Anathem is an interesting book, a ponderous book, a boring book and also a great book. All these things at different times that it becomes difficult to place the book with one review and one rating.

To be sure, Stephenson does something with Anathem that most authors either cannot do or cannot get away with doing. He rambles and extends chapters continually. While he does this however, it can often be to great benefit to a reader wishing to come across a different way of looking at whatever theme Stephenson is trying to mention. At odd times the rambling can come across as pointless and arbitrary - likely Stephenson saw a point to it but it was lost in translation along the way.

Unlike most reviewers I have noticed, I enjoyed the first one-third of Anathem the most. It was intelligent, slow-paced and basically developed what the reader was immersed with. To me, it was amazing. The mid-section of the novel was also good but took quite a different style than the first sections. It was faster paced with more going on and with some eventual "action" sequences that were almost non-existant in the first third. The last third of the book was a letdown to me. The novel became even more fast-paced with yet again more changes to the novel's style and I felt Stephenson was trying to rush a conclusion a bit.

Overall, I can definitely understand how many readers would not enjoy this book. It's a book for people who want a slower paced, more thought-based novel with an imaginative setting and lots of various themes being touched. At times incredibly slow, it was still overall a decent novel, I only wish that the artful quality that the book began with could have continued through the later chapters. ( )

Skillful, thought-provoking, often entertaining, with some exciting adventure elements, but hundreds of pages too long. Lots of mysterious possibilities to cultivate a reader’s interest, but the work involved in attaining rudimentary understanding of the theoretical discourse, especially many very lengthy passages of it, far outweighed the satisfaction received from the story’s conclusion. The recurring multiple realities/consciousness theme affected the outcome in a way that was very obscure to me, and less essential to tying things together than expected. ( )

I found the beginning part of the book the most interesting. The last part wasn't bad, but I'd like to see more of the culture and interactions of the world. The tone & style of the story seemd to shift several times, which probably helped keep my interest. ( )

This book is a showcase for Stephenson's strong and weak points. It was going great guns when his hero decided to trek across the tundra, then it improbably started reading like a return to Snow Crash. Don't get me wrong, he's a very good writer but I would argue that this book could have used stringent editing. Less is more. Also, it's time to retire the ninja fetish. I'm talking to everyone. Embracing branching timelines, which was interesting and clever, nevertheless took some of the drama from events. If only we all could step into the outcome that was most pleasing. Stephenson fans, it's well worth it, everyone else read Cryptonomicon.

The more you read, the more stars you give it. Starts out slow, but instead of gaining speed, it gains mass until the momentum is overwhelming. The book's implications on how imagination interacts with the plurality of universes floored me.

A firm grounding in the history of mathematics is helpful, but not necessary. ( )

The writing and story are awesome; I found the sci-fi and ending somewhat far-fetched. ( )

It takes a while to become immersed in the book, as the characters use many words of their own language. However, once you become used to this, the pace gets faster and faster, and it develops into a real page turner. It is full of fascinating ideas and philosophies, and is a very satisfying read. ( )

This is hard SF of the most unusual sort. Normally hard SF involves a lot of checking of the structural strength of buildings, the physics of a star drive and so on.

This, rather, takes some of the more controversial ideas of quantum theory and quantum consciousness and plays "what if." If you're reasonably au fait with the fields without being an expert, which would describe me I think, you'll find it an interesting walk from places where you're fairly comfortable into some fascinating ideas, fascinating ideas that have experts in their field arguing about them today.

And then it's all wrapped up in a long, but engaging and interesting science fiction story where the theoretical scientists are locked away as if they are monks in seclusion, and they see the outside world only rarely.

Excellent book, all the way through. ( )

I'm a slow reader, and the book is almost 900 pages, but it is well worth the investment of time and effort. As I think back to my experience of reading the story, it really seems to be several different styles combined into one long narrative. It starts as a spec-fic cultural examination, with a bit of philosophical dialogue. Then there's a section of grand adventure and survivalism. Then a great turn into full-on scifi, with some more philosophy (which gets really thick around the 600s, but press on and don't give up). The wrapping-up chapter (denouement if I remember my terminology) was not quite satisfactory to me, but after the actions and ideas that were explored in the previous pages, I can't think that any "ending" would suffice (plus, I knew what was coming -- maybe if I'd been surprised, I would have liked it more). ( )

This was a joy to read. Pleasantly challenging and engaging enough that when it strayed into territory I typically avoid I went with it willingly. I've been recommending it to everyone, if you're a close friend, you'll probably enjoy it too. ( )

A brilliantly conceived speculative science fiction book, with small bits of theoretical physics, philosophy and mystery thrown in. Slow moving at first, but such an interesting alternate universe and cast of characters he weaves here, that I breezed through this long book rather quickly for me. ( )

Anathem is a large book, both in terms of its physical size (900+ pages) and in terms of its scope of imagination and ideas. Set on a planet called Arbre, it describes a civilization already many thousands of years old, where the rational thinkers (scientists, mathematicians, philosophers and the like) live separated from the rest of society in closed compounds called concents. These bear some resemblance to medieval monasteries, except that their inhabitants, on the whole, don't worship anything.

They're not anti-religion exactly; at one point the narrator states that if one of them were to prove the existence of God, the rest would say "nice proof" and begin believing in God. Yep, they're that rational. These people, called avouts, live to think and learn, and are bound by oath to avoid secular (or Saecular, as they would say) distractions such as possessions, technology, and family life (the avout are rendered sterile by their diet.)

The rest of Arbran society is similarly divided: the religious tend to cluster into Arks, roughly equivalent to churches but with a slightly more Branch Davidian flavor, while the rest of the population lives what we'd recognize as ordinary lives, generally in cities near a concent (at the time of the narration, the population is in severe decline so there's plenty of uninhabited space.) At regular intervals there is an Apert, where the concent gates open and the avouts get to mingle with the local populations; this is a chance for brainy children to be recruited into the concent and for avouts to change their minds and go back to ordinary life, although that rarely happens. Hilariously, the Information Technology people have evolved into a race (the Ita) separate from any of those described above; I explained this to my husband, who is an IT guy, and it was slightly worrying that this made perfect sense to him.

Devoid of thinkers, the world outside the concents is, not surprisingly, one of slow technological development and near illiteracy, with the exceptions of the Arks, the Ita, and the Saecular Powers who are a somewhat shadowy bunch of military/political leaders. But then an unprecedented event occurs (I won't say what it is as that would spoil the first part of the novel for you) and these different groups are forced to leave their comfort zones and begin working together, a dynamic that drives the last two-thirds of the book. The engaging young avout who narrates the story, Erasmas, and his friends are caught up in the center of the sweeping changes that result.

I suppose it's inevitable that reading this book reminded me of Dune and the Gormenghast trilogy. The similarity lies in the skillful building up of details so that you find yourself thinking in terms of the world that you're temporarily immersed in. I think Anathem has more to offer in the way of ideas, though; reading it is like paging through the contents of a very well-stocked mind, and in fact I suspect that the book could easily have been twice as long. I'm not crazy about where the plotline ended up (although I can't explain why without introducing some spoilers) but this novel got me thinking about a good many things. Such as, for example, the historical events that got the avout confined to the concents in the first place, and why further attempts were made to limit their power every couple thousand years. The short version is that people who are very good at thinking inevitably come up with ideas that pose a threat to all or part of civilization, and need to be confined and managed. Our own civilization seems to be taking the subtler route of dumbing down everything that can be dumbed down, and mysteriously somehow failing to eliminate recreational drugs.

This is one of those books that I might actually read again one day, which is a fairly high accolade for me (I'll have to buy it next time.) Character and dialog are both well above average for a book of this genre (I'm assuming that it fits somewhere within fantasy, although to class it alongside the half-naked sword-wielding spell-throwing sort of fantasy is a bit unfair) which is a good thing, as a lot of the dialog deals with difficult concepts. Stephenson avoids the pomposity which dogs both Dune and Gormenghast, so if you threw up your hands in horror when I mentioned those novels please rest assured that you can still read this one. It's my first Neal Stephenson novel, and I am definitely going to give this author another try. ( )

Speculative fiction about a post-apocalyptic society where all formal knowledge is kept alive by the avout--suurs and fraas who are cloistered. Their lives are described as in many was similar to those of our own religious orders, and similarly, music is interwoven into their practice. Music is treated, along with astronomy and several forms of mathematics, as a framework for much of the knowledge that has been kept by the avout, and some of the chanting is used to accompany physical work.

Later in the book, when some of the avout have been sent outside the cloister to solve some problems that have arisen, the extramural music (and other cultural customs) are described in contrast to what had gone on inside the cloister.

Wonderful book, and like all of Stephenson's works, a ripping good yarn. This one has speculative music theory, cultural criticism, and performance practice issues in it. (Gina Balestracci)

The uniqueness of a world in which science and math become a sort of secular religion has an irresistible appeal. It becomes a warm blanket it becomes a warm blanket that is ripped away when that world is disturbed. The story is interesting but wouldn't be nearly so without the layers of philosophical speculation on top. My only major critique is that the world outside the math was too flat in comparison to the rich monastic life. ( )

http://tyranist.blogspot.com/2009/08/... ( )

Bit of an epic read, but pretty absorbing. Lots of philosophical stuff in there. ( )

http://tpi-reads.blogspot.com/2009/06... ( )

I loved this. http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/200... ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here illegally.)

Is Neal Stephenson the most brilliant living author currently in the United States of America? Oh, wait, I can answer that for you right away: Yes. Yes he is. And that's because Stephenson can do something almost no other American writer currently putting out work can; he can take a healthy dose of the popular zeitgeist at any given moment, mine it to understand the underlying fears and hopes these trendy obsessions actually express, twist it using some of the most inventive speculative fictional tropes that have ever been created, infuse it with the kind of heady, complex "pure science" usually only understood by nuclear physicists and NOVA hosts, then spit it out in these breathtakingly dense thousand-page tomes every couple of years. Of all the thousands of published writers of our generation, I'm convinced that Stephenson will be one of the mere handful still being read and studied a century from now, and there's a very good reason that so many people call him "the heir of Thomas Pynchon," the creator of his own one-man literary genre that can't be called anything else but "Stephensonian." And thus have I eagerly followed along in real time with nearly all of Stephenson's backbreakers over the decades, all the way back from the 1992 cyberpunk classic Snow Crash (the direct inspiration for the very real Second Life); then to his stunning redefinition of steampunk, 1995's The Diamond Age; then to his masterful examination of the real history of 20th-century code-breaking, 1999's Cryptonomicon; and then to his massive three-book, three-thousand-page overview of the entire beginning of both science and finance as we know them, the career-defining "Baroque Cycle" (2003's Quicksilver, 2004's The Confusion, and 2005's The System of the World).

And now, after ten days in a row of reading at least four hours each and every day, I have finally finished Stephenson's latest, the epoch-defining yet often headscratching Anathem; and in fact I found it so dense, so generation-defining, I've come to realize that I simply will not be able to make all my points in the usual thousand-word essay I normally do here regarding any given book. So instead I'm doing two essays on two days, one spoiler-free and the other spoiler-heavy (today's the spoiler-free one), the first essay devoted to nothing else but the superlatively complicated backstory, and not even touching the book's actual plot until the second essay. (LibraryThing readers, this is one of the rare times when you will literally have to go to the CCLaP website for the second half, because of there literally not being room here for both.) Because it's important right away to understand what Stephenson is trying to do with this novel, and will make your reading of it (a part-time job, I warn you now, that will take most people four to six weeks) go a lot more smoothly; he is no less than redefining the very relationship between religion and science, and methodically explaining how there's actually a lot less differences between the two than most of us think, if people would simply choose to embrace both subjects in this interrelated way.

And really, this grand a goal is not actually as big a stretch as it might seem at first; after all, according to how recent history has played out, we're hovering right around a time these days where we as a society will be creating a big giant new way for us to even think about such basic subjects as faith, reason, the meaning of life, and more. There was the Enlightenment of the 1700s, for example, which pushed atheistic rationality to the forefront of society; then the Romanticism of the 1800s, in which emotions and spirituality were brought back into style; then the Modernism (and Postmodernism) of the 1900s, where science and religion were first presented as an "either/or" proposition, where rationality and faith were first cemented in the mind as eternally struggling enemies. And now here it is, the early 2000s; so what kind of "ism" will define this age? Well, if you study the subject like I do, the pretty obvious answer is that we're set to go through a century where we profoundly redefine what the relationship is in the first place between religion and science, which is why it's not really such a surprise that Stephenson would latch onto the subject himself, a good ten or fifteen years before it becomes the dominant subject of the popular culture at large, just like all his other novels have done too.

And the way Stephenson does this is of course unexpected and magnificent, which is by creating an entire different planet called Arbre which is almost just like Earth, but different in several basic important ways. For example, the first three thousand years of Arbre's written history are almost exactly like the last three thousand years of our own (from ancient Greece to now); except that in the oldest surviving myth they have, their version of our "Remus and Romulus" tale, theirs supposedly involves a father who near the end of his life professes to having a vision of what he calls a "perfect other world," then dies before he can explain what exactly he meant. So one daughter, Deat, interprets this how the religious of Earth usually would, into terms of a "heaven" and a "god" and "angels" and the like; but the other daughter, Hylaea, takes it to mean that he glimpsed a realm of pure perfect science and reason, not so much a physical place like a "heaven" but more like a Taoist-style existence of pure energy, where instead of a deity running things who takes the form of a person, there is instead only the pure clocklike perfection of a completely rational universe.

And so all the way back to the beginning of Arbrean society, there have actually been two major ways to think of religion, not only the "deist" way which is the only one we have on Earth (known as "deolatist" in their world, after the daughter Deat), but also this "religion of science" known as Hylaeanism, later in history generalized to the more inclusive term "Mathism." And the Mathists have their own monks and their own monasteries, essentially mirroring how the study of science got its actual start in ancient Earth as well; and anytime one of these monk scientists has a sudden breakthrough, like Newton discovering gravity or Einstein discovering relativity or Pythagorus inventing his theory about triangles, this is considered the Mathic version of a miracle, or perhaps more like speaking in tongues, a sort of short, profound connection that monk suddenly has with this so-called semi-mystical world of pure rational perfection, known in their language as the "Hylaean Theoric World" (with "theorism" being their word for our "science"). And this is just inspired of Stephenson to do, I think, because this hearkens all the way back to what real Earth's first scientists actually were trying to do too, the so-called "natural philosophers" and "alchemists" of the 1600s; to them, "science" wasn't a standalone subject unto itself but rather a simple subset of religion, a way of understanding God better by intensely studying the things that God creates, and understanding how we should live our own lives by studying how such creatures as trees and animals do it out in the "natural world," a.k.a. "the world that works the way God wants the world to work, when we humans aren't using our big giant brains to screw it all up." And again, for anyone who's ever studied Eastern religions, you can see a lot of similarities between this and some of the basic tenets behind Taoism and Buddhism -- the idea that God is too infinitely complex a creature for us to ever understand, so all we can do instead is study the things that God creates, and get our cues on how to live our own lives by metaphorically interpreting God in its most purely rational form, what we now know as "scientific concepts," things like gravity and photosynthesis and DNA.

Newton and the other proto-scientists of the Baroque "Royal Society" always saw their pursuits as an offshoot of religion; it's only been in the last 150 years that science has taken on a reputation as being an abomination to God, as the insane efficiency of the scientific process (theorize, test, observe, record without bias) has meant a profoundly fast increase in scientific sophistication, to the point where scientists must now spend their entire lives studying the specific pursuit they mean to make their career just to get caught up, and now not just observe nature in action but actively manipulate it, thus "playing God" in the eyes of many instead of merely worshipping God through natural observation. All Stephenson does is merely formalize this process, on a planet much like Earth's but where he can take certain artistic liberties; on Arbre, scientists literally are monks, universities literally monasteries, where specialists literally devote their entire lives to the pursuit of specific knowledge, literally do wear robes and shave their heads and live in cloisters and everything else. Except unlike Deolatism/deism/traditional religion, commandment number one among Mathics tends to be, "It's a sin to presume that you will eventually understand everything there is to know about the world," with commandment number two being, "And it's an even bigger sin to make up stories about the things you don't understand." When all is said and done, Stephenson argues that this is really the only big difference between science and deism, with all the other conflicts playing off it in one way or another: that science is all about trying to discover what makes the world work the way it does, without tainting your observations with fictional stories regarding the way you really, really wish the world worked, while the entire point of deism is precisely to make up such comforting and easily understood fictional stories, as a way of easing the fear and threat so many feel in the face of the unknown.

And like I said, thus does the first three thousand years of Arbrean written history pass remarkably like Earth's, with their version of a Roman Empire (the "Bazian Empire") which eventually adopts Catholicism ("The Ark of Baz") as its official religion, which eventually leads to a Protestant Reformation (the "Anti-Bazians") which turns into their version of the Renaissance ("The Rebirth"), which on Arbre is when the gates of the ancient Mathic monasteries were first flung open, so that most of the science-worshipping monks could disperse themselves among the public at large, ushering in their version of our "Modern Age" or "Scientific Age" or whatever you want to call it (basically, the last 500 years of history, from the Renaissance to now), which the Arbreans call "The Praxic Age" on their world, "Praxism" being their word for "technology." And in fact Stephenson does something else really smart when laying out this alternative ancient history, which is to wisely separate what we humans know as "science" into three distinct pursuits on Arbre -- not just the scientific process (logic, rationality, etc), which is technically the only pursuit the Mathics embrace, but also the study of numbers (Earth's "mathematics") and the study of just technology, which are the pursuits the "Saecular" (non-Mathic) parts of Arbrean society mostly concentrate on, and especially when it comes to the subject of "syntactic devices" (things like computers, for example, which can be taught to "read" and "write," but don't even begin to understand the context of what they're parsing, of how to enjoy a joke or be emotionally moved by a poem).

Mathic monks instead concentrate on so-called "semantic thought," or the idea that understanding things in context is the most important pursuit in life; and thus is it that only a portion of Arbre's society understands the reasons why technology works, but doesn't actually use any of the technology their theories spawn, while a much larger portion of the population invents and uses all the technology of Arbrean society, but doesn't understand how any of it works. And also thus is it that what might seem to be very scientific people to us are actually considered blindly religious to the Arbreans, the so-called "number-worshippers" who idolize the specifics of math without understanding any of the underlying theories that make the equations work. (This would be roughly translated to Earth's technology worshippers; think of the socially-retarded Comic Book Guys of the world, who can program a computer application but don't know how to even start having a rational, polite discussion with another human being. And in fact Stephenson very cleverly uses as the ultimate example the so-called "Secret Brotherhood of the Ita" associated with each Mathic monastery, a bastardization of the old corporate "I.T. administrators," the number-worshippers who actually ensure that the monasteries and their giant central worship-clocks keep functioning, but who are physically separated from the monks so that their "tech worship" won't "poison" the Mathics' purely theoretic minds. Freaking brilliant, Stephenson.)

But see, all this is only half the backstory of Anathem; because in their timeline, right around our early 2000s is the actual Year Zero of their current calendar, because of a series of apocalyptic occurrences on Arbre in those years known simply as "The Terrible Events" (with us knowing for certain that these events take place right around their early 2000s, despite the new calendar, because of Arbre even having their version of what they call "The Three Harbingers," roughly corresponding to our World War Two, World War One, and Europe-wide political revolutions of 1848, all of them supposedly minor omens of the apocalyptic events that were to come). And for what it's worth, Stephenson leaves the details of the Terrible Events purposely murky, but highly implies that the mess started with the exact kind of accidental molecular disaster that conspiracy theorists have been crowing about this year regarding the very real Large Hadron Collider just built at CERN, the idea that we may just accidentally create a miniature black hole with the thing because of messing around with stuff we don't nearly understand yet, with Stephenson implying that this kicked off a blind panic and a series of voluntary nuclear weapon discharges in a last-ditch attempt to destroy the rapidly expanding artificial black hole, leading to all the other nuclear-armed nations of the world discharging their own weapons in their own blind panics, resulting in all the mass death and chaos and ecological disaster such events would cause.

Whatever the case, we do definitely know that what was blamed for the Events, among both the Mathics and the Saeculars, was the commingling between the two groups that defined the Praxic Age; and thus did the monk scientists retreat back into their monasteries and once again close the gates, an event known as "The Reconstitution" and that marks year one of their "modern" calendar. And thus does yet another entire three thousand years pass, three thousand years of "future history" that haven't actually happened on Earth yet, where humanity ends up progressing in two distinctly different ways; how the Saecular world essentially becomes a neverending chaos of revolutions and superstitions, a Second Dark Age ruled by an alliance of brain-dead tech worshippers and traditional Evangelicals, where skyscrapers and post-apocalyptic wars come and go faster than people can even keep track, while the Mathic monasteries become timeless closed citadels of pure theoretical thought, where monks master such impossibly dense subjects as quantum mechanics and genetic manipulation using nothing more than chalk marks on slate, stick drawings in the dirt. And thus is an uneasy truce developed between the two societies, with both pretty much agreeing to leave the other alone except when absolutely necessary; well, except for the three times in the last three thousand years when the monks got a little too full of themselves, when they started taking on scientific progressions again deemed a little too much like "playing God," at which points the now almost exclusively superstitious Saecular world rose up against what they considered the "witches" of the Mathic world and slaughtered almost all of them, known historically by the remaining Mathics as the three "Great Sacks," the last of which occurred nearly 800 years before the beginning of our current story.

Okay, got all that? Good; now we're ready for page one of the actual book. And like I said, another fifteen hundred words concerning just that subject will be coming tomorrow. I hope you'll have a chance to come by again then.

UPDATE: Part two now online. ( )

No more Neal Stephenson. Never again. This book was so tedious. So much useless information for so little plot. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1211604...

At first I thought this was going to be some sort of combination of The Tombs of Atuan, The Name of the Rose and philosophy of science; our hero is a trainee scholar in a rigidly ritualistic academic culture which covers his entire world. But then it turns out that this is a First Contact story, and we have the build-up to a brilliantly described commando raid in deep space. And our hero resolves the problems in his love-life, so the romantic in me was satisfied too.

I particularly enjoyed Stephenson's playing with words: the honorific "Saunt" drawing on both savant and saint, the "Concent" combining the characteristics of a convent with undertones of concentration and concepts, our hero's name "Erasmas" echoing most obviously Erasmus but perhaps also Rasselas and others with similar names. There are a lot of neat and witty allusions to well-known concepts in the history and philosophy of science. Erasmas' home, the Concent of Saunt Edhar, is located at 51.3° north, the same latitude as London, or Greenwich, or indeed Bath where Herschel discovered the planet Uranus.

Stephenson loses marks on a couple of technical points, though. He has his orbits wrong; most surface-based observers will not usually see satellites in polar orbits pass over the celestial poles / pole star. Also, like Asimov in The Gods Themselves, he has matter brought into universes where the nuclear forces don't operate in quite the same way, in which case I would expect the atoms to either collapse or explode, though I suppose there could be some handwaving explanation (or perhaps I've misunderstood what "newmatter" is supposed to be).

I expect it will be a tight race between Anathem and The Graveyard Book for the Hugo this year. My vote goes to Anathem. ( )

I finished reading Anathem yesterday. I think i’m done with that cruel mistress that is Neal Stephensen. Cryptonomicon was so great. I can’t recommend the book enough, it’s so interesting and entertaining. The Baroque Cycle pissed me off to no end, but I feel strangely nostalgic for it now. I think it is one of those series that grows on you after you’ve finished reading it — mostly because you forget a lot of the tedium. Anathem just wasn’t that good.

To start with, all the made-up words get distracting and seem a bit silly. (If you are going to make up words for cars and cell phones, but not for shoes, what’s the point?) Eventually you figure out what everything means, and you can get back to enjoying the book. Or trying to anyway. The world the story takes place in is interesting. You could write a really good book set in this world: Anathem wasn’t that book. There are lots of interesting ideas in the book, but as is often the case with the Baroque Cycle, their presentation borders on tedious. And, I can’t believe i’m typing this, but the ending feels rushed. The book is 1000 pages long! All of this I could forgive if not for the most glaring issue with the book: it reads like teen fiction. Stephensen is writing for the audience he knows he already has in the bag. The book is all nerdy science geek guy gets the hot but also nerdy science girl chick, and is helped by his good at everything friend, his nerdy martial arts friend, his super nerd friend who obviously has Aspenger’s, his hot engineer sister, his nerdy… well you get the idea. If Twilight is Vampire fiction for Emo kids, then Anathem is a science fiction romp for the Slashdot crowd. (Actually, god damn, the book was panned by at least one dude at Slashdot. The comments are a bit of a mixed bag.) If you are looking for something to read this winter, pick up Cryptonomicon.
-- http://funkaoshi.com/blog/anathem ( )

This is set on a world parallel to ours in which, thousands of years ago, all the smart people were ostracized from the rest of society. They went to live in non-religious convents where they live very simply, but are free to pursue their own thoughts and projects and only occasionally interact with the outside world. Children from the outside who display signs of too much intelligence are brought to these convents to live. All proceeds as normal for thousands of years until all over the world something strange is seen through observatory telescopes. To tell more of the plot would be impossible without spoilers. As the plot progresses though, the reader's understanding of what has already occurred also evolves in a very interesting way.

This book has a vocabulary all it's own (there's a 20-page glossary at the end that includes entries such as my personal favorite "hypotrochian transquaestiation") along with an entirely new kind of science. A large portion of this novel actually consists of characters discussing theoretical science. As such, it takes some persistence to get into--I wasn't hooked until about 140 pages in. For the most part, this book rocks! The author's ability to create all the intricacies of this world, to maintain a sufficient interest level for over 900 pages and to keep the complexity of the plot increasing as it goes is astounding. I love a book that makes me think and to work a little while I'm reading. This is definitely such a book.

However, I do have a few bones to pick. For starters, the complicated theories and discussions of the characters may have been a little over the top and may have bogged down the story a bit. I also didn't particularly care for the ending. I didn't quite understand how what happened could have happened the way it did (which I can't explain without spoilers). There was also a thread of romance running throughout the story that I felt fell flat. I would've liked to have seen this either developed a little more or eliminated entirely.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone with persistence who enjoys spec fic! ( )