In the course of human history the progress of science is not following a straight line. Times of discoveries during antiquity were interrupted by a dark age before the advent of the modern industrial world. Inhabitants of an individual enlightened period probably think that humankind is, from then on, to follow a persistent path of new discoveries. Yet history tells us to expect the dark ages to come once more. Then what is the protective envelope that can preserve knowledge for the duration of such a period? Part of knowledge is information, but part of it is apprenticeship and cultivation of certain structure of thinking -- it needs guidance and uninterrupted care to be passed between the generations.

The story of "Anathem" takes place during one such dark age. Big part of the book tells about the life of people in one knowledge capsule. They are monks who learn sciences, acquire and teach young apprentices, and impart discipline. Outside the wall of the monastery the humankind has degraded to a religious society -- uneducated consumers of gadgets and trinkets.

For me the book successfully established a frame of thinking into which I couldn't help but see the seeds of that future in our very own modern times -- the main character travels in a world of rapacious consumerism, impatient reach for gratification, short attention spans, and the inexorable campaign of religion to sow distrust in science and impede progress. The story in the book develops on a planet in a time which could be two centuries in our own future. It is a science fiction of science not much more developed from what we have today, a thought experiment into which Stephenson uses the physics of our cosmos and by fudging the constants a little he provides for the possibility of parallel universes slightly different from ours.

An excellent and detailed review here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/...
Stephenson visits Google's headquarters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnq-2B... ( )

Epic book, though the invented words made reading it a bit of a challenge. Took a few starts, but worth working your way through. ( )

"Anathem" was an odd book to read. I'd started it several times and only got through the first 50-75 pages and then dropped it. But the last time, after getting through the (intentionally) very slow beginning, it very rapidly became thoroughly engrossing. It never became a "quick" book to read, but its length, (and very much unlike, in my case, the Baroque Cycle), FIT the book, as did the level of concentration needed to complete Anathem. A good friend, decades long reading partner who borrowed my copy had exactly the same experience - after a couple of false starts, he ended up thoroughly engrossed (except Mike LIKED the Baroque Cycle, which I thought could have neatly fit into 2 books, max. and still probably wouldn't have really enjoyed. I thought NS was throwing in extraneous information to show how much background research he'd done and how he'd gone past the need for editing (in his opinion only!!!!)). I need a programming editor to keep track of unmatched braces!~

But the multiple reveals that emerge over time in Anathem, the complexity of the interlocking social systems AND, more particularly, the care he took with developing the various characters, didn't feel like wasted words - they felt (mostly) necessary. In some ways I'd describe Anathem as the inverse of Snow Crash. Anathem IS a novel of ideas, but the ideas are embodied in the characters and, in this case, the wordiness, the telling as well as showing, fit the needs of the book and the societies he's carefully limned. Both Mike and I who've read everything NS has written (we became NS groupies as we're both geographers by training, as is NS) think it is the closest he's come to a "masterpiece." Previously I'd very much enjoyed Snowcrash and Cryptonomicron and thought that The Diamond Age had been his best - w/ the Baroque Trilogy serving as doorstops...No, i gave copies to our library and didn't buy the last one...but they COULD have been doorstops..

In another odd way, it reminded me of the city and the city by Mieville, which i also liked a good deal - not nearly as long (nor as grotesque as his earlier books - which i liked) in the degree of attention needed to follow an excellent, twisty story. ( )

Just picked this up from the library. It's 900 pages. Anyone want to start placing bets on how high my overdue fines will get?Three weeks later: Kicking this back to my to-read shelf. I never got past the prologue, not because of any fault of the book, but because I've been watching Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and there's only room for one genre universe in my head at a time.

Another fantastic, intelectually challenging bit of work from Neal Stephenson! At times extrmemely challenging, but definitely worth it in the end. ( )

This book was fantastic. All the erudition you would expect from Neal Stephenson, plus a cracking yarn that I literally couldn't tear myself away from. Read it, read the glossary, the timeline, the calcas at the back - just dig in and enjoy. An awesome read. ( )

I want to like this book more than I did. Stephenson is a fountain of great ideas, but he's been in need of fierce editing ever since he "went big" with the Baroque Cycle. I'm not one to complain about lengthy didactic passages in fiction; Heinlein did them just fine in his sci-fi, and Eco (to whose "Name of the Rose" this book owes a lot) writes them much better than he writes "real" dialogue. Anathem has major pacing problems, though, which is a shame, because Stephenson hasn't been this witty and inventive in years. ( )

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... ( )