primeideal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
primeideal) wrote2024-04-09 10:31 am
primeideal) wrote2024-04-09 10:31 am
Anathem (Neal Stephenson)
This book, man, this fricking book.
Important: this is a reread. I'm pretty sure the first time I read it was over a decade ago and I was an undergrad at the time. I think it is, on some levels, amazing and mind-blowing and very well-done. I have a lot of high praise for it. Again, this post is going to probably be disproportionately focused on things that didn't work for me, then and/or now, but that's more about my emotions and less a fair assessment of its literary merits.
The concept: Erasmas is a young "fraa" or "avout" in a "concent" on the planet of "Arbre." The concent is where all the intellectual sorts in Arbre hang out. They go in and take vows that separate them from the "Sæcular" world, so they can focus their attentions on philosophy, math, science, that kind of thing. They spend a lot of time talking about eponymous concepts like Plato's Cave or Ockham's Razor or the Pythagorean Theorem, except Arbre isn't Earth, so they don't have a Plato or an Ockham or a Pythagoras, everything has different names. Depending on how deeply they're embedded within the concent, avout can only emerge for a period of ten days every year, decade, century, or millennium. As our story begins, Erasmas ("Raz") is eighteen, and it's the end of the year 3689; when the (enormous, brilliantly complex, work of art) clock strikes 3690, it will be a new decade, and he'll get to go outside and see his family and the world for the first time in ten years. Which he does. Then things get weird.
Okay, so. Some of the words, you will recognize as being familiar to but not exactly words in our world. "Fraa" ~ "friar," "avout" ~ "devout" or "avowed," "concent" ~ "convent" or "concentric." Even the title: "anathem" ~ "anthem," "anathema." This is all on purpose. People who don't like neologisms in their books probably won't like this book, and that's okay. This is not a criticism I have.
The first chunk of this book is, from a worldbuilding perspective, very fun and cool because MATH MONKS. The concept of the centenarian and millenarian communities remaining in seclusion and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge is fascinating. The elaborate descriptions of the gothic architecture, the bells, the clockwork, the rituals, the music...it's the kind of place I want to visit, even if I wouldn't necessarily want to live there. A little like Ender's Game, sometimes the jargon can throw you into the world a little abruptly, but once I'm in, I like it, and sometimes resent when the plot moves on and drags me away from the cool concent stuff.
A couple subtweets: if you're a math and change ringing nerd and somehow haven't read this book yet, I highly recommend at least the first chunk. Because change ringing!!! If you're a river rafting guide, I can't recommend this book just for the person of Yulassetar Crade, because it's a very long book and Yul is a very minor character. I can, however, tell you that Yul is the kind of wonderful, self-reliant, adventurous character who has an exciting job where every day is a new challenge that brings the potential for a new story. Yul is great.
So.
Raz' attitudes towards people in the Sæcular world, religious institutions in particular, often tend to be condescending. Even when they're not, it's in the context of "wow, they seem so smart, how are they still stuck out here?" Now, some of that could be written off as an unreliable narrator--he's eighteen, he hasn't seen much of the world. But the contrasts between Earth convents and Arbre concents--especially in light of the later reveals--make it feel more like the story's perspective that research is a "better," "purer," "truer" form of contemplation, and religion is just a "corrupted," "watered-down" variant.
That being said. Reading it the second time around, having survived grad school in the interim, gives me a slightly better sense of when some depictions might be intended to be non-endorsements, and the little things Stephenson gets right about academia. Raz has a student, Barb, who's like twelve and a wunderkind and has no social skills. The feeling Barb sparks in the others "I should admire this kid's intelligence because he's going to be my future collaborator, but actually I just resent him for making it look easy and reminding me how dumb I am" is exactly on-point. Same too for Raz's impostor syndrome and discussion about "yeah there are non-academic careers, but those are basically for failures and washouts."
Not only are there fraas, there are also suurs (sisters, sorority, etc.) Raz has woman friends and love interests, and a sister/close female relative in the outside world. That being said, this time around I found myself noticing there were very few women among Raz's close friends/mentors/cool older characters with screen time. (His group of close friends are the boys who wind the clock together, and I can see why you might want big strong men to do this when they're eighteen, but not when they're eight or nine?) And some of the stereotypes ("girls are always gossiping to each other about boys who are mean and hurt their feelings, that's because they're the ones with social skills!") felt bizarre in a world that's very much about the abstract life of the mind. Not a dealbreaker, just underwhelming.
Raz's response to some of the overstimulation in the outside world (cell phones, etc.) is a little "kids these days," but sometimes it can be clever: "An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market."
The drugs. I'm not going to talk about the mind-altering drugs because that would be a berserk button for me. It's probably for the best I wiped my memory of that part after the first read because yikes.
Ummmmm. As far as the birth control and stuff goes, it's an interesting parallel to "Children of the Star"--in both cases, there's a small elite surrounded by normies. The elites are like "we don't want to have a hereditary elite, that's not fair, so we can't have kids here." Yet, the elites include both men and women of the heterosexual persuasion, what do. CotS solves it by placing all elite-born kids up for adoption; Anathem deals with it by putting male birth control in all the elites' food.
Another niche parallel: the "Karx" religion reminded me of the Utopians from "Terra Ignota," in terms of "killing someone is terrible because you haven't just taken away one life, you've destroyed all the worlds and stories and potential that their creativity could have generated."
I think I'd misremembered how long the "Advent" takes. Like somehow I thought the end would contain a discussion on "some of us are going to go with the ship and others will stay behind so we'll never see each other again" but it seems to take a long time before the ship jumps again, oops.
The first time around there was this bittersweetness about "this system has endured for 3690 years and now it's just collapsing," but now it's more "hmm, yeah, there were some things that could change." Like, at the end of Apert, Raz is punished by immediate detention and he can't say goodbye to his sister for ten years, which is horrific! And of course it works out for the best because he's the only one who can sneak out and miss the ceremonies, and it's not actually goodbye, but still, jeez.
Then there's the tour at the beginning, they pass a tomb commemorating avout who died in a war with the outside. They were under siege but a squad of five hundred burst out, did a supply run, then the survivors stormed back in to the concent to resupply the Millenarians. The rest of the concent was overrun, but their sacrifice ensured that the Millenarians could hold out indefinitely in their mysterious sanctum, and a few outposts of the concent system survived untouched. Very poignant. Then several chapters later we meet one of the Millenarians, who casually mentions "oh yeah, the outside world wouldn't touch us because they know we're the ones guarding the nuclear wastes." Recontextualization mood whiplash D:
Part of the implicit question at the end is: if the Lineage and the ship's arrival was all part of a galaxy-brain scheme to bring down the current system and make avout and Sæculars work together, would that be a good thing? Or, put another way, are the concents more of a prison than a refuge? Lodoghir seems to think yes: avout have more political power now, and if you're going to live in a world where people build superweapons, it would be good to have the scientists who can design those weapons and philosophers who can counsel against them actually on speaking terms with the politicians and military people.
But a lot of Raz's reaction to the outside world is "too much stimulation, casinos are dumb, cell phones are a distraction, the news cycle is terrible." For someone like me, there's a part of me who would rather be inside the walls than out, not only because it would be fun to think about math and bells all the time but also because if people aren't dumping the pain and suffering and news of the world on me all the time then it's no longer my problem and I can just think about math. (Of course I personally would want to see my family more than once a decade, so. There's that.)
Stephenson has written "yes, this may look like an anti-religion take, but if I'd meant it to be anti-religious, I wouldn't have dedicated it to my parents, who are the nice normal unzealous type of religious people." (And yes, I looked this up the first time I read it, because it was very striking to me then too.) I don't find this argument compelling. For one, how should the reader know anything about his parents? And even at the end, despite Raz's recurring moments of "hmm maybe some of these people are actually not complete idiots and we can maybe work together," part of him still suspects “That the poet’s way [of appreciating symbols without literalizing them] is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty, that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.”
I suspect a lot of the people who have met me over the years, especially those who don't know me very well, see me as a Raz-type figure--someone who would be happy plunging into the abstract world of rigor and ritual and leaving behind the outside with its weird overstimulations. Maybe. But on the inside, I know, for every Raz there's always going to be a Barb who outshines them while I worry about plateauing. There's always going to be someone more condescending and scornful and cooler than me looking down upon stupid, shallow religious people. When I was young enough to be Barb, I was able to laugh along and take the side of the mockers, but I think for most of my adult life (Raz's age and beyond) I've defaulted to instinctively seeing myself in the mock-ees. Does that say more about the book or about me? :/
The most important thing I would have wanted to know when I read this the first time is that change ringing with mathematical patterns is real, you can do it in this universe! I didn't discover my college's tower until almost too late, but now I'm slowly picking it up again, and handbells/online ringing give the opportunity to learn the math without the coordination. :D
Important: this is a reread. I'm pretty sure the first time I read it was over a decade ago and I was an undergrad at the time. I think it is, on some levels, amazing and mind-blowing and very well-done. I have a lot of high praise for it. Again, this post is going to probably be disproportionately focused on things that didn't work for me, then and/or now, but that's more about my emotions and less a fair assessment of its literary merits.
The concept: Erasmas is a young "fraa" or "avout" in a "concent" on the planet of "Arbre." The concent is where all the intellectual sorts in Arbre hang out. They go in and take vows that separate them from the "Sæcular" world, so they can focus their attentions on philosophy, math, science, that kind of thing. They spend a lot of time talking about eponymous concepts like Plato's Cave or Ockham's Razor or the Pythagorean Theorem, except Arbre isn't Earth, so they don't have a Plato or an Ockham or a Pythagoras, everything has different names. Depending on how deeply they're embedded within the concent, avout can only emerge for a period of ten days every year, decade, century, or millennium. As our story begins, Erasmas ("Raz") is eighteen, and it's the end of the year 3689; when the (enormous, brilliantly complex, work of art) clock strikes 3690, it will be a new decade, and he'll get to go outside and see his family and the world for the first time in ten years. Which he does. Then things get weird.
Okay, so. Some of the words, you will recognize as being familiar to but not exactly words in our world. "Fraa" ~ "friar," "avout" ~ "devout" or "avowed," "concent" ~ "convent" or "concentric." Even the title: "anathem" ~ "anthem," "anathema." This is all on purpose. People who don't like neologisms in their books probably won't like this book, and that's okay. This is not a criticism I have.
The first chunk of this book is, from a worldbuilding perspective, very fun and cool because MATH MONKS. The concept of the centenarian and millenarian communities remaining in seclusion and pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge is fascinating. The elaborate descriptions of the gothic architecture, the bells, the clockwork, the rituals, the music...it's the kind of place I want to visit, even if I wouldn't necessarily want to live there. A little like Ender's Game, sometimes the jargon can throw you into the world a little abruptly, but once I'm in, I like it, and sometimes resent when the plot moves on and drags me away from the cool concent stuff.
A couple subtweets: if you're a math and change ringing nerd and somehow haven't read this book yet, I highly recommend at least the first chunk. Because change ringing!!! If you're a river rafting guide, I can't recommend this book just for the person of Yulassetar Crade, because it's a very long book and Yul is a very minor character. I can, however, tell you that Yul is the kind of wonderful, self-reliant, adventurous character who has an exciting job where every day is a new challenge that brings the potential for a new story. Yul is great.
So.
Raz' attitudes towards people in the Sæcular world, religious institutions in particular, often tend to be condescending. Even when they're not, it's in the context of "wow, they seem so smart, how are they still stuck out here?" Now, some of that could be written off as an unreliable narrator--he's eighteen, he hasn't seen much of the world. But the contrasts between Earth convents and Arbre concents--especially in light of the later reveals--make it feel more like the story's perspective that research is a "better," "purer," "truer" form of contemplation, and religion is just a "corrupted," "watered-down" variant.
That being said. Reading it the second time around, having survived grad school in the interim, gives me a slightly better sense of when some depictions might be intended to be non-endorsements, and the little things Stephenson gets right about academia. Raz has a student, Barb, who's like twelve and a wunderkind and has no social skills. The feeling Barb sparks in the others "I should admire this kid's intelligence because he's going to be my future collaborator, but actually I just resent him for making it look easy and reminding me how dumb I am" is exactly on-point. Same too for Raz's impostor syndrome and discussion about "yeah there are non-academic careers, but those are basically for failures and washouts."
Not only are there fraas, there are also suurs (sisters, sorority, etc.) Raz has woman friends and love interests, and a sister/close female relative in the outside world. That being said, this time around I found myself noticing there were very few women among Raz's close friends/mentors/cool older characters with screen time. (His group of close friends are the boys who wind the clock together, and I can see why you might want big strong men to do this when they're eighteen, but not when they're eight or nine?) And some of the stereotypes ("girls are always gossiping to each other about boys who are mean and hurt their feelings, that's because they're the ones with social skills!") felt bizarre in a world that's very much about the abstract life of the mind. Not a dealbreaker, just underwhelming.
Raz's response to some of the overstimulation in the outside world (cell phones, etc.) is a little "kids these days," but sometimes it can be clever: "An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market."
The drugs. I'm not going to talk about the mind-altering drugs because that would be a berserk button for me. It's probably for the best I wiped my memory of that part after the first read because yikes.
Ummmmm. As far as the birth control and stuff goes, it's an interesting parallel to "Children of the Star"--in both cases, there's a small elite surrounded by normies. The elites are like "we don't want to have a hereditary elite, that's not fair, so we can't have kids here." Yet, the elites include both men and women of the heterosexual persuasion, what do. CotS solves it by placing all elite-born kids up for adoption; Anathem deals with it by putting male birth control in all the elites' food.
Another niche parallel: the "Karx" religion reminded me of the Utopians from "Terra Ignota," in terms of "killing someone is terrible because you haven't just taken away one life, you've destroyed all the worlds and stories and potential that their creativity could have generated."
I think I'd misremembered how long the "Advent" takes. Like somehow I thought the end would contain a discussion on "some of us are going to go with the ship and others will stay behind so we'll never see each other again" but it seems to take a long time before the ship jumps again, oops.
The first time around there was this bittersweetness about "this system has endured for 3690 years and now it's just collapsing," but now it's more "hmm, yeah, there were some things that could change." Like, at the end of Apert, Raz is punished by immediate detention and he can't say goodbye to his sister for ten years, which is horrific! And of course it works out for the best because he's the only one who can sneak out and miss the ceremonies, and it's not actually goodbye, but still, jeez.
Then there's the tour at the beginning, they pass a tomb commemorating avout who died in a war with the outside. They were under siege but a squad of five hundred burst out, did a supply run, then the survivors stormed back in to the concent to resupply the Millenarians. The rest of the concent was overrun, but their sacrifice ensured that the Millenarians could hold out indefinitely in their mysterious sanctum, and a few outposts of the concent system survived untouched. Very poignant. Then several chapters later we meet one of the Millenarians, who casually mentions "oh yeah, the outside world wouldn't touch us because they know we're the ones guarding the nuclear wastes." Recontextualization mood whiplash D:
Part of the implicit question at the end is: if the Lineage and the ship's arrival was all part of a galaxy-brain scheme to bring down the current system and make avout and Sæculars work together, would that be a good thing? Or, put another way, are the concents more of a prison than a refuge? Lodoghir seems to think yes: avout have more political power now, and if you're going to live in a world where people build superweapons, it would be good to have the scientists who can design those weapons and philosophers who can counsel against them actually on speaking terms with the politicians and military people.
But a lot of Raz's reaction to the outside world is "too much stimulation, casinos are dumb, cell phones are a distraction, the news cycle is terrible." For someone like me, there's a part of me who would rather be inside the walls than out, not only because it would be fun to think about math and bells all the time but also because if people aren't dumping the pain and suffering and news of the world on me all the time then it's no longer my problem and I can just think about math. (Of course I personally would want to see my family more than once a decade, so. There's that.)
Stephenson has written "yes, this may look like an anti-religion take, but if I'd meant it to be anti-religious, I wouldn't have dedicated it to my parents, who are the nice normal unzealous type of religious people." (And yes, I looked this up the first time I read it, because it was very striking to me then too.) I don't find this argument compelling. For one, how should the reader know anything about his parents? And even at the end, despite Raz's recurring moments of "hmm maybe some of these people are actually not complete idiots and we can maybe work together," part of him still suspects “That the poet’s way [of appreciating symbols without literalizing them] is a feature of the brain, a specific organ or faculty, that you either have or you don’t. And that those who have it are doomed to be at war forever with those who don’t.”
I suspect a lot of the people who have met me over the years, especially those who don't know me very well, see me as a Raz-type figure--someone who would be happy plunging into the abstract world of rigor and ritual and leaving behind the outside with its weird overstimulations. Maybe. But on the inside, I know, for every Raz there's always going to be a Barb who outshines them while I worry about plateauing. There's always going to be someone more condescending and scornful and cooler than me looking down upon stupid, shallow religious people. When I was young enough to be Barb, I was able to laugh along and take the side of the mockers, but I think for most of my adult life (Raz's age and beyond) I've defaulted to instinctively seeing myself in the mock-ees. Does that say more about the book or about me? :/
The most important thing I would have wanted to know when I read this the first time is that change ringing with mathematical patterns is real, you can do it in this universe! I didn't discover my college's tower until almost too late, but now I'm slowly picking it up again, and handbells/online ringing give the opportunity to learn the math without the coordination. :D