Anathem

[Dr. Ivor Yeti]

New Neal Stephenson just dropped into my hands....

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

It's been sitting on the kitchen table for two weeks. I really should read it, but I keep thinking about the Baroque cycle.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

At least I think I am.

What started out a strange novel about a different society became a wierd space time travel thingy.

It's a deep novel, deeper than I appreciate. Stephenson went to a lot of trouble to find new words for things we already had. Jeeley for telephone and speelycaptor for video camera. The end of the book has a glossary over thirty pages long. Which was why I was confused, because there were still so many pages left in the book when I finished. I'm used to books that have glossaries, but it's usually of place names and people's name, but not of new words for things I already know. If it's a sword, we could call it a sword, I think. I'm not buying into the whole immersive quality of the fiction. After the glossary, there was two chapters of how to solve some of the math problems posited in the book. Nothing I like better than bonus math problem chapter.

I'd say the book was 3/4 story and 1/4 physics and math discussion. At least I think it was physics. He changed all the terms, but I'm guessing and I'm probably wrong but it had a lot to do with quantum physics. Granted, I tuned out a lot when they started to lecture and have their theoric discussions. There were a lot of discussions, too about how to have dicussions. Yeeha.

The main guy, Erasmus is an avout who lives in a Math away from the Saeculars. Should I stop there? He's basically a monk in a monastery where they are devoted to science and learning. They are kept away from the rest of society. There are even different heirarchies in the Math. Some who've been there for ten years, some for a hundred and some for a thousand. There is no interaction between the sects. There is little interaction with the outside world. Once every ten years, the doors to the monastery do open and the outside world and the monastery world intermingle.

One of the Fra's or Brothers, Fra Orolo discover something in the sky that shouldn't be there. Just the fact he's seen it gets him kicked out of the Math. From this the rest of the adventures ensues. Other people are chosen to leave to help solve the problem of what's going on in space around the planet.

Now this exciting moment where something actually happens, occurs about page 100. Be patient. There's lot of talk about being in the Monastery. There's lot's of talk about problems and theorics. There's even a nascent love story. But you have to climb through a lot of jargon and odd words to get to that point. Maybe I'm learning how to read the book for the first hundred pages before I'm actually told the story. And one of the problems is that Erasmus isn't on the main story track. The real story is told through inference of what the others are doing. He spends a lot of time wandering and getting told what the others are doing. He's not a big doer.

I think someone else needs to read the book so I can compare notes and to see how wrong I am about this book that was chosen top-ten by the critics. But then again I can't really recommend anybody reading this book.