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A review by jbliv
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
5.0
It's been a while since I have been so astounded by a novel, so moved to heights of intellectual astonishment. While I loved Snow Crash and liked Cryptonomicon, I checked out of the Baroque Trilogy. But Anathem puts Stephenson back on the map. He riffs on so many concepts, from philosophy through religion onto lots of science, that during the reading, and especially after, you can't he;p but feel giddy at the mental gymnastics on display. And yet I found it easy to follow along, relishing each twist and turn and discovery.
The novel starts with the fascinating concept of a society in which science and its study have been split from the regular "saecular" world and sequestered in compounds, or maths. People enter them as "tenners" but can move on to become "hundreders" or "thousanders" (yes, think about it). For the tenners, the gates to the outside world only open every 10 years, at which time the maths can mingle with the saeculars. The concept of a world so frightened by technology that they place it behind walls to be studied in 10, 100, and 1,000 year increments was utterly fascinating to me. And that is but the setup.
From there, Stephenson takes you on a journey totally unexpected and utterly surprising at every turn, in a world both shockingly different from and yet eerily similar to our own. Not a single revelation was what I expected, and yet each was pitch perfect. He mixes the aforementioned concepts along with space travel, evolution, and quantum mechanics and makes it all fit and flow and jolt with awe.
Anathem is a book I will treasure and read again, and again. It even has its own Wiki: check it out at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Anathem_Wiki.
The novel starts with the fascinating concept of a society in which science and its study have been split from the regular "saecular" world and sequestered in compounds, or maths. People enter them as "tenners" but can move on to become "hundreders" or "thousanders" (yes, think about it). For the tenners, the gates to the outside world only open every 10 years, at which time the maths can mingle with the saeculars. The concept of a world so frightened by technology that they place it behind walls to be studied in 10, 100, and 1,000 year increments was utterly fascinating to me. And that is but the setup.
From there, Stephenson takes you on a journey totally unexpected and utterly surprising at every turn, in a world both shockingly different from and yet eerily similar to our own. Not a single revelation was what I expected, and yet each was pitch perfect. He mixes the aforementioned concepts along with space travel, evolution, and quantum mechanics and makes it all fit and flow and jolt with awe.
Anathem is a book I will treasure and read again, and again. It even has its own Wiki: check it out at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Anathem_Wiki.