Well. Wow. Where to begin.
Anathem is a book of ideas. It is intellectual, complex, and amazingly ambitious. It is not like anything else I have read. It is a science/philosophy thriller, which sounds really dry and serious, but is much more engrossing than that. Anathem is both funny and fun, if philosophy and quantum theory is your idea of fun. But reading it requires attention and almost feels like work. It is the kind of book that makes me feel dull, and 100 pages in I was already thinking that I should probably really start over, taking notes, and perhaps read up on some philosophy before I do that.
Brief plot summary: On the planet Arbre, scientists live segregated from ordinary people, in convent-like places. The flow of information in both directions is strictly controlled, as is the scholars’ use of technology. This separation was put in place a few thousand years ago after some vaguely described Terrible Events, in order to limit the power of scientists’ ideas, and the risk of dangerous technologies being developed and used.
The convent doors are opened only once per year (or once per 10, 100 or 1000 years, for different parts of the convent). So the scholars inside their walled communities think and theorize, and watch cities come and go outside their walls over thousands of years, and civilization rising and falling and rising again.
Around one of these door-opening times, something happens in the skies of Arbre that changes everything. Some scholars get busy speculating on what exactly happened, and figuring out how it will affect their world – using precious few observations, and their impressive deductive abilities. Events grow, some scientists are even called forth from their convents in order to work together, and finally grand things happen.
This is all told through many philosophical debates and entire chapters filled with theoretical discussions that are crucial to the plot – you can’t skip any of it and still be able to follow the action. It is a Socratic novel. Stephenson manages to cover several major strands of the history Western thought from the ancient Greeks onwards (the history of philosophy on Arbre is similar enough to Earth’s to be clearly recognizable, but obfuscated just enough to make it an effort to match up the two) as well as some interesting parts of quantum theory (and I do mean theory, there are no “quantum wormhole warp drives” in this book).
To quote another reviewer: Anathem is “a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness” (Strange Horizon Reviews). An Amazon reviewer said it felt like a novelization of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can sympathize with that, too.
It was a wonderful if somewhat daunting book. If you haven’t read any other books by Stephenson, don’t start with this one – it might be too big a shock. Which doesn’t in any way mean that it isn’t good – you just need a warm-up first. Stephenson’s scope and ambition have definitely grown over the years but luckily the page count has come down since the Baroque Cycle. (This book is a mere 900 pages, plus appendices with more science if you feel you didn’t get enough.)
Amazon UK, Amazon US.