It was during middle school that most of us learned of the historical period some call the "Dark Ages," a centuries-long era in which the chief repository of knowledge was the early Christian church. More than anything else, we heard tales of monks in their cloistered halls laboring over hand-written copies of the few extant books while the barbarian hordes circled the landscapes. Whether or not it's true, it certainly makes for a good story: a few seeds of knowledge saved so that humankind might one day be reborn; a Renaissance, if you will. Of course, like most that we learned in school, that's an over-simplification at best, an outright fiction at worst. Still a good story, though, all those tonsured monks going blind as they spent their lives painfully copying the few extant books one page at a time, complete with marvelous embellishments and fanciful illustrations...
Things are different on Arbre. The planet certainly has had its periods of "intellectual darkness" - at least three of them; but Arbran repositories of knowledge were not religious institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact: communities of mathematicians, scientists, and scientist-philosopher - most of whom reject the concept of religion out of hand - have been responsible for keeping the flame of knowledge lit for almost 4000 Arbran years. Cloistered within the walls of their "maths," the brothers and sisters live, love, eat, think, and argue amongst themselves; opening their gates to the outside only once a year, decade, century, or millennium. One among thousands of fraas and suurs (brothers and sisters), eighteen-year-old Fraa Erasmus - "Raz" to his friends - is but a simple student of geometry and agriculture; the apprentice of old Orolo, a student of astronomy and viticulture (he's far better at the former than the latter, it is said). All that changes when Orolo is "thrown back" to the secular world in the rite of Anathem, a permanent expulsion from the mathic world reserved for the most severe violations of The Discipline.
But what did Orolo do to earn his fate? Raz thinks he knows - and this knowledge may prove his undoing as well. That's the least of his worries, however, for Arbre is about to be visited by an alien craft; and this first contact could well be the planet's last.
Thrust from the comfortable surroundings of his math into the seething, seedy world of the secular masses; Erasmus and his friends find themselves unprepared for the role of leadership. Yet this is precisely the role for which they have been called: theirs is a desperate, last-ditch effort to save Arbre from whoever's out there orbiting the planet - but first, Raz has an errand to run...
In an era in which speculative fiction authors crank out three, four, and even more volumes per series, Neal Stephenson's Anathem stands out by virtue of its singular nature: at nine hundred pages, it's a volume that lesser writers would have felt compelled to split into a trilogy - if for nothing else, for the resulting three paychecks instead of one. Like many a trilogy, it loosely follows the chronology of The Lord of the Rings: discovery of danger and formation of a "fellowship," a dangerous journey, and final confrontation. And yet Anathem is vastly different from the potboilers such fantasy seems to often produce. There's not a single sword; not a single sorcerer (although I could not read Orolo's name without envisioning Ian McKellar's bushy eyebrows...); no dragons, orcs, elves, or dwarfs - yet this is clearly a tale of epic proportions. Kudos to Stephenson for his ability to turn a rather hackneyed formula on its ear.
Kudos as well for his dry wit, having creating a world that's clearly modeled on our own. The Arbre beyond the walls of Raz's home math might well be another Vegas or Atlantic City: "an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change." Beyond the walls of the math one finds religions (in the secular world?) squabbling over niggling differences in dogma, class warfare, racial tensions, and rampant illiteracy; all furthered by a constant barrage of information arriving through their "jeejahs," sort of a smartphone to end all smartphones. Some of the inhabitants might seem familiar to anyone who's been in a suburban mall of late:
"The current ...fashion was to wear a garment evolved from an athletic jersey (bright, with numerals on the back) but oversized, so that the shoulder seams hung around the elbows, and extremely long - descending all the way to the knee. The trousers were too long to be shorts and too short to be pants - they hung a hand's-breadth below the jersey but still exposed a few inches of chunky calf, plunging into enormous, thickly padded shoes. Headgear was a burnoose blazoned with beverage logos whose loose ends trailed down the back, and dark goggles strapped over that and never removed, even indoors.
"But it was no only clothing that set [them] apart, They had also adopted fashions in how they walked (a rolling, sauntering gait) and how they stood (a pose of exaggerated cool that somehow looked hostile to me)."
Stephenson probably had only to look out the window of his Seattle office to describe that fashion...
Like many a spec-fic writer, Stephenson created his own language forAnathem; a language he dutifully defines in a glossary and in "Dictionary" entries within the text (not unlike Asimov's chapter headings in theFoundation series, and a thousand other spec-fic books). Some are quite familiar - "the Reticulum" is a sort of wireless internet (which makes sense, since reticulum means "network). Some are amusing - theories of the Sconic school are named for a group of philosophers who showed up at a patron's house just in time to consume her daily batch of scones. Jeejah is obviously derived from "Geegaw" (something gaudy and useless - which says a lot about Stephenson's opinion of smartphones). At least the vocabulary is (for the most part) something about which English speakers can wrap their tongues.
But what of the plot? Yes, Anathem is a sort of amalgam of fantasy trilogy and scifi thriller, but is it worth all those 900 pages (a volume that, frankly, took me more than a week to wade through)? Sure, it has a little something in it for everyone (except fans of Britney or Miley, I suppose). Sure, it's chock full of fascinating (although sometimes overly pedantic) math, philosophy, and science; especially physics. But let's be honest - the middle third (the "journey") could have been omitted out in its entirety and the beginning and the end are rather long, too. So it may be 900 pages long (890, if you want to be accurate), but perhaps 400 of those pages utterly failed to move the plot forward - they moved it sideways, instead.
And where have you heard of monastic orders maintaining science and technology in a post-apocalyptic world? Ummmm, A Canticle for Liebowitz, perhaps? Or the idea that the food and even air of one cosmos (dimension, whatever you want to call it) might not provide sustenance for natives of another? Try Roger Zelazny's Doorways in the Sand. So while Anathem clearly represents an enormous volume of work and Stephenson must be congratulated for avoiding the pitfalls of trilogy spec-fic, he likewise should be admonished by the Terran version of Arbre's Lorites: this is ground that's already been plowed, and plowed well.
Recommended only for those who are prepared to chew through nine hundred pages that move in fits and starts, with scattered flashes of brilliance.