounded by the length
of Fra Orolo's attention span. I suffer from attention sur-
plus disorder, Fraa Orolo liked to say, as if it were funny.
“First of all,” Fraa Orolo said, “we don't have a speely-
device.”
“Speely- device?”
Waving his hand as if this would dispel clouds of lin-
guistic confusion, Orolo said, “What ever artifact you use
to speel in.”
“If you have an old Farspark resonator, I could bring you
a down- converter that's been sitting in my junk pile—”
“We don't have a Farspark resonator either,” said Fraa
Orolo.
“Why don't you just buy one?”
This gave Orolo pause. I could sense a new set of embar-
rassing questions stacking up in his mind: “do you believe
that we have money? That the reason we are protected by
the Sæcular Power is because we are sitting on a trea sure
hoard? That our Millenarians know how to convert base
metals to gold?” But Fraa Orolo mastered the urge. “Liv-
ing as we do under the
(Continues...)Excerpted from Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Copyright © 2010 Neal Stephenson. Excerpted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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