Anathem

Neal Stephenson’s Anathem showed up Tuesday night. I’m about 150 pages in, and enjoying it. Pleasant surprise, actually. When I first heard about the book, I was all, “Yaay, new Neal Stephenson book.” Then I saw the write-up on it on Amazon, and watched the videos they have of him talking about it and reading from it. It sounded very grand Sci-Fi - some sort of giant monastery on an alien planet thousands of years in the future. It has its own special vocabulary, which sets off all kinds of warning bells. In the video, Stephenson compares it to Dune in how out there it is. More warning bells.

I read a ton of that stuff when I was a kid, but now it really bugs me how escapist it is. It just has no relevance to my life. How am I supposed to develop any kind of emotional attachment to it? When am I going to be involved in high-level political intrigues, or raise a guerilla army to ride out on giant sand worms? The appeal of it is supposed to be that it takes you away from everyday life and transports you to a different world. You can lose yourself in the novelty and richness of it.

You know what? I like this world. It’s cool. There’s an amazing amount of weird and fascinating stuff going on here. Some of it even involves blowing things up. We have thousands of years and billions of characters to draw on. That’s what I loved about his Baroque Cycle. It really gave you a sense of amazing complexity of the world even three centuries ago. It runs for nearly three thousand pages, and leaves you with the sense that you’re only getting a fraction of the story. You want to go read whole books about some of the characters. Conveniently, you can, because they’re real people.

Even the most richly-imagined fictional world is going to look pretty flat by comparison. There are six books about Dune. That’s it, end of story. That is the depth of that world. I have about that many novels just set in Victorian England. They’re written by different people with different perspectives. They’re different types of novels: Adventure, supernatural, political intrigue, mystery, romance, drama. And there’s a lot more out there, and on top of that there’s more factual information about that time than I’d ever get through in my life.

In the end, I decided to trust Stephenson. I’d been doubtful about him writing historical fiction, and that worked out really well. Anathem is promising so far. The critical thing is that it’s not escapist. He does what all good science fiction does - he talks about us and our world, but in a completely different context, so we can come at it afresh.

So yes, he’s made up a lot of the terminology of his world, but it’s all derived from English (or what English is derived from). Mostly, he’s dug back into the old roots of words to come up with interesting variants and reinterpretations. There’s a lot of interesting etymology going on, and I’m a sucker for that.

It works well for me that he’s just a few years older than I am. By the time he’s chewed over a bunch of cool ideas and finished writing a book, I’m at the point in my life where I’m ready for them.