OT: Anathem

It's like a cross between Harry Potter and G?del, Escher, Bach.

I've been meaning to pick this up at some point. I'll probably end up grabbing it the same day I get An Evil Guest.

Anyone read Michael Dirda's review of Anathem in The Washington Post? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/04/AR2008090402460.html Dirda compares Anathem with The Book of the New Sun, which he says is much superior. -Matt

Mostly I agree with Dirda; however I think I like it considerably better than he does. I admire and approve of Stephenson's project. I suspect Stephenson really was thinking about the Harry Potter crowd when he wrote this -- some of whom would be approaching the age of the protagonist, Fraa Erasmus, and his friends. I may be reading too much into the novel, but I am convinced that Stephenson was presenting his science-and-math monastery (the Mynster) is a counterpoint to the Hogwarts "school for wizards," replacing the realm of wish-fulfillment fantasy with the realm of abstract theories and ideas. (The novel seems to be geared toward a just-post-YA age group who were thrilled by the steadily increasing page counts of the Harry Potter sequels and thus won't be scared off by this 900+ page monster.) Stephenson is trying to uplift the Harry Potter crowd with a taste of philosophy and science, and offering some positive alternatives to the consumer-driven, intellectually barren, fundamentalism-spawning culture they've grown up in. Unfortunately, he's going to lose many of those Harry Potter readers (as he nearly lost me), most likely between pp. 12 and 23, in a long description of the Mynster that far outlasts any curiosity you may have developed about the place by this point. It was while slogging through these pages that I kept thinking about how Wolfe introduces us to Severian's world and implies all sorts of fantastic things about it without interrupting the story to take us on a walking tour of the citadel and the Matachin Tower, pointing out details left and right. But that's just the kind of thing Stephenson does at several points in Anathem, and whereas Wolfe's details are integral to the story, Stephenson's are mostly just flavor. But once I forgave Stephenson for not transcending popular fiction with a new Book of the New Sun, I started to enjoy Anathem. I have more to say about the book, but I'm curious about others' reactions to Anathem. On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 10:41 AM, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com

is it really totally OK to write a fantasy book about a future version of our planet and call it "Orth"? On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 2:40 PM, Matthew Groves <matthewalangroves at gmail.com

Well, I don't know, maybe not, but it's a moo point (as Joey Tribiani would say). Stephenson's Anathem is a postcyberpunk sf novel about another World, with a planet called Arbre, on which there is a language called Orth.

ohhh, that review made me think the planet was called Orth. On Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 3:36 PM, Matthew Groves <matthewalangroves at gmail.com

That's because Dirda told you it was : "The plot of Anathem is basically this: It's the far future of an Earth-like planet called Orth." It's kind of a small thing, unless you're a book reviewer for a major news organization, in which case it's not the kind of thing you ought to screw up. -k

Even if it were a planet called Orth, it's not like Wolfe has a monopoly on the names of the Norns. Or phonetic derivatives of their names. Sent from my iPhone

I'll forgive him though - he generally gets sf right. Who knows - maybe he had Wolfe on his mind when he wrote that sentence? -Matt

My Locus review of Anathem is also posted on my blog, the Inferior4+1, for those interested: http://community.livejournal.com/theinferior4/400584.html I'll be posting my review of An Evil Guest there as well a week or so after it comes out in Locus. pw

It looks like Stephenson has done a 'Sword Of Shannara' on TBOTNS. What a maroon! .

Let's be fair... is Stephenson really capable of something along the lines of the Shannara series? (In Terry Brooks' defense, his "Running with the Demon" series was pretty good. Once he stepped away from epic fantasy he's not a terrible writer.) Lane

I hope not: 'Snow Crash' wasn't that bad. I have no idea if Brooks is good or bad apart from Shannara: the one Shannara book I read traumatized me so badly that I am unlikely to risk exposure to another of his books. .

I haven't read the Baroque cycle be Stephenson, but "Snow Crash" continues to top my list of favorites. It's like Thomas Pynchon and William Gibson had a baby. Terry Brooks writes terribly juvenile fiction, which is when I read the entire Shannara series (or at least, the series as it existed in the 1990s). I picked up "Running with the Demon" and its sequels, and actually enjoyed them. Brooks plays with more mature subject matter and breaks out of the Standard Epic Fantasy story mold, which is nice. Though I hear with his latest books he is attempting to tie these books to the Shannara series, which has kind of ruined it for me. Lane

I've had other people say similar things to me, but I don't see it as all that good. But then I don't really like either Pynchon or Gibson either. .

Next thing you'll tell me that you think Dostoevsky was a hack and Capek is overrated! :) Lane

One question. Does the ending suck? Stephenson can't write endings. That's a lot of why I liked the Baroque Cycle. 3000 pages of fun, so the 30-page crap ending wasn't too bad (and, to be fair, it was a better ending than, oh, The Diamond Age). But I always feel like there's been the following conversation: Editor: How's it going, Neal? Stephenson: Great! I've written 1200 pages now! Editor: Dude, I sold them a 400-page novel. Stephenson: .... Editor: Wrap it up. NOW. Stephenson: Um, OK. STEPHENSON DOES. Adam

Lane Haygood <lhaygood at gmail.com> writes:

I adore Stephenson in general, but he's a very different writer than Wolfe. I've not read Anathem yet (I just got my copy last Friday), but I can't imagine it being any sort of direct or even close rip-off of BotNS, nor was that the impression I got from the segment Stephenson read or from the subsequent discussion and Q&A. I don't think Stephenson could write such a book if he tried. Stephenson at his best is a sort of insane infodump of fascinating trivia crossed with incredibly dry geek humor and the sort of crazy ideas that engineers and computer people come up with at 2am when they're exhausted. He doesn't have anywhere near the narrative complexity and levels of partly revealed detail as Wolfe. He instead sucks you into his world by showing you all the shiny bits that he thought were just fascinating. Hiding stuff isn't really his thing. Snow Crash is great stuff, as is Cryptonomicon and Zodiac (an underappreciated book), but read one of his books before getting lots of them. Some people bounce off his writing style pretty badly.

If you want Pynchonesque Stephenson, it'd have to be the Baroque Cycle: really really long, full of awful puns, and dotted with occasional non-sequitur musical numbers. Seriously: the Baroque Cycle is Gravity's Rainbow only set after the 30 Years' War rather than after WWII. Speaking of which: how many other hard-core Pynchon fans are there here? Adam

Haven't read Capek, but Dostoevsky puts me to sleep. .

I'm one. And I've liked Stephenson in the past because of his Pynchon-lite qualities, but--and it feels strange to say this--I wish he could write as tightly as Pynchon. James

Hellz yeah, Pynchon! I love Gravity's Rainbow for its thematical scope and sheer inventiveness, though I have no idea what you mean by "tight" writing - Pynchon matches those two with some pretty rambling wordsmithing. Paul

Another Pynchon fanatic here, agreeing with James and Paul.

Agreed, James. I've read all of Pynchon's published fiction and most of Stephenson's. I am indeed a serious Pynchon fan and a less-serious Stephenson fan. IMO Rainbow is the former's masterpiece and Cryptonomicon is the latter's, but even the latter is lite compared to most Pynchon. The Baroque Cycle was a slog. Were it not for the wonderful local (London) colour, I never would have stuck with it. An earlier post echoed my problem with it: long sections seem too much like textbook history. Pynchon was never dry like that (although parts of his last two books were a bit of a slog too...nonetheless, on the whole, I strongly recommend Against The Day). veering back on topic for a second, am I the only one who frequently finds post-New-Sun Wolfe novels a bit of a slog? (His short fiction never bores me.) Probably the hardest for me to finish was Wizard Knight. I did finish it, but found myself unable to care about Able at all. Even though he is very similar, I found Chris the pirate to be much more interesting. I think because of the large dichotomy between what he did and how he viewed himself. bee

Well I just finished Against_the_day. I avoided M&D as too long (read all his others), but got sucked in by the first chapter of _AtD. I like and have read everything of Stephenson's, but I was glad to reach the end of the Baroque Cycle ;) Turning back to Wolfe, Pynchon is interested in a lot of the same things -- I think here of power and violence and pulp literature (atD has a few Lovecraftian episodes as well as all the edisonades/westerns) and a hard science background that is deliberately held lightly -- but slightly different politics...and more on-screen sex...and his puns are probably better. David Duffy.

I'm a fan of Wolfe, Stephenson, Gibson, and Pynchon. (Not to mention Sterling and Swanwick -- have we ever discussed Swanwick here?) Anyway, "Go figure." Pynchon's most accessible novel is "The Crying of Lot 49." It has many of the themes he elaborates on in later novels (conspiracies, weird sex, technology, drugs, paranoia, nerdulent infodumps), but is short, funny, and to the point. "Gravity's Rainbow" is an incredible novel, but it's a hard slog for most people (you can tell the ones who gave up because they only talk about the "Banana Breakfast" scene, which occurs very early in a very long novel). I liked "Mason & Dixon" but found it overlong, and haven't managed (so far) to get past the first hundred or so pages of "Against the Day." "V," though, is readable and (again) comparatively short. I like Stephenson a lot, and am reading "Anathem" now (and avoiding any potential spoilers). Like most Stephenson novels, it's starting somewhat slowly. I have read "The Baroque Cycle" twice and enjoyed it even more the second time. This is not unlike how I approach most of Wolfe's work: I've probably read "The Book of the New Sun" six or eight times at least, and still find new stuff each time. I disagree with Adam Thornton's comparison of "The Baroque Cycle" and "Gravity's Rainbow." Superficially it is accurate, but in practice "GR" is profoundly pessimistic and while it is vaguely about "how the present came to be" (and for Pynchon, that means the technological, deracinated, conspiracy-theorist, dehumanized present), "BC" is optimistic and about how the modern world and worldview was born and propagated (in a fairly short space of time in the 1600s). Thus, in spite of its setting and ostensible format ("historical novel"), "BC" is an SF novel, whereas "GR" is a modern or post-modern "mainstream" novel. I am looking forward with anticipation to "An Evil Guest." (My wife discovered it inside our storm door as I was typing this message -- no doubt it fell from space in a leaden casket). To further broaden the topic, I just finished "House of Leaves," by Mark Danielewski (sp?), another doorstop of a book, full of typographical foolery and unreliable narrators. It was creepy and I enjoyed it. -- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha

Greetings: Like Swanwick, got bored with Sterling, Gibson is getting increasingly borderline with me. As for Stephenson, it's a split. I couldn't get through Snow Crash (but bought it recently to try again) and haven't tried Diamond Age. Cryptnomicon caught my attention and I read it in a day or so when I was supposed to be attending a conference. I loved The Baroque Cycle. I've bought it in hardcover, trade paperback (to bring on vacation) and in electronic format (twice, the second time to get it in a more "universal"--for me--format, to be able to use it in multiple eBook readers). But what of Dos Passos? F.P. Kiesche III "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Blogging at The Lensman's Children and TexasBestGrok! --- On Tue, 9/16/08, Dave Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com> wrote: From: Dave Lebling <dlebling at hyraxes.com> Subject: Re: (urth) OT: Anathem To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net> Date: Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 8:12 PM I'm a fan of Wolfe, Stephenson, Gibson, and Pynchon. (Not to mention Sterling and Swanwick -- have we ever discussed Swanwick here?) Anyway, "Go figure." Pynchon's most accessible novel is "The Crying of Lot 49." It has many of the themes he elaborates on in later novels (conspiracies, weird sex, technology, drugs, paranoia, nerdulent infodumps), but is short, funny, and to the point. "Gravity's Rainbow" is an incredible novel, but it's a hard slog for most people (you can tell the ones who gave up because they only talk about the "Banana Breakfast" scene, which occurs very early in a very long novel). I liked "Mason & Dixon" but found it overlong, and haven't managed (so far) to get past the first hundred or so pages of "Against the Day." "V," though, is readable and (again) comparatively short. I like Stephenson a lot, and am reading "Anathem" now (and avoiding any potential spoilers). Like most Stephenson novels, it's starting somewhat slowly. I have read "The Baroque Cycle" twice and enjoyed it even more the second time. This is not unlike how I approach most of Wolfe's work: I've probably read "The Book of the New Sun" six or eight times at least, and still find new stuff each time. I disagree with Adam Thornton's comparison of "The Baroque Cycle" and "Gravity's Rainbow." Superficially it is accurate, but in practice "GR" is profoundly pessimistic and while it is vaguely about "how the present came to be" (and for Pynchon, that means the technological, deracinated, conspiracy-theorist, dehumanized present), "BC" is optimistic and about how the modern world and worldview was born and propagated (in a fairly short space of time in the 1600s). Thus, in spite of its setting and ostensible format ("historical novel"), "BC" is an SF novel, whereas "GR" is a modern or post-modern "mainstream" novel. I am looking forward with anticipation to "An Evil Guest." (My wife discovered it inside our storm door as I was typing this message -- no doubt it fell from space in a leaden casket). To further broaden the topic, I just finished "House of Leaves," by Mark Danielewski (sp?), another doorstop of a book, full of typographical foolery and unreliable narrators. It was creepy and I enjoyed it. -- Dave Lebling, aka vizcacha David Duffy wrote: On Mon, 15 Sep 2008, Adam Thornton wrote: On Sep 15, 2008, at 9:25 PM, brunians at brunians.org wrote: I've had other people say similar things to me, but I don't see it as all that good. But then I don't really like either Pynchon or Gibson either. Seriously: the Baroque Cycle is Gravity's Rainbow only set after the 30 Years' War rather than after WWII. Speaking of which: how many other hard-core Pynchon fans are there here? Well I just finished _Against_the_day. I avoided M&D as too long (read all his others), but got sucked in by the first chapter of AtD. I like and have read everything of Stephenson's, but I was glad to reach the end of the Baroque Cycle ;) Turning back to Wolfe, Pynchon is interested in a lot of the same things -- I think here of power and violence and pulp literature (atD has a few Lovecraftian episodes as well as all the edisonades/westerns) and a hard science background that is deliberately held lightly -- but slightly different politics...and more on-screen sex...and his puns are probably better. David Duffy. Urth Mailing List To post, write urth at urth.net Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

Swanwick is great. .

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I think I would let Gary slide, it's not cool to pick on D&D kids they have enough problems as it is.

2008/9/20 Rjyan Kadwallader <cexwell at gmail.com>

And didn't he die a few months back? As I understand (from reading Michael Moorcock's comments on this), early D&D was very upfront about the sources it used - apparently they used to cite Tolkien, Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, et al. in the guidebooks. Now - not so much. I never played myself, but surely there are some "D&D kids" here? My parents were always suspicious of it, so it wasn't really an option for me. I got my watered-down fantasy through Japanese videogames, thank you very much. -Matt

I was in the service when D&D first came out, and beginning to experience the kind of slack an infantryman may experience if he is not in a combat zone and knows the way things work. So after I finished my work for the day (which would normally take an hour or three) I would mosey on down to the rec hall, where I would play D&D with various other guys doing the same thing I was doing. If anyone asked us what we were about, we were doing small unit tactical exercises. .

ha, that's great!!

He did die a few months back. As for playing D&D, I did but then moved on for "better" stuff. Pedro Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 13:53:37 -0400From: matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.comTo: urth at lists.urth.netSubject: Re: (urth) OT: Anathem 2008/9/20 Rjyan Kadwallader <cexwell at gmail.com> I think I would let Gary slide, it's not cool to pick on D&D kids they have enough problems as it is. And didn't he die a few months back? As I understand (from reading Michael Moorcock's comments on this), early D&D was very upfront about the sources it used - apparently they used to cite Tolkien, Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, et al. in the guidebooks. Now - not so much. I never played myself, but surely there are some "D&D kids" here? My parents were always suspicious of it, so it wasn't really an option for me. I got my watered-down fantasy through Japanese videogames, thank you very much. -Matt

was it dogs in the vineyard? that game looks ripe for an Urthy setting...

One (ex) D&D kid here. Can't recall having any problems any different from others my age. And I have a feeling that D&D kids are much more in tune with stuff in Wolfe's writings than say...shop kids or football kids or slacker kids or... F.P. Kiesche III "Ah Mr. Gibbon, another damned, fat, square book. Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh?" (The Duke of Gloucester, on being presented with Volume 2 of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.) Blogging at The Lensman's Children and TexasBestGrok! --- On Sat, 9/20/08, Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> wrote: From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com> Subject: Re: (urth) OT: Anathem To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net> Date: Saturday, September 20, 2008, 1:53 PM 2008/9/20 Rjyan Kadwallader <cexwell at gmail.com> I think I would let Gary slide, it's not cool to pick on D&D kids they have enough problems as it is. And didn't he die a few months back? As I understand (from reading Michael Moorcock's comments on this), early D&D was very upfront about the sources it used - apparently they used to cite Tolkien, Moorcock, Leiber, Vance, et al. in the guidebooks. Now - not so much. I never played myself, but surely there are some "D&D kids" here? My parents were always suspicious of it, so it wasn't really an option for me. I got my watered-down fantasy through Japanese videogames, thank you very much. -Matt

Yeah, there are a few D&D kids here. Gary Gygax did die a few months ago, and the earlier editions were pretty clear about where the inspiration came from. A lot of people, such as your humble correspondent, found their way to Jack Vance, Fritz Lieber, and Michael Moorcock from it, and thence outward. Adam

I still play D&D ;-) hartshorn Rjyan Kadwallader writes:

http://www.thenightland.co.uk 01273-488272 / 0777-214-9545

The most recent edition is more influenced by World of Warcraft, which was heavily influenced by earlier editions of both. I've been a D&D player until I moved on to better things as well. Besides girls, I playtest with a rival publisher Steve Jackson Games, the same outfit that published the NEW SUN RPG supplement.

Well, Andre wrote a Book of the New Sun RPG campaign book for GURPS, in case you're interested. I moved on to stuff like Call of Cthulhu, Vampire, Ars Magica, King Arthur Pendragon, In Nomine, etc. Pedro Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:58:28 -0400From: cexwell at gmail.comTo: urth at lists.urth.netSubject: Re: (urth) OT: Anathem On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 5:43 PM, Pedro Pereira <domus_artemis at hotmail.com> wrote: I did but then moved on for "better" stuff. was it dogs in the vineyard?that game looks ripe for an Urthy setting...

You playtest girls?

In my younger days. Oh. That question wasn't directed at me, was it? Adam

Jack Vance was a tremendous influence on both Wolfe and D&D.

Every chance I get.