ANATHEM
By Neal Stephenson
Anathem is a science-fiction fantasy set in a cosmos parallel to
our own where they manage things just a bit differently. For starters, the
intellectual classes have hived themselves away from the "saecular"
world and live together in "concents" or co-ed monasteries where the
chemically neutered "avouts" contemplate all fashion of physics and
metaphysics. The slight variation in the language reflects the fact that Arbre
isn't a world apart from ours as much as it is the same place, kind of,
occupying a different causal domain or "Hemn space" (what those on
Earth who follow such matters know as "configuration space"). These
spaces are not hermetically distinct. Indeed the novel's central premise or
"upsight," as expressed by one of the avout, is that "the Hylaean
Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across
worldtracks!"
Still here? Good.
Fresh of the exhausting triumph of his massive Baroque Trilogy,
bestselling author Neal Stephenson delves even deeper into religion, physics,
philosophy and theories of the mind with Anathem. But at heart it is still a
conventional space opera based on that hoariest of SF plots, "first
contact." Are the aliens aboard that orbiting mothership friend or foe? Or
both? Or neither? This time only the philosophers know for sure.
In other words, all you Stephenson fans out there still waiting
for the next Snow Crash, this is not an action novel. There is an erupting
volcano, a planet-destoying death ray called the "World Burner," and
even an elite team of space ninjas fighting in zero gravity, but most of the
book is spent in "dialog," a Socratic back-and-forth among the monks.
It is a testament to Stephenson's prodigious talent as a storyteller that this
is not as dull as it sounds, though at least one reader will admit to some
confusion as to what it all means. Apparently something like Plato's world of
pure forms (here called the Hylaean Theoric World or HTW) is acting as a kind of
directing intelligence over the slipstreaming narratives of the multiverse,
which we navigate among not through wormholes but by way of arcane mental
disciplines. And so: Enter the Geometers.
Still here? You are a persistent fid, aren't you?
Anathem will test that persistence. Even given the expansiveness
of the genre this is not a light read in any sense of the word. When you add in
the appendixes of lecture-style "calcas" and an invaluable glossary
for those less obvious Orthicisms like "hypotrochian transquaestiation,"
you're talking over 900 pages of world-building. And while the young narrator
Fraa Erasmas and his friends give it all a bit of an air of Hogwarts, most of it
is pretty dry theorizing in what not only seems like but is another language.
Nobody but Stephenson could make it work. But even genius has
its limitations.
Notes:
Review first published online June 29, 2009.
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