Anathem

Last night I finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. Normally by time I finish a book I have a reasonably good idea what I want to say about it on my blog, but for some reason I'm struggling to review this one. It's not that I didn't like it, because I did like the book and as I was reading it I often found myself thinking thank goodness I'm back to reading scifi (or speculative fiction as Stephenson likes to call this one). I think the struggle to summarize comes from two things. One there is just a lot of stuff in the book (which is partially because it is long). The other is that in typical Stephenson style it would take a while just to describe the starting point and from there it just gets crazier and crazier. Well, time to stop making excuses and say something about the book.

The story is set up in such a way that he can have several characters go off on a discussion of science, math, philosophy, or religion at just about any point, which he takes advantage of often. Because so much time is spent on exploring philosophy and science I think some of the other aspects suffer a bit. Normally at the end of a book like that I really care about the characters, but in this one I didn't have the same attachment. There were a couple of huge adventures in the book which were cool, but Stephenson does action/adventure/humor better in his other books. But the technical description of the last adventure is very cool and I think the religion that seeks salvation through recursion is hilarious.

He does pick out some very interesting areas of science and philosophy to discuss and takes them to some very cool conclusions. In addition the structure of society in the book is an interesting take on the interaction between scientists and society. While I didn't know much of the philosophy, I did know pretty much all of the science which on one hand may have made it less interesting since I didn't need his science explanations (I definitely needed the philosophy ones), but on the other hand was nice because it made it easier to separate the fact from fiction and speculation. The book is nothing like the Da Vinci Code, except that it does use a combination of fact, fiction and hypothesis without telling you which is which. But at the end of the book it does give a website where he helps sort it out and gives a bibliography.

One immediately apparent aspect of the book is that it uses a lot of made up words, as Randall mentions. It does have a glossary in the back so he doesn't force you to figure it all out on your own. But I think that it doesn't take too long to get a feel for the words and mostly stop noticing them. I think they get in the way a lot less than the ones in A Clockwork Orange. I sort of see how the made up words fit into the story, but I'm not totally convinced it was necessary. What I did enjoy about them is he renamed all of the science he was talking about so it was fun to identify the correct names.

In most of Neal Stephenson's other books he tells the story from a variety of different perspectives and of course they all come together in some way throughout the book. But this one is told from the perspective of a single character. I really like the effect he can produce by telling the story through the eyes of multiple characters, but given where this story goes I think it is clear that it had to be written from a single point of view.

I guess I came up with some stuff to say. As I think through it I really would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in philosophy and metaphysics. If you already think you might read the book STOP HERE (seriously I think a lot of the fun of the book is seeing him build up and stretch some ideas so it is best not to know where he is going with it). Otherwise here are a few SPOILERS (although if you're not going to read the book not sure why you would care, oh well).



A lot of the science/philosophy/scifi in the book is about the multiple universes view of quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics things occupy multiple states at once, until they are observed then they settle into a single state. The multiple universes view is that each time an observation is made multiple universes branch off and in each one a different one of the possibilities happens. What you observe just depends on which of the tracks you are now in (hence the need to tell the story from a single perspective). Up to here is a combination of fact and speculation from respected scientists. Where Stephenson takes it is what if someone came up with a way to occupy multiple tracks at once.

Another recurring theme is the idea that certain fundamentals of math are true independent of the human mind, or even our universe (prime numbers were prime long before humans came along) and so maybe they occupy a universe of their own that only contains things like fundamental theorems and proofs. And if that's true is there somehow a way our brain pulls information from that universe? Sounds crazy, but up to here is actually from Godel. Then if that's true could there be a whole hierarchy (or other linked list type structure) of universes goes from the theoretical perfect on down and ideas leak universe to universe down the hierarchy? Then after that is where Stephenson really makes it extra weird - what if you could travel up the hierarchy.

In addition to the philosophy and science the end of the book involves several characters going into space and getting into an alien spaceship. The technology they use to get up there undetected is very cool and partially based on some real research. The alien spaceship also has an interesting design that he describes. And for the more traditional adventure several characters have to make their way across the north pole (partially by foot) to get to the other side of the world.

He also broaches the subject of what's after Diamond Age (nanotechnology) - altering the nucleus of atoms by changing some of the fundamental, but seemly arbitrary, constants of physics. The idea of altering the constants is pretty crazy. But while there are some constants that seem to have a certain value for a reason, there are others that seem like they could just as easily have other values. Lots of those values would cause the universe to just fall apart, but there should be others that make a different, but stable universe.

Well, that's a few paragraphs - as you could imagine with 900 pages there's a lot more he discusses and he has a lot more room for better explanations.