Every once in a while you come across a book that forces you to think in ways that you don’t normally. Well every book lets us see through the eyes of a different pair of eyes, allowing us access to a worldview that we might not know of. This is what makes reading so fun, we love to live vicariously through the lives of the characters we read about. To love with them, cry with them, and at times die with them give us each a little bit of insight into a different set of possibilities.
When we read science fiction, we typically take those known world views and ignore them, giving us a glimpse of an alien culture (whether it is actually alien or simply so high tech that it seems foreign) that we can live in for a time. Sometimes, however, a book comes around that seems so familiar that it could be your worldview, and yet at the same time is quite alien. Those books typically give us more insight about us as a culture and a race than many others.
Anathem is one of those books.
The story is centered around a society in which most of the highly intelligent have been placed into monastic-like Maths, where the inhabitants, called the Avout, are sequestered off from normal everyday living as we know it. To summarize 900 pages is not simple so let this suffice:
Anathem is a novel of speculative fiction set on a world where scholars live apart from the rest of society at a time when great events are breaking down traditional barriers. The novel involves numerous ideas in physics, cosmology and philosophy as well as social commentary, mixed in with science fiction concepts and an adventure as the main characters cope with their own world and try to understand a great secret that will change everything.
This book is good. Not good like the Dresden Files’ entertaining romp through urban fantasy. No it’s good like reading Descartes, Archimedes, Einstein, Plato, Socrates, Gödel, Husserl, Thales, and many others and understanding them all. Mr. Stephenson, he gins the Mister from here on out as a prominent term of respect, has done what many have failed to do for some of us during college, give us a rudimentary understanding of Philosophy, Physics, and Quantum Mechanics.
This book is pivotal for me personally as it brought back to mind many of the old thought experiments I would play with friends in school and in college with my Philosophy professors. It also reminded me that, even though I am stuck here physically away from friends that I mss dearly because of the lack of those conversations mentioned earlier, I can still hold such discussions in mind just as an Avout from some far off Math might have on Arbre.
This book has a permanent spot on my bookshelf, and we be re-read numerous times. It is a wonderful read, if a bit slow at first. And it is nothing like Stephenson’s other work. Well I could see some ties to Cryptonomicon but only in his breadth of knowledge and attempts at relaying that across to the reader, something he does far better in Anathem.
Anathem Video Widget
