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Average Customer Rating:

Needs more explosions!!!

Customer Rating:

Mr. Stephenson just doesn't get it. I mean - I have read, like, ALL his books now and this is just another one that went on sooooo long it ate up like three contiguous days of my entire life! First of all there are not enough explosions. Ok - sure there are some - but where is the specially modified 747 with super cool secret agent stuff? Where is the stubbly faced hero charging across the desert in search of Incan gold? Hah! There isn't one! Instead all we get is a monk - who lives in a "concent" (which is like, a monastery! - but Stephenson obviously realises his book is boring and short of explosions [and exclamation points!] so he has to come up with a totally impenetrable language of his own where "sib" is a relative and "jeejaw" is a mobile phone - it took me AGES to work it out.) Ok - so the monk does have a kind of a nano-tech cloak and an orb that he can do cool things with... but ANYWAY - so this monk has an adventure of sorts which I won't bore you with here, but if you've read any of Stephenson's other stuff you can probably guess at the scope of it - I mean who does this guy think he is? and who has time for this stuff?! I don't want a lot of three (or more) dimensional characters I actually care about. I don't want 800 pages of romance, humour, aliens, lost temples, biotechnology, skulduggery and Pythagoras - OH SORRY - I mean "Adrakhones" theorem. And I certainly don't want to ponder the nature of consciousness, and the relationship between academia and religion while I'm at it! I mean I laughed so hard at one part I WET MY PANTS! Like... Who's going to pay for that?? Anyway - the only thing I can say is thankfully it'll be another 3 years or so before Stephenson can inflict this nonsense on us again. I'm going back to the airport to get my next book.

Hard going	Customer Rating:
Reading this is a bit of a slog. Very slow to get going, the characters don't really come alive. Not one of his best.

Another world

Customer Rating:

The story in Anathem takes place on a kind of alternative earth ("Arbre") where sholars ("Avouts") have sealed themselves off in closterlike milieus ("Concent") from the outside society ("The Saecular"). We soon learn that this has gone on for thousands of years, and that civilisation has developed, flourished and degenerated several times. Only on very rare occasions ("Apert") do the doors to the Concents for ten days and it's maths open for the saeculars. We follow fraa Erasmas, a young avout in the Concent of Saunt Edhard in year 3689, after the so called Reconstitution, awaiting the new Apert when he will meet his family for the first time in ten years. The scope widens as several avouts are called on by the Saecular to help solve a problem or crisis. And a strange object has been spotted on the sky... The word "Anathem" refers to when an avout is cast out from the Concent. Some reviewers have been irritated by the use of alternative words in Anathem and even refused to read the book to its end. I would say that the frustration diminishes after about 100+ pages, but before that the reader has to go to the glossary. But if you read the whole book you will find that these alternative words have a clever function in the story, besides giving it a certain flavor. Also, many of them could almost be real alternatives: "speely" for movie, "theorics" for theoretical work, "syndev" (synthetic device) for computer and so on. The book is too long though, at 890 pages. I found the first 200-300 pages very good. Here Stephenson introduces the scenario with the Concents and the Saecular, and gives hints of the history of Arbre. The part when Erasmas goes out in the saecular world to visit his family, and is confronted with it's vulgarity, is good. Then a couple of hundred pages follow that are more action-based, and I think that part could have been shortened a lot. The last 300 pages are a little uneven. Dialogues between the scholars are quite interesting (but sometimes longwinded), and here we are introduced to a theory of alternative realities with pieces of the philosophy of Plato. The characters seems a little flat, but this is usual in idea-driven SF and Fantasy and did not bother me too much. I had only read Snow Crash before this, and Anathem is written in a more slow paced style and not so crammed with cool high-tech gadgets (but they appear here too a few hundred pages in). Also, as an alternative Earth scenario Anathem opens to reflections and questions about our own world and society. For example: should we let the scientists and scholars rule the world instead of the incompetent politicians (the "panjandrums" as they are called in the book), or is it better to have the best minds sealed inside their own cities without access to high technology? All in all, a fascinating and well written scenario, a good plot that weaves all parts together nicely, but too long. 4 stars.

Rewarding reading if you persevere with it

Customer Rating:

Anathem was a complete surprise to me. I had deliberately avoided reading anything about the book before I bought it, willing to trust the author to come up with another excellent novel comparable to Snow Crash, The Diamond Age or Cryptonomicon. After reading the first 50 or 60 pages, I was wondering if I'd wasted my money. I don't know what I was expecting, but it wasn't this. The many invented words peppered throughout the text didn't help either - you can immediately decipher many of them from context they're used in, but it is annoying to do it as often as Anathem requires. However, I kept going, and by the time I'd gotten through the first 100 pages or so I found myself quite enjoying it. After another couple of hundred pages I was reluctant to put it down, and eventually ended up reading the last third of the book in a single session. What I would say is that once you become familiar with the dialect used by the characters and get past the relatively slow opening chapters, Anathem becomes a far more engaging and interesting book. Sci-fi action sequences are interspersed with frequent philosophical or metaphysical discussions between various characters, which may of course not be to the liking of every reader, but I found it both interesting and entertaining. Now that I've finished the book I am planning to wait a few weeks and then read it again, as I suspect that reading the opening chapters will be a far better experience the second time around.

Stephenson's best yet

Customer Rating:

I've recently read Anathem, and I enjoyed it immensely. I'm a Neal Stephenson fan and have almost all of his books, and in my view this is his best and deepest yet. For most of its considerable length it reads like a fantasy, yet by the end it's turned into something quite like hard sci-fi. Yes, it is long and involved, and you need to be prepared to devote considerable time to it. I was lucky - I took it on a cruise with several uninterrupted days at sea; perfect reading time. Stylistically it consists of a single first-person narrative thread, from the point of view of Fraa Erasmus, a monk/student in a Concent, which seems like a cross between a monastery and a university. Because the narrative is in the first person, there is only one narrative thread, and I preferred this to the multi-threading that he used in Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. Don't get me wrong, I greatly enjoyed these other books, but there were times when having got immersed in (say) Randy Waterhouse's life it was a wrench, initially, to be suddenly taken back to Laurence Waterhouse 50 years earlier - then I'd get immersed in Laurence's life and eventually the same thing would happen in reverse. So Anathem is in some ways an easier read. The depiction of Fraa Erasmus' life in the Concent takes up the bulk of the first third or so of the book, i.e. about 300 pages. Initially I did find these chapters hard to understand, but the glossary is very helpful - indeed, essential. I can see Stephenson's reason for putting all that stuff in a glossary; if it weren't Erasmus would have to keep finding another character to give a paragraph of background exposition to (for the reader's benefit) every page or so. The description of Erasmus' life, and the society - that probably ought to be societies - in which he lives, is engrossing and finely detailed. By page 300 we know this man and his world pretty thoroughly. At which point Stephenson starts lobbing hand-grenades at our hero as his life is turned upside down and it seems that all his certainties are challenged. How he resolves these challenges, and the adventures he has doing so (yes, it is quite an action-packed story in many places) makes up the rest of the book. It is necessary to understand the philosophical musings in the main text, the glossary and the appendices (the Tutorials) about alternative cosmoses (there are some similarities here with Snow Crash - the need to understand the different types of language that is developed in that book). It seems that there are alternative cosmoses of two different types: firstly, those that separated from each other in the first millionth or billionth of a second or so that the universe existed ('alternatives'), and secondly those alternative futures or paths that are constantly being generated by each separate decision by everyone in each of the first type of separate cosmos ('narratives'). It turns out that it is possible to travel between alternative cosmoses, with difficulty, and when you arrive the difficulties continue: the air is breathable (just), but processes that depend on more complex chemistry, e.g.digestion, just aren't compatible. And it also appears that some very old, very knowledgeable and very experienced Fraas can perceive, experience, and even select from, multiple narratives within their alternative. There seem to be at least two different endings to the book - Erasmus is in different narratives - and I think that the main protagonists are following separate narratives at the book's climax. his is complex stuff. Indeed, one question I was left with was this: at the conclusion, is Erasmus in the same narrative that he started in? Has he been able to select, in some sub-conscious way, the narrative that he will occupy, because it has a satisfactory (for him) ending? It's certainly a big book and a challenging one, but it fully repays the effort required. This is the best, most detailed and most thought-provoking 'alternative future' novel I've ever read, starting with the fact that (despite early appearances) most of the book isn't set in an alternative future of the traditional kind. Five stars!