Anathem 356
Max Tardiveau writes "I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Anathem. I was awaiting it with some anticipation because I absolutely loved Stephenson's best-known novels: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon. One of Stephenson's non-fiction pieces, called In the beginning was the command line, simply wowed me when I read it. The man can write. A few years ago, I got really excited when I heard that he was writing a whole cycle of novels (the Baroque cycle). But I read the first book of the cycle — Quicksilver — and I was somewhat disappointed, so I skipped the rest of the cycle. I realize that many people enjoyed these novels, but I was hoping that Stephenson would get back his old style and inspiration. So, when Anathem was announced, I was full of anticipation — was this going to be the one? Would he find his mark again?" Keep reading for Max's impressions of Anathem
The first impression of this book is its heft---at 935 pages in the hardback edition, you'll need strong arms, or a good support, just to read the thing. But otherwise, this is a sharply printed, well-bound book. The official retail price is $30, but you can find it for around $24, less if you buy it used.
| Anathem | |
| author | Neal Stephenson |
| pages | 935 |
| publisher | HarperCollins |
| rating | 6 |
| reviewer | Max Tardiveau |
| ISBN | 9780061474095 |
| summary | Action and philosophical exploration in an Earth-like future |
Anathem is set on a fictional planet called Arbre, which is very similar to Earth, in a fairly distant future. Much has happened, as we discover during the course of the story. World wars, revolutions, climate change, etc... During all these tribulations, religious orders have provided a certain amount of continuity, and have pursued theoretical scientific research. They still live like monks and nuns, even though there are occasional glimpses of highly advanced technology (materials, genetics, etc...).
In a monastery, ruled by an ancient Discipline, our hero is a young monk who is inquisitive, smart but not brilliant, and brave but not foolhardy. We see most of the action through his eyes.
Not much happens in the first 100 pages or so, which can be a bit trying, but soon we learn that mysterious events are in progress, and the narrative picks up the pace after that. I can't say much more without spoilers.
As usual with Stephenson, there are many neat ideas, and a few mind-twisters. The writing is usually clear, the action can be stimulating, the characters can be engaging. And yet...
It's not that Anathem isn't interesting. It's just that it feels ... self-indulgent. It's a 935-page novel that should be 600 pages or less. Perhaps Stephenson's fame and success make it difficult for editors to stand up to him. That would be his loss (and ours). A good editing job would have turned a good novel into one that is worthy of him.
Why do I say that?
First, the story is replete with made-up words that add very little to the story, the atmosphere, the narration, or anything at all. They just stand in the way. I'm not opposed to a judicious use of this device, but here it feels gratuitous and pointless and, yes, at times irritating.
I know it's not supposed to be Earth, but at least half of this gobbledygook could have been skipped without any detrimental effect. I'm afraid I have to invoke Munroe's Law, which states: "The probability of a book being good is inversely proportional to the number of made-up words it contains". In fact, XKCD had a strip about this specifically aimed at Anathem.
There is a lot of dialog and action that adds little or nothing to the narrative. One feels, at times, like Stephenson is filling time. This is where a good editor should step in and tighten things up. One senses that the entire book was published as delivered by the author, with no critical paring, no condensing. I'm sure I'm wrong about that, but the feeling is there nonetheless.
We meet a very large cast of characters, many of whom seem unnecessary. Names appear and disappear, and the reader is left to ponder why they were introduced at all. Is there some ulterior motive? Will they have some sort of meaning later in the book? But alas, most don't, and we feel like we have invested time and emotion in vain.
There are also a lot of uncompleted story lines and plot holes. Perhaps the novel is simply too ambitious, and tries to broach too many topics. Time and time again, Stephenson introduces an interesting concept, or an intriguing subplot, only to drop it without any follow-up. This is most unsatisfying.
This is a surprise, because I am under the impression that Stephenson's audience is in large part made of people like me — somewhat geeky, interested in science, and therefore prone to paying close attention to details of the story. In this respect, this book simply fails. The reader is left with so many open questions, so many unfinished lines of inquiry, that the whole thing feels unfinished, even rushed. The ending is bland and appallingly predictable, worthy of a Bruce Willis action movie--harsh words, I know, but I am not using them lightly.
I was expecting more intellectual stimulation, a significantly faster pace, and more storytelling rigor from Stephenson, and I have to admit to being disappointed. The book is certainly not without redeeming qualities, I was just expecting quite a bit more.
I would not recommend this book as an introduction to Stephenson. If you're a real fan, you'll probably read it no matter what, but otherwise you can safely skip it. If you've never read anything by Stephenson, then you owe it to yourself to read the three novels I mentioned at the beginning of this article. They are truly excellent. Anathem, sadly, is not cut of the same cloth.
You can purchase Anathem from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
2nd derivative of plot (Score:5, Interesting)
*Possible Spoiler* An Actual Ending!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Unlike every other Stephenson novel - this one has a real conclusion!
While I'm a big lover of Stephenson's work, I've felt like in his other novels the end is just hacked off without literary justification. This time, Stephenson provides us with a satisfying conclusion. It sort of blew my mind.
As to the rest of the novel, I enjoyed it overall. But I felt like Stephenson did fall prey to the trap of letting his characters discusses theoretics overmuch at the expense of some narrative.
Also, I'm not sure that forcing readers to learn so much invented vocabulary for the sake of his imaginary world was entirely worth it. Sure, there might not be a word in the English language that perfectly encapsulates the idea he was trying to communicate, but most writers are forced to overcome this obstacle every day, and do so without making up new words. It added a layer of complication to Anathem that was unnecessarily daunting.
So, read the book if you're already into Stephenson, you'll probably love it. But - as the review said - you'd be better off falling in love with the man's writing somewhere else.
Very disappointing review. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, some of Stephenson's books were, IMHO, outstanding. Snow Crash was great. I even thought his first novel, "The Big U", was hilarious (apparently unlike many others... it did not sell well or get good reviews).
After reading this, I doubt very much that I will bother reading Anathem.
But after Cryptonomicon, I was reluctant to dive into the Baroque Cycle books. Too much prose, for too little effect. Stephenson would do well to return to the more terse writing of his earlier years.
you'll need strong arms... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The question is... (Score:3, Interesting)
His early books were pretty good, but I some time while he was writing Cryptonomicon he became a "fan" of his subject matter instead of a student of it. Heinlein had the same problem... after Stranger in a Strange Land his books turned into well-written fan fiction.
Completely Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I'm concerned, the reviewer's complaints really only apply to the first third of the book. Yeah, he made up a bunch of words, which was a bit off putting. Also, there was a very prolonged rising action where several hundred pages essentially just introduced the world; the actual plot proper didn't start until maybe page 200 or 300.
And that's where all my complaints stopped. I found the actual plot thoroughly compelling. I found the world very interesting and all of the characters deep and quirky. Towards the end of the book I couldn't put it down. Once I got through all the introductory material, I thought this was one of the most entertaining books I've read in a good while, and I read a lot.
Better than Quicksilver, not as good as others... (Score:3, Interesting)
I feel like the XKCD comic has somewhat unfairly focused the discussion on the book's invented words. While I find it frustrating in some fantasy novels, half of the charm of Anathem for me was learning the rules of this new society- which is what happens in the first hundred pages.
What frustrated me was that, having set up this immersive, complicated world, focused on scholars and their ideas, Stephenson ended up telling a fairly conventional (if exciting) story for the remainder of the book, essentially forgetting about many of the internal conflicts of the monks about halfway through, rather than letting that drive the action. It's as if he doesn't know whether to make this book look more like Eco's The Name of the Rose or a retread of Snow Crash.
Nonetheless, I enjoyed Anathem immensely, and I couldn't finish the Quicksilver series (dropped out halfway through System of the World). I feel like this book was more of a return to Stephenson's writing in the Diamond Age / Cryptonomicon era. It's not his best, but I'd recommend it over Quicksilver.
This is Neal's Best Book Yet (Score:5, Interesting)
I read this book on the plane on the way into theatre.
This is Neal's best book yet. His work is high concept, intellectually challenging stuff that winds up educating as much as it entertains, and past Stephanson works have wobbled back and forth between action and education. This one gets it exactly right. It starts slow, but it has to, as there are a lot of new concepts to introduce and a whole different world to paint in before we can get going with the main story. As we learn and gain confidence with the new vocabulary (and there is a lot of it, although it is cleverly constructed to provide semantic clues as to what it means in "our world") he builds and builds on what he has already contructed, and before you know it, we are fully immersed in the culture of Arbre - at which points the story takes off and you can't put the damn book down.
And unlike some of his other work (Diamond Age?) this book ends strong.
I love how this book isn't written to the lowest common denominator. I love that it is willing to tackle things like philosophy, the nature of conciousness, the ramifications of the "many worlds" theory of the cosmos, thinking "long view" with people who only live a short time, and many other subjects, while still wrapping the whole thing up in an entertaining yarn.
After I finished, I felt smarter. How many other authors can pull that off?
DG
Re:have a problem with made up words? (Score:4, Interesting)
For other books, where they make up new names for periods of time, like "cycle" instead of "day" or make up a new word that replaces "hour", there's no reason to do so. If an author makes up a word, let's say "klek", and then defines it as "60 minutes", they've lost a lot of credibility with me and made it so that I'll almost certainly never recommend that book to anyone else again.
My wife had an interesting observation (Score:3, Interesting)
Neal Stephenson is a writer who simply adores a shaggy dog story.
I think he writes for the love of being clever; cleverness for its own sake, whether or not it leads to anything. Contrast this to other, even more wildly inventive authors such as Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, where absurdity seems to have more of a purpose, which is to make the characters struggles more sympathetic. Everyone can put himself in Arthur Dent's place, because while we might be a little self-absorbed, we're surrounded by even more aggressively self-absorbed people. In the case of Terry Pratchett, we have more pure fantasy; we can imagine ourselves to be stronger and cleverer when faced with the absurdity and corruption of everyday life than we are.
Stephenson's characters seem to me a lot less sympathetic -- not that the have to be. He seems a lot less interested in something you might call "the human condition"; more interested in ideas, places, and things than people perhaps. Cryptonomicon is perhaps the most appealing of his novels that I have read, especially the Goto Dengo character. His survival story is immediately understandable and compelling.
I'm over Stephanson (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Can you have read the same book? (Score:3, Interesting)
I definitely think his style is maturing, and I completely agree with the statement about the ending. Either he ended it in media res or it wound down in a particularly boring fashion...Neither is fully satisfying.
Anathem built slowly, something I think was required for the vast amount of world building he had to pull off, and then he took all that he'd built and blitzed it for 400 pages of crazy.
It's the first real piece of old-school intellectual sci-fi I've read in a while that didn't feel shallow or contrived. Hats off, I'd love to see more of the same.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Touche! As a writer, I find it hard to avoid making up vocabulary. Especially being a student of etymology, some words are so rooted in the cultures and it's easy to forget that no one other than yourself -cares- if their history is removed because you're not writing about earth.
Similarly, it's simple enough to find analogous cultures here on earth and mutate their languages to suit. A decidedly oriental-type culture may include permutated Mandarin or Canton words, whereas an exceptionally Norse culture may end up looking like something out of Tolkien. It's a very useful trick that not enough ficton writers use.
Unfortunately, long windedness is also a common mistake in writers, whether you're new to the business or experienced. Having competed in NaNoWriMo this year for the first time, I can certainly appreciate the need to meet certain benchmarks for word-count, but if it's fluff, there's no way around it; it's still fluff. I've known writers to intentionally blast the backs out of their typewriters just to get to the next 10k mark in their word count, because of payment arrangements with publishers as well. It's uncommon, but perhaps good ol' Neal is labouring under his paycheck a bit too much.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I found the first quarter of the book a little slow...but after that, I couldn't read it fast enough to keep up. I obsessed about the book and ended up getting the audio book as well so I could listen to it in the car to and from work!
It is an epic book, and it is a memetic masterpiece, since many people are big fans of this book have slowly been infiltrating it's words into the english language...
Don't overlook the Anathem WIKI at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Anathem_Wiki [wikia.com]
And if you like the music, you can get it via Neal's site: http://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem/music.htm [nealstephenson.com]
ttyl
Farrell
Re:2nd derivative of plot (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if anyone's put together a Fame-to-Wordcount algorithm? When I started writing, I could get through about two pages a day. Now, if I'm on my game, I can easily write 10k in a night and had my record set at nearly 20k - which amounts to about 15-25 pages.
I imagine should I ever get published and suddenly have ALL my time free, I may begin to aim for the Rober J Sawyer law of 8 pages per day. However, when you're really in the groove, it's easy to get overextended. If your deadlines are roughly one book per year, and success means more liesure time in which to produce, the deadline and the volume produced cease to match up pretty swiftly. Editting your own work is all well and good, but I hate cutting scenes I'm proud of, and the better I get, the more I've got to be proud of. Publishers have their own work to decide whether what excites me realy belongs in mass market.
Anathem is Literature (Score:2, Interesting)
Stephensen has been stepping incrementally closer to being a literature author with each book he's written. Snow crash is fluff, Cryptonomicon is pretty deep, and the Baroque Cycle is a master work (in the original sense). Anathem is his first post master work book.
Many posters have made the claim: "It would be better if you removed X", for various values of X. What is instructive is that not everyone agrees on X. Stephensen had a lot to say in this book, on many topics.
I'll address a few things here, but this list isn't exhaustive:
* Unresolved plot elements are not bad. Only in very bad fiction does absolutely everything happen in service of the ultimate confrontation. Some things just happen, and we learn about the characters in how they deal with them.
* Characters exist for themselves, not the plot. If every character was there 'for something', this would be a (bad) video game, but it isn't, its a book.
* The ultimate conclusion of the book is that intellectuals have a duty to the world to remain engaged. The first half (roughly) of the book exists to convince you that being segregated would be lovely, while the second half drives towards the negative consequences of that approach. The character development and the plot both work to develop this theme over time.
Re:have a problem with made up words? (Score:3, Interesting)
I generally agree with your statement regarding making up words. Typically, it is a sign of sloppy cliche thinking and someone trying to dress it up in semantics.
But I think you have to recognize that depicting a believable future sub-culture in a novel that you want to stand the test of time - that's a special case. You need to use language that won't become dated over time - eliminating the possibility of using current jargon. You also cannot use standard English because it misses conveying how differences of this future sub-culture. So, you have to make something up - particularly because standard concepts don't tend to cover what authors are trying to convey in this context.
Clockwork Orange is an excellent example of the technique. Even novels like Stranger in a Strange Land do it with some degree of success - and grok is a good addition to the language. On the other hand, using a cliched abortion of a word like Islamocfascist, deserves the limited lifespan it gets. It's a fine line, and we won't know whether authors that attempt it like Neal - whether they walked it successfully for a decade or two.
Re:Halfway through the book, and ... (Score:3, Interesting)
If you like sci-fi, you owe it to yourself to read The Diamond Age.
As a coincidence I finished The Diamond Age this morning. I also highly recommend it. It has some slow bits in which I wondered where the story was going, but all of them had redeeming purposes and I was not disappointed for long.
However I'm a bit disappointed by this review of Anathem because it sounds suspiciously like I'd agree with it. I base this assertion largely on this passage:
I am under the impression that Stephenson's audience is in large part made of people like me - somewhat geeky, interested in science, and therefore prone to paying close attention to details of the story. In this respect, this book simply fails. The reader is left with so many open questions, so many unfinished lines of inquiry, that the whole thing feels unfinished, even rushed.
I'm exactly that sort of reader. I pay close attention to details and am interested in seeing them be developed. Snow Crash and The Diamond Age definitely reward the reader for paying attention. The dead ends the reviewer describes would ruin such a book for me.
Also, at least a couple people above mention that the first 100 pages are a waste. That reminds me very much of Snow Crash, the beginning of which made me wonder why I'd spent my hard-earned cash on a book about a pizza delivery man in the future and his unlikely friendship with a girl who skates behind cars; it took some time before I understood why these two characters are worth following, and why the world they live in is worthy of having a novel set in it. The Diamond Age, too, is a little slow to start and at times seems to be aimless (one of the first characters to be introduced dies almost immediately). While I haven't read this new book, it strikes me from the Anathem reviews and from the two books I've read that Stephenson invests much effort in showing you around his worlds after his books start, rather than thrusting you into some meaningful action, and I get the impression that while he occasionally manages to make this work, sometimes he doesn't, and that Anathem is in the latter category. Rather a shame, because the man is gifted.
Protractors (Score:2, Interesting)
That line, and everything after that point, made that book worth reading. It was frankly uninteresting until that it was suddenly made clear that the next 500 pages would involve defeating the opponent using applied and weaponised platonic epistemology.
I agree with the review to some extent, but having read the book three times at this point, I put this up with Snow Crash as an example of what Stephenson can do. Now can someone make a mini-series or movie out of his books already!
Yes, I wrote the TVTropes.org entry of Anathem and I stole some of it.
Litany of the Long Sun (Score:5, Interesting)
I agree that it's a hell of a good book, but to be honest, it's extremely similar to Gene Wolfe's Litany of the Long Sun. I'm not sure whether Stephenson had read Wolfe's book and it stuck in his unconscious for a while before he wrote this one, or whether it's just zeitgeist, but the similarities are too many to not note:
In Gene Wolfe's Litany of the Long Sun, Patera Silk, a young "cleric" from a science-based "religion" that has outlasted governments for generations, has to go forth into the world outside, and becomes an important chess piece on a global scale.
In Stephenson's Anathem, Fraa Erasmus, a young "cleric" from a science-based "religion" that has outlasted governments for generations, has to go forth into the world outside, and become an important chess piece on a global scale.
Fraa = Patera ... and so on.
Suur = Matera
Avout = Augur
Arbre = Whorl
Math = Manteion
I do not think it's plagiarism, but the similarities are so great that I'm fairly certain that anyone who has read Wolfe's book can't help but think that this is a very close relative.
And while Stephenson might be more popular these days, I still think Wolfe is the better writer. Perhaps they're not as engaging, but I find that his books stands up to re-reading more than Stephenson's novels.
Anyhow, I recommend that people read both. They're very similar, yet different. Where Stephenson has more of a technical point of view, Wolfe appears to me to have a deeper psychological insight, and characters with more grit to them. Again, read both.