Book: Anathem

[liv]

Author: Neal Stephenson

Details: (c) 2008 Neal Stephenson; Pub Atlantic Books 2009; ISBN 978-0-857-89048-1

Verdict: Anathem has some lovely ideas unfortunately buried in verbiage.

Reasons for reading it: I have enjoyed several other of Stephenson's books and I liked what I was hearing about this one in general discussion.

How it came into my hands: Waterstones. Getting it as an ebook got round the problem that it's too physically big to read, and this is an example of ebooks doing what they should: a couple of years after it was published, this huge fat tome was available for a standard new book price.

I greatly fear that Stephenson has become too successful to need an editor. There's a really excellent 200-page novel hiding somewhere in Anathem; it's got all the elements people (including me) enjoy in classic hard SF. Original ideas (lots of them), world-building, an exciting first contact story, extrapolation from ideas clearly related to real world physics and maths, sensawunda. Unfortunately Stephenson chose to pad it out with about 500 pages of boring, self-indulgent wankery. Yes, I was expecting a lot of exposition from Stephenson, it's what he does. But in something like Cryptonomicon he manages to be charming and humorous, albeit long-winded. Raz is a pretty unappealing viewpoint character, though; he's pretty realistic as a pedantic, nerdy 18-year-old boy who overestimates his own intelligence, but that is very much not a narrative voice I want to spend 700 pages with. Anathem felt like reading an entire trilogy's worth of the self-insertion fantasies of the kind of person who writes long, rambling screeds in internet comment threads proving to his own satisfaction that young, white, Anglophone, educated boys / men really are objectively better than everybody else.

I found most of the plot twists predictable, partly because they get very heavily foreshadowed by Raz explaining over several dozen pages all the things he notices that will become significant later, even if he doesn't understand why at the time. And generally lots of really heavy-handed hints about the direction the story is going to take. Still, there are some scenes which are very exciting and moving; they're pretty diluted by wankery, but there are enough of them that I kept ploughing through the boring bits to get to them.

The central idea of combining Platonism with the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is very cute; the handwavy Penrose-ish thing about consciousness I can take or leave, but it's a nice hook for a story. OTOH the stuff about non-standard atomic nuclei is pure stupidity (pico-technology as magic is probably even worse than nano-technology as magic), but it's something I'd suspend disbelief for if the voice weren't so damn smug. I'm so much cleverer than you, goes the subtext of every other line, I've read a handful of popular physics books, and I am going to enlighten you with my amazing cleverness and knowledge of esoteric topics like, ooh, the observer effect in QM, Platonic forms, and classical Greek geometry. Maybe if I were 12 years old I might have been impressed by this, but as it is the smugness just made me want to pick holes.

It's not that I can't see the appeal of monasteries of rational enquiry! That's a lovely idea, and I did enjoy the details of how the maths work, even if they were described in such excrutiating detail that it made the story drag a bit. It's just that Raz' smugness inclined me to write off most of the world-building as pointless wish-fulfilment (wouldn't it be great if geeks ruled the world, except without any of the boring bits of ruling like politics and economics...), rather than going along with it. Some of the invented language is great, the technique of using Latinate roots to create words whose meaning is obvious to an English reader but clearly refer to a concept unique to Orth and the mathic world works really well. Some of it runs into the "smeerp" problem; calling a truck a "drummon" adds nothing to the sense of being in a different world, but that's a forgivable flaw. Also the laborious explanation of how bulshytt is totally not a rude word in Orth and it's only a coincidence that it's a homophone of bullshit is really really annoying; it pretty much falls under the heading of language plays based on made-up words.

I was surprised to see that Jo Walton, whose opinions about books I nearly always agree with, considers Anathem one of the books of the decade. I think that's only true if you basically ignore three quarters of it. I can see why someone would want to, though; the occasional good parts really do sparkle! But still, it's a very old-fashioned book, a throwback to the era when SF had walking mouthpieces for scientifically inaccurate essays about physics in place of characters, and the women were trophies for the men who save the world by being geeky. I mean, Foundation was ground-breaking in the 50s; Anathem seems to be in very similar vein 60 years later, so it's hard to see it as innovative. But if you ignore the last several decades of progress in SF writing, and if you don't mind books that take hundreds of pages to get to the point, there's a great deal to enjoy in Anathem.

I wonder how much vehement defence this post is going to attract!

Comments

[azurelunatic]

I was chatting with a friend, post-read, and she said something along the lines of: "He's made a lovely RPG setting, and then rolled around in it for a while."

I really liked the monastery! And the apert system! It was a lovely world! But the aliens-from-another-dimension thing spoiled my suspension of disbelief, and there was a *lot* of camping.

So yes, I very agree with you.

[liv]

Heh, talking of succinct, your comment manages to summarize my long post in two lines! I don't mind RPG-setting type books, as a rule, but this is just too long drawn out.

The aliens thing is not particularly original, but I felt it was a good example of what it is. If the characters hadn't spent a hundred pages discussing the theoretical implications of the proposed physics, I wouldn't have been so easily able to spot all the flaws in the set-up and would probably have just accepted it as space opera.

[azurelunatic]

It was really like he'd jammed two books together: the one with all the worldbuilding, and then the one with the aliens. I would have been happy to read either of them. Both of them. Separately.

[jesse_the_k]

If you did a fic extracting that good book out of the sucking embrace of the pointless verbiage, I for one would be a happy reader.

[liv]

The problem is... I think I'd have to be Mary Renault. The only interesting relationship in the book is Erasmas / Orolo, and I don't do pederasty.

But what I'm imagining is 100 pages or so from Orolo's point of view. Assuming he had a kind of witty, endearing if a bit off-beam and geeky voice, the sort of thing that Stephenson is really good at. He'd give you the worldbuilding and explain how the maths work and he'd introduce you to Raz in a way that would make him seem more endearing than annoying. And the things that have to be hidden from the reader to keep up the tension would be things that Orolo would just happen not to mention, if it were done well you could accept it as part of his generally rambly digressive style. You'd get his Anathem from his POV, and then end with him at Ecba, and Raz showing up and you could do Raz' interminable journey across the arctic as a conversation between the two of them.

Then cut to Raz at Tredgarh, being interrogated about what happened at Ecba. He could recount the moving part with Orolo's death (which I think is the high point of the book) in almost exactly the same words that he uses in the original book, but talking to senior people or his friends at Tredgarh instead of directly to the reader. Cut the tedious bits with the messals down to a few dozen pages, so that we can have people figuring out what's going on with the aliens without word-for-word accounts of the discussions and dialogues they needed to get there. Then straight to the Antiswarm and sending Raz and co into space to save the day and broker peace with the aliens. That bit would only need a little trimming, it's naturally quite exciting.

[siderea]

No vehement defense here. I'm less convinced than you that there's 200 pages worth saving in there. I didn't find it smug, though I did find it a bit much self-satisfied with its cleverness, but I was willing to give it a pass on that for playfulness.

I do disagree with you on one matters of fact and think another you may have missed. Re the first, Stephenson is very much not saying "wouldn't it be great if geeks ran the world". The apert system he both sets up and interrogates, which, as someone who knows a modest amount about the history of monasticism in the West, I find really intriguing. He makes an argument than any ivory tower can basically be a Roach Motel(tm) for intellectual troublemakers. By removing the geeks from society, that system renders them pure but almost entirely impotent in it. Then later in the book when the geeks break loose, they do get their moment of heroism, but in no way which suggests they'd be great at running things.

Re the second, the similar-but-different language is, itself, part of the whole downstream-Platonic-parallel-world thing, and as such is essentially foreshadowing. That is, there are cognates in this world for their words because this world is a pale shadow of theirs. Those invented words aren't just to make strange another world, they're illustrating the relationship of that world to this -- just very slightly off.

[liv]

I think you're better at reading Stephenson than I am, so this makes me feel more confident in my impression that this is one of his weaker books. I do agree that there is some playfulness in Anathem, but a lot of it didn't work for me or was really overwhelmed by intense earnestness.

I did phrase badly the degree of geek wish fulfilment I see in Anathem. You're quite right that what the Avout are doing is not exactly ruling the world, though that's sort of what I was trying to get at by mentioning that they're excused from the boring bits of ruling like politics and economics. So it's not so much wouldn't it be great if geeks ruled the world, as wouldn't it be great if anyone with a reasonable facility for abstract reasoning was completely excused from any kind of responsibility and allowed to carry on living like a heavily subsidized computer science student for their whole lives.

It's somewhat an extrapolation the standard geek grumble that everybody despises geeks, but really the whole world relies on geek skills. This is sort of a valid point, but it's a great deal more true of people like personal care assistants, cleaners and others in sanitation, and generally I could make a long list of people who are more despised and less materially rewarded than geeks in spite of being more necessary for a functioning society and maintaining the standards of living that rich Westerners expect.

So Stephenson sets up a world where no annoying mundanes make the poor put-upon geeks waste time with boring small talk, clothes, sport or status games (let alone, you know, actually dealing with life maintenance or supporting themselves economically, and let's not even consider for three seconds who's doing the ultimate necessary but low status job, parenting), yet the geeks are so all-powerful that the "Saeculars" can't do anything significant without turning to them. For example, I had a problem with things like the idea that Suur Ala is the best person to be the general of an interplanetary army, because despite having no military training at all she's very good at logic.

I do agree that book questions its own mathic system, and I do like the ending which implies more mixing of the mathic and Saecular worlds in the happy future. The separation of "theors" from "praxics" and the relationship between Avout and Ita I thought was interesting too. I'm absolutely on board with your interpretation that it's saying something about monasticism, too.

[jack]

I would raise the wish-fulfilment even one further level of abstraction: not that the mathic system is so perfect (although there is a lot for geeks to like) because it's shown to be very flawed, but that the book presents the intellectuals with a moral victory of implying the saecular world should take them seriously even though they don't.

I agree it's a ridiculous taken-to-extremes wish-fulfilment of intellectual life to suggest that an academic would be a better military leader than someone trained[1]

[1] I mean, it might have some truth if there _aren't_ any trained military leaders, sometimes in real life intelligent outsides _have_ made great contributions to an established field. But also, people skills are not really the mathic strong point AT ALL, even if organisation is.

[vatine]

Hm, I think the almost excruciatingly slow pace is what makes the book (FWIW, I quite liked it and have read it in paper form multiple times).

If you manage to pare the book down, to something short, snappy and readable, I'd be happy to compare and contrast, if you want me to.

[liv]

Heh. A lot of people say that the point about Stephenson is that he is rambly and discursive, and if you don't like that you won't appreciate him. I think the long expositions in Anathem are worse than in many others of his books, though, because the voice is so flat and uninteresting, and seems to lack much of Stephenson's habitual charm.

[vatine]

Heh, I actually found them better done than in previous works. Instead of just skipping between discursions like a mayfly out to mate, it instead spend some quality time on each one (the "extended editions" of the discursions tah are in the appendices instead of the main text are a nice touch, too; it may be that some taht were would've been better off in there, rather than in the main body, but...).