Anathem of the Heart and Anathem of the Mind

Wow, that was a good book. I'm speaking of Anathem, the book I mentioned in my last post. I'm a Neal Stephenson fan, so I knew I was going to be reading this book anyhow, but it was even better than I had expected.

WARNING! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!!

I think this is the first openly and explicitly science fiction novel I've read in quite a while. I don't know...it seems like SF is on the way out, and then I read a book like this. It's got classic SF tropes like a spaceships (including one of the best hard-SF generation ships I've encountered, the Daban Urnud) and other worlds. Moreover, it takes scientific ideas, such as the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and builds a good story around them. Very well done in that respect. And it even has a satisfying ending, though enough loose ends remain to make me hungry for more of this.

And it left a lot of room for speculation. We got just a glimpse at Urnud's version of the mathic tradition (and of course heaps of detail on Arbre's). It makes me wonder if "Laterre" has its equivalent. More specifically, it makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the Society Eruditorum, and if the Laterran versions of Fraa Jad and his ilk are none other than Enoch Root and the others who would be considered Wise. In addition, I wonder at the connections, if any, between newmatter and the alternate chemical elements of the various alternate worlds, and the Solomonic Gold. In short, I wonder if there is any connection between this novel and Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle.

There were certainly lots of references to other Stephenson novels. Yes, even The Big U, with the nuclear waste hidden beneath the millenial maths. The descriptions of how the Bolt, Chord, and Sphere worked also reminded me of the various nanogizmos from Diamond Age.

Anyhow, I am very pleased with how this book worked for me. It gave me a lot to think about, which I always consider a good thing.

Anathem

No, that's not a misspelling. I picked up the latest novel by Neal Stephenson recently, and am in the midst of reading it. I'm not far enough along to properly review it but I must say I love it so far. The last few books he read were all historical tales, and were set in the real world, so he didn't get to exercise the world-building skills he did in earlier stories like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, which were set in the future. Anathem is set in...well...I don't know yet if it's a parallel universe, an alien planet, or what, but it's not Earth. Despite this, it is just enough earthlike to be comprehensible, yet tantalizingly different. In some ways, it reminds me of the feeling I got when I watched Wings of Honneamise for the first time. I felt like I was exploring a world that was not mine, but was nonetheless a real place.

Hopefully I'll have more to say when I finish the book.