Pun Salad

I'm reminded of a book title of a few years back: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Except heartbreaking isn't the right word for Anathem; it's more like breathtaking or awe-inspiring. Also very heavy. It's over 900 pages, including glossary and supplementary material, with a lot of funny language and unfamiliar settings and situations. It's kind of a project, and there's a lot of Stephensonian red meat for the geeky. (You don't have to know what a directed acyclic graph is to enjoy the book, but if you do…) It's also very funny in spots. I found it worthwhile, and did something I rarely do: put it back in the pile to be read again someday.

Anathem is set on a planet named Arbre. Society is divided between the sæcular world—normal, everyday folk—and the mathic world, made up of monastery-like "concents" where the "avout"—groups of philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists—devote their lives to theory. Interaction between the two worlds is minimal and tightly controlled to maintain social stability. There's also structure within the concent: it's divided into maths: unarian, decanarian, centenarian, and millenarian; with rare exceptions, the inhabitants are only allowed exit during their "Apert" which happens (respectively) every year, ten years, hundred years, and thousand years.

That's a very simplified description; it's much more complicated than that. Stephenson builds this world in amazing detail, not only its present, but going back thousands of years, imagining how social structures, science, and philosophy developed.

Our protagonist/narrator, Erasmas, is a decenarian who became avout ten years previous. So he still has memories of and connections to the sæcular. He's curious, brilliant, and brave. Without spoiling things, Erasmas slowly becomes aware of facts that threaten to shake Arbre to its very foundations. He gets caught up in events, sending him on a truly grand adventure.

Part of the fun is making the language connections. Arbre's "Adrakhonic Theorem" is what we call the Pythagorean theorem; Occam's Razor is "Gardan's Steelyard". Oddly, "rafters" are rafters, "t-shirts" are t-shirts, and—hmmm—despite the fact that Arbre is an alien world and an odd society, it's not that odd: the inhabitants seem very human. What's up with that? Is this some kind of Star Trek deal, where a limited production budget means that the aliens have to be kind of human? Or is it just the author's limited imagination?

Nope. Read it and see.