Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" Due In September

Alexander Rose writes "Neal Stephenson's new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008." Read Rose's complete posting for more information about the release of the book, which he describes as set "in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."

Urgh...

"a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle." Sounds horrific.

Re:Urgh...

You don't like Snow Crash? Get the fuck out of here. Your Slashdot license has been revoked.

Waiting for a review of the ending

I read Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash and thought both were great, except for the endings. I thought the endings were rushed, as if he spent a years carefully writing each novel until his publisher suddenly showed up at his door and said "Dude, you've got 24 hours to finish this novel." I'm waiting for a specific review of the ending of this one before I decide whether to buy.

Neal Stephenson doesn't DO endings.

The Diamond Age had the same problem.

Reading a Neal Stephenson novel is like strapping yourself into the back seat of a converted jet trainer to tour the Grand Canyon. For a lot of people, by the time they've gotten used to dodging pillars of rock at half the speed of sound and they're really enjoying the view the pilot flips over the rim and... that's all, tour's over.

I get used to the view pretty quick, and I've come to accept the endings, so I'll be picking up ANATHEM anyway.

GAH

Read Rose's complete posting for more information about the release of the book, which he describes as set "in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."

My god, I've gone cross-eyed.

Re:GAH

Sounds like steampunk Star Wars except that Han blasts Pennywise and Sex Pistols in the cockpit and occasionally makes out with Chewbacca. Not for the kiddies.

Edited for clarity and asshattery

...which he describes as set "in a [...] world"

There, that's better.

Re:GAH

A Canticle for Liebowitz is probably one of the top 20 or so true science fiction classics (as opposed to fantasy or weird) and is worth a read (and a reread).

Geez

in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."

Wow. I'm already bored.

less is more

I found out all I wanted to know from Amazon -- the book is 960 pages long. The guy still doesn't have an editor with the balls to say no. Until he finds one, I can't get too excited about a new Neal Stephenson novel.

Snow Crash was great. Cryptonomicon would have been great if he'd cut at least 300 pages of fluff. I didn't even bother with the Baroque books.

He's very self-indulgent as a writer.

Re:less is more

The guy still doesn't have an editor with the balls to say no

Sorry, no. He's got a publisher with the balls to let him write what he wants to, and willing to sell it to people who appreciate it. I would have missed any single paragraph removed from the Baroque Cycle, and remain grateful that he won whatever stare-down might have been necessary to get an editor or publisher to let him have it his way. It's wonderful work, and if you're in such a hurry to get back to your Wii, just limit yourself to comic books or something you can handle while in the bathroom. I hope that he doesn't give a moment's thought to lightening up. 960 pages? What's the big deal? Maybe for people with gnat-sized attention spans and shallow vocabularies. It's not meant to be fast - his stuff is meant to be savored.

Re:less is more

Was there some particular need to be a prick about this?

Maybe not. I guess I'm tired of people who see a long book (which they haven't even bothered to pick up!) and simply default to saying it, or the author, or editor have failed. It's what's wrong with a great deal of our culture these days, and speaks volumes (if you'll pardon the pun) about the diseased state of our collective attention span. It's why people can't get through a two-page science article and draw some useful conclusions. It's why people can't vote sensibly. It's why so much potentially great entertainment - in all media - is chasing its own tail down the drain, searching for the lowest common denominator. Spanking Neal Stephenson and his editors for the length of the Baroque Cycle is to utterly, completely miss the point of that piece of work (and indeed of Stephenson's purpose for writing it and his choice of style).

I loved Snow Crash, I think there were editing problems all over that thing.

Yup. Likewise with Cryptonomicon. By the time he got to the B.C., he'd come a long way, I think. Greatly improved. I'll always admire T.S. Elliot for saying, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time." Brevity - well used - can be a delight. But that isn't the only delight. People who don't like the Baroque Cycle probably couldn't make it through a Dorothy Dunnett novel, either (to say nothing of the series of them needed to actually tell a complete tale). It's a style one likes, or one does not. But not liking something meant to last you through many long evenings of reading doesn't mean that the author or his editor have somehow failed.

Learning to Read the Existing Millennium Clock

Bruce Sterling (coined the term "cyberpunk" for associate William Gibson's SF style that he imitated) promoted the Millennium Clock (Clock of the Long Now, from the Long Now Foundation) on his "eco-future design revolution" Viridian movement [wikipedia.org] mailing list. We discussed it at length, but everyone missed the point.

The #1 design problem in a Millennium Clock is how to be sure that people 10,000 years from now (and along the way) will be able to "read" the clock, make sense of the clock's striking. Knowing that it's a "clock", knowing that it struck before at regular intervals, that it will strike again. "How to tell the time?" is a problem more for the uncontrolled people the clock is designed to signal, than it is for a clock that can at least theoretically be controlled from its beginnings across millennia.

Mechanical failures or 100% success is irrelevant if people as far in the future from now as we are from shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, twice as distant as the people whose ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing is decipherable only by the most learned experts, can't recognize the clock enough that they know it's marking time.

So I proposed that we concentrate on that problem. After all, we've already got a giant, maintenance free, frictionless and durable clockwork flying around the sky every day. The Sun, Moon, Earth, planets and stars are all marking time every day. Their alignments at each year, century and millennium are evident to everyone on Earth, distinctive, and already "built". What we need to do to ensure our descendants can read any clock through the next 10,000 years is exactly the same task for inventing a mechanical clock we build and encode with time symbols, and for discovering how to use the existing "clock" (that humans have already used as timekeeper for our whole history).

Maybe we should indeed build some monuments pointing at the "clock". Maybe to indulge our current fetish for precision matter engineering in the service of information manipulation, we sould build precise models of the sky at each time the clock strikes. Maybe we should spread thousands of Volkswagen sized synthetic diamonds, into which glowing radioactive doped renderings of the sky at each "gong" are obvious to everyone. Perhaps with a "Rosetta Stone" embedded inside, showing how we presently represent those times at those gongs (eg. "00:00 January 1, 2000 AD") also embedded in there, the privilege of the builders. Perhaps we should launch satellites (redundant - 10,000 years is a long time, even in the near-vacuum of orbit), powered by solar panels, that laser down to some such markers, burning away debris that might cover them, but passing through the readable, transparent monument. Perhaps we should carve the sequence of images into a circle on the face of the Moon, so anyone can glance up and compare the century/millennia arrangements in the Lunar pictures to the sky framing it.

But building a clock that can be stolen, lost or broken, and which could easily become an unreadable enigma even if still available and moving in 10,000 years, is a distraction. In fact, our obsession with building that clock, rather than learning how to communicate with our distant descendants, shows just how important such a project is to its real goal: changing our naive approaches to longterm thinking. The failure of Version 1 of this Millennium Clock is a perfect expression of why we need to learn to devise a clock that succeeds.

We missed the 2000 AD launch of a clock that people will recognize striking in 12,000 AD (or whatever they call it then). Lucky for us, we have 992 years to figure out how to do it right before the next deadline for what could become its first consecutive strike, that 10 millennia hence people will still know was a "clock" that started "now".

Re:01999? 02008?

No, obviously since it starts with a zero it's in octal. Mmmmh.. except for some reason calc.exe doesn't like 8s and 9s when I try to punch these as octal numbers...

Re:01999? 02008?

its the Y10K bug

Re:01999? 02008?

Don't worry. It's just an in-joke for those who read _and_ understood the summary.

Re:Temporal sickness?

No, it makes perfect sense, the guy is just a visionary.

Currently we only think of 4 digit years, but the guy thinks out the box and has foreseen that one day, sooner or later, probably in a few millenniums, we will have 5 digit years, and that then just like we already put a bunch of zeros for years before the year 1000 we will one day put zeros for years before the year 10000!

And allow me to blow your mind by predicting that one day we will reach 100000 and that therefore we might as well start right now writing it 002008!

Re:Temporal sickness?

For that matter, shouldn't it be September 09, 02008? I mean, there will come a time when we need to use days higher than 9, people!

Re:Temporal sickness?

For that matter, shouldn't it be 0September 09, 02008?

There, fixed it for you!

Re:Temporal sickness?

WHOOOOOSH! Oh shit, and there we go again! Now I'm going to have to explain a dozen times again how I was being sarcastic.

000012 times??!

Re:The only question that really matters

Will he write an ending for it, or will it just sort of stop in mid-page?

Wait... Neal didn't write the final episode of The Sopranos, did he?

No, no... he wrote the secret alternate final episode where Tony sets up a data haven in East Orange, New Jersey in order to get at the Civil War gold hidden by steam powered robots that fled Sicily in 1860. He puts his son in charge, but A.J. whines like a bitch until even his own sister, Meadow, finally has enough and whacks him herself. And then there's a four hour monologue by the ghost of Big Pussy.

Re:The only question that really matters

Amen, brother. I can't figure out if Stephenson thinks it artistic or something to end his books like that. For me, it's just a sign of bad writing. There are all sorts of stuff you think are artsy until you improve your craft--and then you realize you were just excusing crap work under a label of "artistic."

For once, I'd like a Stephenson book with a decent ending. I think the only quasi-ending he has ever written might be the ending of the Baroque Cycle. But is that an ending or beating a subject matter to death so thoroughly that there is nothing left to say? ;-)

I say this all as a big fan. For me, his books are great right up until the end, where I am promised a very dissatisfying, unresolved end to the book. And for no good reason as near as I can tell. Doesn't stop me from reading them--but it also doesn't stop me from complaining either :-)

Re:The only question that really matters

What's wrong with the ending of Snow Crash? Do you really need spelled out what happened after that, like in a fairy tale? And if you do, I figure you find little enjoyment in most novels that were written after, say, 1870.

Re:The only question that really matters

As for me, Snow Crash is the only reason I buy any of his books.

I've bought every stinking thing Neal has ever written simply because he wrote Snow Crash, and I have this weird, vain hope that he might again someday write a book even half as brilliant. So I'm out a couple hundred bucks, and have a lot of disappointment sitting on shelves in my library, but I'll likely buy Anathem the day it comes out, too.

Just in case it's another Snow Crash. Please let it be another Snow Crash.

Climax without denouement

Stephenson's detractors are just pissy because Stephenson stops right after the climax and doesn't bother with a denouement. They're like women who complain that the guy just leaves them after he's gotten his rocks off, and doesn't stick around to cuddle so they can pick the pimples on his ass while he's dozing.