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Summary
Summary
A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Anathem is perhaps the most brilliant literary invention to date from the incomparable Neal Stephenson, who rocked the world with Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle. Now he imagines an alternate universe where scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians live in seclusion behind ancient monastery walls until they are called back into the world to deal with a crisis of astronomical proportions.
Anathem won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the reviews for have been dazzling: "Brilliant" (South Florida Sun-Sentinel), "Daring" (Boston Globe), "Immensely entertaining" (New York Times Book Review), "A tour de force" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), while Time magazine proclaims, "The great novel of ideas...has morphed into science fiction, and Neal Stephenson is its foremost practitioner."
Author Notes
Neal Stephenson, the science fiction author, was born on October 31, 1959 in Maryland. He graduated from Boston University in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography with a minor in physics. His first novel, The Big U, was published in 1984. It received little attention and stayed out of print until Stephenson allowed it to be reprinted in 2001.
His second novel was Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was published in 1988, but it was his novel Snow Crash (1992) that brought him popularity. It fused memetics, computer viruses, and other high-tech themes with Sumerian mythology.
Neal Stephenson has won several awards: Hugo for Best Novel for The Diamond Age (1996), the Arthur C. Clarke for Best Novel for Quicksilver (2004), and the Prometheus Award for Best Novel for The System of the World (2005).
He recently completed the The Baroque Cycle Trilogy, a series of historical novels. It consists of eight books and was originally published in three volumes and Reamde. His latest novel is entitled The Rise and Fall of D. O. D. O.
Stephenson also writes under the pseudonym Stephen Bury.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This audiobook goes the extra mile, giving listeners something the printed page-turner can not. Fans of the cult author will enjoy his vocal cameo appearances when he calmly reads definitions from a non-Earth dictionary at the start of many chapters. Another added bonus is the music between chapters that was composed specifically for this production; working with Stephenson and early drafts of the novel, David Stutz beautifully captures the complex traditional, coded choral music described therein. Moreover, the extras do not obscure the remarkable performance by William Dufris, who reads as if he knows the 900+-page text by heart. The story is told by a monastic scholar, and Dufris--with a twinkle in his proverbial eye and a sense of awe in his voice--is the perfect match. His intelligent rendering of the cast of characters is a delight for the ears. A Morrow hardcover (Reviews, July 28). (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Stephenson has quickly established himself as an A-list writer of epic-length fantasy. His mammoth novel Cryptonomicon (1999) was as long as the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then there's the multivolume Baroque Cycle, which offers a world of another time and place that is so tangible that reality seems flat and dull by comparison. He does the same thing here in this astonishing novel, taking us to a world similar to Earth, where society is divided between the avout, who live in a sealed-off monastery and devote themselves to science and philosophy, and the saecular, whose daily lives are taken up with more mundane concerns, such as reproduction, recreation, and business. Every so often, residents of the monastery venture out into the saecular world but never for very long. Then Erasmus, the novel's narrator, and his fellow avout are shocked to learn that they are being sent out into the other world to save it from certain disaster. Stephenson's novels have always contained more than one level, and Anathem continues that practice, its surface story serving as a launching pad for multiple meanings, both metaphorical and allegorical. The novel is beautifully written (fans of Adam Roberts' ornately written science fiction will see some similarities), and, even though it runs to nearly 1,000 pages, it feels somehow too short, as though we're made to leave this carefully constructed world and return to our own before we're quite ready. A magnificent achievement.--Pitt, David Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
TO paraphrase an old Greek guy: I have always from my earliest youth had an awe and love of Neal Stephenson, which even now makes the words falter on my lips. But a man is not to be reverenced more than the truth, and therefore I will speak out. In the acknowledgments of ANATHEM (Morrow/HarperCollins, $29.95), Stephenson, the author of such meticulous historical novels as "Cryptonomicon" and "The Baroque Cycle," gives inspirational credit for his latest work of fiction to a long line of distinguished thinkers, from Thales and Plato to Husserl and Gödel. But it is the spirits of the Greeks that exert the greatest influence on "Anathem": at its best, the book is a thought experiment in narrative form, a meditation on how far a society can go on pure reason and arguments from first principles. It is an intricate Socratic puzzle, yet - though you may wish to banish me or pour hemlock down my throat for saying this - I'm not entirely sure it's a novel. Set in a world that is similar but not identical to our own, "Anathem" imagines a modern-day monastic order whose members have pledged to live their lives without computers or electronic technology. Having long ago set aside such unanswerable questions as "Does God exist?" these alternative Augustines are free to contemplate issues of math, physics and philosophy; depending on the order they belong to, they are allowed to visit the outside world as much as once a year or as little as once a millennium. (Needless to say, only those members of the latter group with good timing and health care will get to enjoy this benefit.) Of course, Stephenson does not simply hand over this information to his reader on a platter. Seen through the eyes of a young ascetic named Erasmas, the universe of "Anathem" and its properties are revealed methodically over hundreds of pages, and at first, there is much joy to be found in watching this plausible other reality assemble itself and in observing how it parallels our own. This world has its own Socrates and Plato (a pair of classical philosophers named Thelenes and Protas, who challenged a troupe of freelance rhetoricians similar to the sophists) and equivalents of basic principles like Occam's razor, the Pythagorean theorem and the parable of the cave presented in Plato's "Republic," as if to show that such ideas are so fundamental to intellectual development they must arise in any thinking society, regardless of its history. Stephenson, too, delights in the language and etymology he has designed for his fictional world (where revered scholars are given the title Saunt, derived from the word "savant") and in the 7,000 years of detailed history he has given it: before Erasmas has set foot outside his cloister, he has introduced the reader to numerous disputes and schisms that his "mathic" tradition has spawned over the centuries - philosophical (and sometimes physical) battles that have arisen between rival groups of Deolaters and Physiologers, Bazians and counter-Bazians, Procians and Halikaarnians. Whether you are able to keep track of the differences between these factions (there's a helpful glossary at the back of the book for dopes like me), it doesn't obscure Stephenson's larger point, perhaps the most resonant and consequential in all of "Anathem": the absence of religion does not prevent passionate and violent disagreements over theoretical matters; such conflagrations can occur even in societies that hold rational thought as their highest virtue. So far, so good, but here comes the heresy. Eventually, Erasmas spies what he thinks is an alien ship in the sky, leading to his dismissed from his monastery and finally setting the plot of "Anathem" in motion. While his narrator is engaged in his wanderings, Stephenson amuses himself with other interpretations of worship: a faith based on an ancient craftsman and his vision of a triangle in the heavens, and another structured around the unlikely trinity of a condemned man, a magistrate and an innocent girl. But there is still another triad the author should have heeded more carefully. Back in "The Republic," a work Stephenson has evidently spent some time with, Socrates delineates three categories of art: "one which uses, another which makes, a third which imitates them." The last of these three Socrates holds in the lowest regard, because it is a copy of a copy of the truth - "an inferior who marries an inferior, and has inferior offspring." And my reluctant conclusion is that "Anathem" spends so much time engaged in copying, in conjuring up alternative formulations of our real-world science and religion, that it forgets to come up with much that is new or true. Too much of the book is dominated by lengthy dialectical debates, whose conclusions are hardly earth-shattering (if you are reading this review, I suspect you already know how to divide a rectangular cake into eight equal servings) and which do little to promote a reader's engagement with the characters of "Anathem," any more than one cares about the interior lives of Pausanias or Eryximachus while reading "The Symposium." What's worse, the book's fixation on dialogue leads Erasmas (and Stephenson) to simply tell us what is happening or has happened in pivotal scenes, instead of allowing us to see the events for ourselves through descriptive action. And when Erasmas and his confederates at last make their way onto that alien ship, you may wonder what all of this has to do with the larger themes Stephenson spends the first 300 pages of his 900-page novel laying out. But you don't have to know Plato from Play-Doh to sense that "Anathem" doesn't completely work on its own terms. Throughout the book, we see Erasmas tinkering with a tool called a sphere: a flexible, amorphous blob that he can variously fashion into a bushel basket, a stool, a toboggan and a life buoy. Likewise, it is immensely entertaining to watch Stephenson play with an admixture of science, history and language, and stretch it into as many different forms as he can imagine. I'd also like to believe that he had a more ambitious and rewarding intention in mind than playing around with sophisticated toys.
Guardian Review
It feels appropriate that cosmology should form the underlying basis of Neal Stephenson's vertiginous new novel. Both hold, for me, a boundlessly engaging fascination that comes at the price of being made to feel infinitesimally small: not merely as a human being, but as a writer, too. The scale of his works since Cryptonomicon in 1999 has been such as to require a greater commitment than some marriages. Even with Snow Crash (1993), a breakneck satirical geek-fest that still reads as though it's years ahead of the cyber-curve, he was demonstrating an aptitude for wrangling big ideas without sacrificing pace or lightness of touch. That early novel has its faraway echoes in Anathem , as Stephenson again explores the relationships between language, thought and meaning: specifically, whether the last can exist outside of the direct dominions of the first two. Anathem takes place on a world called Arbre, where our narrator, Erasmas or "Raz", is an avout Decenarian fraa in the concent of Saunt Edhar. Don't panic: I will elaborate upon this last sentence. The concents are like monasteries, but where science, philosophy and mathematics are studied, rather than theology. The word concent suggests an encircling structure to these sanctuaries - metaphorical rather than necessarily physical - in which the fraas and suurs are denominated according to how often their constituent group opens its gates to the world beyond: from unarians (once a year) to the remotely cloistered millenarians. In these realms of the avout, the word saunt (a punning contraction of "savant") is defined as "a term of veneration applied to great thinkers, almost always posthumously". However, this does not imply that the people of Arbre revere academe above religion or even "saecular" ambition. When their gates are closed, these concents are sealed off almost entirely from the saecular world: they are not allowed direct access to technology (their limited use of it being moderated by an authentically grumpy caste of IT types), and write their proofs on genetically modified leaves, as even paper is not permitted. Their Discipline dictates not only that they receive no news from outside the concent, but also that the ten-, hundred- and thousand-year constituents have no inter-communication either. This is ostensibly so that their "theoric" study is uncontaminated by transitory ideas, but more historically it is because the saecular world mistrusts them with a suspicion that has spilled over into catastrophic violence at various points throughout the planet's history. The obvious early point of reference is Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, as Stephenson immerses the reader in a world of ritual and order, the reasons for which are not entirely understood by their adherents. These are people who think as a vocation, deconstructing the reasoning behind every statement; yet even in such a culture, ritual can take hold and impose an order whole centuries after the reasons for it have been forgotten. Arbre's is a civilisation several thousand years more mature than our own; I say mature rather than advanced, as there is a deep sense of technological ages largely forgotten, buried under cataclysm. World wars and genocide are recorded as mere harbingers of "the Terrible Events". The hidden history of this world, and in particular the relationship between the avout and the saecular, emerges in glimpses only once a threat of unprecedented scale sees Raz and some of his fellow avout "evoked": that is, sent on a mission that will take them not merely into the saecular world, but to points far beyond. Stephenson insisted that his historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle be described as SF because it was "fiction about science". He tags Anathem as "speculative fiction", but in keeping with his previous work, this novel is as much about language, and it provides a whole new playground for his fascination with etymology. Take the term "speelycaptor", for example, which denotes any kind of visual recording device. It is a word that does not merely imply a plausible coinage, but suggests a history of usage that has transcended and even abandoned the technology that first gave rise to it. Laden with dozens of such words, Anathem is as much a code-breaking experience as Cryptonomicon , due to the teasing way Stephenson's neologisms gradually unlock themselves. However, the beating heart of this novel is philosophy, and if I may borrow an analogy from Professor Stephen Law, at times Anathem is not so much a work-out in the philosophy gym as philosophy extreme sports. The history of the avout is punctuated by the breakthrough ideas of saunts, all of them replicating concepts familiar to us here on Earth through Plato, Euclid, Leibniz, Newton and so on. Edmund Husserl's copper ashtray becomes Atamant's Bowl; Occam's razor becomes Saunt Gardan's Steelyard. This is more than mere facsimile: the most powerful and controversial idea among the avout concerns the "Hylaean Theoric World", and the question of whether the same ideas will occur independently to thinkers on different planets because there are certain transcendental truths - prime numbers, the value of pi, the laws of geometry - that exist on some higher plane. Taking his cue from the likes of Hugh Everett and Max Tegmark, Stephenson postulates that, while certain conditions are necessary for the cosmos to have taken shape (various laws of physics, such as the speed of light, having to be set at very precise values), there is still room for tiny variations in those values to create parallel cosmoses in which the make-up of matter is minutely distinct. It is the many worlds theory evoked with a greater elegance than I have read in any previous work of "speculative fiction". For that let us hail him Saunt Neal of Seattle. Weighing in at 800 head-stretching pages, Anathem demands a near-avout level of commitment, but rewards those who enter its concent with bounteous gifts of wisdom, beauty and "upsight". The only catch to reading a novel as imposingly magnificent as this is that for the next few months, everything else seems small and obvious by comparison. Indeed, Stephenson's own predicament in the midst of such a towering project is succinctly encapsulated in one character's fraught observation: "Why did I study Linguistics instead of Celestial Mechanics? Linguistics got me into this excellent mess - only physics can get me out." Christopher Brookmyre's latest novel is A Snowball in Hell (Little, Brown). To order Anathem for pounds 17.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop Caption: article-stephenson.1 In these realms of the avout, the word saunt (a punning contraction of "savant") is defined as "a term of veneration applied to great thinkers, almost always posthumously". However, this does not imply that the people of Arbre revere academe above religion or even "saecular" ambition. When their gates are closed, these concents are sealed off almost entirely from the saecular world: they are not allowed direct access to technology (their limited use of it being moderated by an authentically grumpy caste of IT types), and write their proofs on genetically modified leaves, as even paper is not permitted. Their Discipline dictates not only that they receive no news from outside the concent, but also that the ten-, hundred- and thousand-year constituents have no inter-communication either. This is ostensibly so that their "theoric" study is uncontaminated by transitory ideas, but more historically it is because the saecular world mistrusts them with a suspicion that has spilled over into catastrophic violence at various points throughout the planet's history. - Christopher Brookmyre.
Kirkus Review
A sprawling disquisition on "the higher harmonics of the sloshing" and other "polycosmic theories" that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own. Stephenson (The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune--and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the "anathem," a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. It's a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed "the Terrible Events" of a thousand-odd years past. Our hero is set to an epic task, but it's no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers; more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. The hero's quest affords Stephenson the opportunity to engage in some pleasing wordplay à la Riddley Walker, with talk of "late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt" and "Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies," and the like, and to level barrel on barrel of scattershot against our own time: "In some families, it's not entirely clear how people are related"; "Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures"; and much more. Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
On the world called Arbre, time runs in counterpoint: the ponderous flow of ritual and study behind the doors of the great "maths," or monasteries, against the constant flux of cultural change in the world outside. Devoted to scientific rather than religious practice, these sanctuaries maintain an austere and ceremonial cloistered existence for decades, even centuries, before opening briefly to see what has changed. Every so often, major outside events break the great cycle and force the maths to change. Fraa Erasmas, a not especially distinguished member of one of these cloisters, finds himself at the center of one of these events and, as so often happens, ends up trying to save the world. Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) is not afraid to spend as much time as it takes to explore everything that interests him, whether it's the geometry of cake cutting or the particulars of a 1000-year-old collection of assorted garden furniture. In less skilled hands this might be tedious, but here the layers of world building are the foundation for an enthralling tale that, even at over 900 pages, is over almost too soon. For some fans, this may be a welcome return to sf after his epic historical trilogy, "The Baroque Cycle," but readers with an interest in science and philosophy will also enjoy it--there are dozens of famous ideas and theorems half-hidden throughout the novel. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 5/15/08; includes a bonus CD with music composed for Anathem.]--Jenne Bergstrom, San Diego Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Anathem Chapter One 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 flesh, like a handful 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 five 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? Sacrifice 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 fix a rotted rafter that we could not reach with our ladders; it had only just been noticed, 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 artisan said. So far, nothing. When the interview had begun, he had been dragging an insufficiently sharp thing over a flat rock. Now he was just staring at Orolo. "Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book?" Artisan Flec closed his mouth for the first 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 cameâ€"that is, before I was Collectedâ€"weâ€"I mean, theyâ€"had a thing called a speely?.?.?.?We didn't say 'speel in'â€"we said 'cruise the speely.'?" Out of consideration for the artisan, I chose to speak in Fluccish, and so this staggering drunk of a sentence only sounded half as bad as if I'd said it in Orth. "It was a sort ofâ€"" "Moving picture," Orolo guessed. He looked to the artisan, and switched to Fluccish. "We have guessed that 'to speel in' means to partake of some moving picture praxisâ€"what you would call technologyâ€"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 silent 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 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 embarrassment had gone away without my noticing it, as with hiccups. Artisan Flec, believing that the conversation was finally 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 agoâ€"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 surplus 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 linguistic confusion, Orolo said, "Whatever 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 pileâ€"" "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 embarrassing 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 treasure hoard? That our Millenarians know how to convert base metals to gold? " But Fraa Orolo mastered the urge. "Living as we do under the Cartasian Discipline, our only media are chalk, ink, and stone," he said. "But there is another reason too." "Yeah, what is it?" demanded Artisan Flec, very provoked by Fraa Orolo's freakish habit of announcing what he was about to say instead of just coming out and saying it. "It's hard to explain, but, for me, just aiming a speely input device, or a Farspark chambre, or whatever you call it?.?.?." Anathem . Copyright © by Neal Stephenson . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Anathem by Neal Stephenson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
