Anathem

I have finally finished off the monster. No, not in an RPG. I finally finished reading Neal Stephenson's 900+ page Anathem. I've been a fan of his books for a long time. The first one I actually read was his Big U, which I hear is a book he now wishes he never wrote.

Stephenson has a way of writing that comes across as both effortless and complex. He sucks you into his world, building detail onto detail, and you soak it in like a sponge. And before you know it, he has you considering the world around you in a different light.

The events of Anathem take place on the world of Arbre. The main character, and narrator, Fraa Erasmus is a young man who has lived the last ten years of his life in the Concent of Saunt Edhar. There he has lived an austere life of contemplation on the mysteries of the universe; namely, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.

Wait, what?

Yes, Arbre is not quite what it seems. In it, the scientists, the great thinkers, have retreated from the secular world into the concents. There, they spend all of their time thinking and writing. They are divided into four orders, the Unarians, the Decenarians, the Centarians, and the Millenarians. Each group stays isolated from the outside world for a set length of time (1, 10, 100, or 1,000 years) and then get to leave the concent for 10 days during the festival of Apert.

This familiar seeming yet strange set up grew out of the history of the world of Arbre, where the Saeculum (secular powers) grew to fear how quickly the thinkers ("avout," in the terminology of the world) where advancing technology ("praxis"). The avout discovered how to make materials ("newmatter") that followed different natural laws, the secular powers locked them away from their particle colliders in the concents. When the avout discovered how to master genetic sequencing, the secular powers sacked the concents and forbid the avouts from making any more new life forms. And so on. The concents are not religious, as that is something for the secular world, but they are very convent-like.

So, life on Arbre has continued for thousands of years in this way, until something strange happens. Something that throws the entire world, for both the avout and the extramurous (those who live in the secular world), into upheaval. An alien space ship is spotted.

From that point on, Fraa Erasmus and his friends must travel beyond the world of the concent and learn the truth about the aliens and the world that they inhabit.

There's a steep learning curve in reading Anathem, because Stephenson has created an entire vocabulary of terms to describe things. For instance, computers are called syndevs, networks are reticulums, cell phones are jeejahs, video cameras are speelycaptors. There is a glossary in the back of the book to help you understand, but it can be slow going at first. He also can go off on pages of philosophical debate on the nature of reality, and consciousness, some of which can be rather hard to understand (after all, most of us have never walled ourselves off from the world for a 1,000 years just to think.)

But, all in all, Stephenson has created a vibrant, interesting world, that I liken to Name of the Rose crossed with Contact. Everything is consistent with the internal logic of Arbre, and it all builds to an end that leaves you scratching your head a bit, for many subtle things have been happening just beneath the surface that only come to a head at that point.

I wish there was a RPG based on this, it would probably be cool.

Now Reading: Living With the Dead by Kelley Armstrong
Now Watching: Not much, actually... been busy.