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Neal Stephenson’s Anathem has been called a space opera, but that seems inaccurate.  The characters eventually make it out of the atmosphere, but time is the subject of the book - not space.  Some of the best parts are about contemplation, piecing together puzzles and following the threads of deductive logic through to a conclusion.  A long character-building scene has to do with an art project where the characters recreate a famous battle by planting a garden full of weeds that will battle for dominance and advance their growth in predictable ways.  The kind of ideas where events play out over months, years and centuries hardly belong in space opera.  It is Long Now fiction.

The Setup

In a world far far away, the monasteries are a place where mathematicians, scientists, and rhetoricians have sequestered themselves away from the working world.  They practice a method of separation that allows for regulated exchange of ideas between the monasteries (called concents) and the outer world.  Each concent has a series of gates and subdivisions, all regulated by an enormous clock designed to run on a millenial scale.  For some, the gate opens once a year for a week.  For others, the time between openings is 10 years, 100 years, or even 1000.  This lets the secluded folks work away at their ideas without being interrupted or polluted by popular culture.  The setting projects timelessness, order, safety and ritual.  Obviously, that isn’t going to last, but it’s an idyllic sort of world for nerds, one where you can devote yourself to a higher purpose, abandon ambition, and be recognized solely for the worth of your mental work.  There are analogues between much of what monks do and what these guys do, and lots of the same sort of psychological motivation.

The Gripes

Actually, let’s take a moment to discuss the biggest failing of the book.  The vocabulary is tedious.  There’s a lot of vocabulary and world building going on here, and most of it is a waste, a distraction from the ideas and the characters.  Sure, it’s set in a faraway world and they have different word’s for different things.  But why?  In the end, there’s no real need for this story to take place on a different planet: if set here on Earth you’d have a history for free, you could reference the work ideas of folks like Plato or Pythagoras directly and you’d only need to invent new words for concepts that are actually new.  Too much of the book is set on giving alternate histories for ideas like Platonic ideals, too little on explaining the actual new ideas in the work.  Stephenson’s books are generally not great storehouses of characterization - they are a box of whizzy fireworks for your brain to set off.   That’s great - it’s fun.  But if that’s what you are going for, get to it.  The reader doesn’t benefit from learning that in this world the science monks are called “avout” rather than “devout” and their convents are called “concents”.   With so many analogues between the avout and the monastaries that we know, why not just use those words and explain the differences?  Stephenson’s path means he’s got to explain both the similar and the dissimilar, which draws the plot to a stop.  That’s why it takes a third of the book before our hero gets moving and the action starts forward.

The Push

Or rather, it shoots off like a rocket.  Once things start moving, they pulse on for 600 pages.  Ah, there you go.  That’s the rush you were waiting for.  Once it starts moving you’ve got dashing stories of survival, ninjas, instructional parables of math and geometry, explorations of Graham-Everett-Wheeler Cosmology, etc.  There’s a lot going on.  Like “Snow Crash” or “The Diamond Age”, Stephenson’s technique is to ramp up the book in a hyperbolic fashion.  Picture an asymptotic curve where there is a long flat head as the book builds the world and characters it needs, then a sudden rising motion when the real story begins to show. As you near the end, the drama, intensity and stakes have risen to staggering heights.  Unlike the previous books, this one actually seems to end.  With a real ending.  And there is resolution for the characters.  This is a pleasant surprise, given the past performance of Stephenson’s novels.

The Good

Once the action begins, it kicks hard and continuously.  Danger and excitement are ever-present, the nature of reality is challenged, exploded, put back together, and then smashed to bits again.

The Bad

You have to read 300 pages of setup.  This isn’t unpleasant, in fact these are some thoroughly written stories and they lay a great foundation for the rest of the book.  The vocabulary choice is also grating.

The Ugly Conclusion

I dug it, but I’m a fan of everything the guy’s written.  Some of the best bits of the book surface once you’ve completed it.  The length and complexity speak to the ideas of the Long Now, which apparently inspired the book.  The constant mapping between concepts and words of our culture and the book world brings to mind the Godelian mappings that  I finally began to understand in Doug Hofstadter’s “I am a Strange Loop”.   Also, no, Enoch Root doesn’t appear in this book.

I finished the book and put up a longer review of Anathem
When I got home from going San Francisco and the Caymans this Sunday I had a pleasant surprise. I had a nice advanced reader’s copy of “Anathem”, the upcoming novel by Neal Stephenson*. I’d heard reports that it was either post-apocalyptic or a space opera, but neither seems an apt description 100 pages in. So far it seems to be another new genre: Long Now Fiction. You’ve got a monastic (”mathic”) order where different sects sequester themselves away from the ever changing world outside for periods of a year, a decade, a century or a millennium.

There’s an awful lot of worldbuilding words to keep track of, which is a bit annoying, and it is starting off slow. That’s fine, though. Stephenson’s books generally don’t move like other books that have a slow rising action to a climax. Stephenson’s books tend to be first immersion in a world for a few 100 pages, then a radical spiraling climax that is vertically asymptotic against the presence of the end of the book. It’ll get exciting soon enough.

The book isn’t due out till September 30th, and assuming that I’ll finish the massive thing by then, do let me know if you’d like it next.

*Apparently I’m quite the lucky duck.  I got this through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program and was one of the 25 recipients out of the 1375 requesters. 

March was full of some really high quality reading. If only every month brought such riches.

• Two stories from Ted Chiang, both via boingboing:
  • The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate, a lovely time travel fable in an ancient arabic setting
  • 72 Letters - A loopy mix of golem’s, DNA, golempunk and self reference. The ending is lovely.
• Glory - Greg Egan. Greg Egan always brings stunningly original ideas into his work and the climax is always for huge stakes. He does not disappoint here.
• The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien. This powerful collection of Vietnam War stories was a random gift from Sally Nelson, but it was a sock in the gut. Each story has the quality of a carefully composed poem and individually worthwhile and cohesive. The kind of story you have to take a breather after. The collection as a whole is more than the sum of the stories as the characters, events and themes reference each other and wind back on themselves.
• Superman: Red Son. It’s a great comic book superficially about superman landing in the U.S.S.R instead of landing in Kansas. It’s really about free will and political choice. The execution here is much better than the summary of the gimmick.
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret. What a wonder this is. A beautiful combination of full rich sketches, text, and film stills. It’s a children’s book, but so unusual and exquisite that it kept me spellbound.
• I am a Strange Loop - Douglas Hofstadter.  I found it convincing and persuasive.  Gave me a fuller understanding of Godel’s theorem, a way to apply it to more problems, and an understanding of how consciousness can be an illusion that believes in itself.  Fascinating and even more accessible than his first book, “Godel, Escher, Bach: and Eternal Golden Braid”.

If you were to read only one of these books, I’d hope it was “I am a Strange Loop”.   I think it is a powerful and touching explanation of what is going on in the meat between our ears.  But I’d hope you’d read more than one.  “The Things They Carried” and “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” are well worth your precious time.

I am reading Douglas Hofstadter’s amazing and brain churning I Am a Strange Loop, so I’m noticing loops and recursion everywhere.

This dog machine loop is fascinating, I think it is a way for tennis balls to become soaked in saliva. Maybe it is a way to generate dog orgone? Perhaps it is a dog liberation device, a way for you to have a more equitable relationship with your dog. If you had an automatic feeding machine and this ball thrower, would your relationship with your dog be less of a servant-master relationship?

I like music videos with loops. My friend Rafal just recommended to me that I check out Swedish Band “The Sounds” and of course they have a loopy video. I’m a bigger fan of their “Song with a Mission“, but their video of “Tony the Beat” loops in and around itself.

February was evenly split between nonfiction and fiction. I like that, and I think I should keep it that way.

• The Scoreless Thai - Lawrence Block
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon - Garrison Keillor
• How Doctors Think - Jerome Groopman
• DMZ: Public Works - Brian Wood

Of these, The Black Swan and How Doctors Think should be read one after another. They are talking about the same thing in different ways and deal with failures in how we (and our doctors and money managers) think. I found them both fascinating.

It was a busy month, with more adventure than reading.

• The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 by Dave Eggers
• The Family Trade by Charles Stross
• The Geek Gap by by Bill Pfleging

The only one that I’d really recommend is The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007 by Dave Eggers. It is sweet, funny, sensitive and overall a wonderful thing. I got it as a present from my neighbors Matt & Megan and it was perfect for my trip to Utah.
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“A few intellectually rigorous killjoys argued that any explanation to which humans could relate was probably anthropomorhpic nonsense, but nobody invited them onto talk shows.”

From Greg Egan’s Quarantine, which I am currently reading.

Robert Reich wrote a very surprising book on the interplay of capitalism and democracy. His argument is that we’re seeing a lot of problems in our democracy because we have demanded too much of corporations. If, instead, we strip away some of our fiction that corporations are people, we won’t expect them to be noble, or fair, or honorable.

Instead, we should see corporations for what they are. They are legal contractual agreements between groups of people in order to generate profits. They have no purpose or concern other than the flow of capital and profit. Just as we don’t ask a gun to distinguish between good directions to shoot in or bad directions to shoot in, we shouldn’t ask corporations to do anything but obey our laws and generate as much money as they legally can.

At the same time, we shouldn’t allow corporations any entrance into democratic policy, since they aren’t people. Corporations shouldn’t have the ability to sue to overturn laws or any rights to free speech. Since they are legal agreements without morals, without any concept of right or wrong, corporations have no business participating in democratic politics. They aren’t, after all, people.

People can say things like: “I quite like cheap sneakers, but I don’t want to allow anyone to employ children to make them.” Corporations can’t do that. So people can get together and decide what rules corporations play by.

Now, this is good. It’s a good thing to have a book that connects the dots between corporate influence on politics, the changing marketplace, the economics of globalization and the legal concepts underlying corporations. I just wish it didn’t take so long. The last chapter, “A Citizen’s Guide to Supercapitalism” contains the only real proposals and it is 16 pages. The previous 208 pages are all lead-in. Frankly, I got it early on. The book didn’t need quite that much paper.

To be fair, I did have some good insights while reading.

• A good portion of the decrease in economic security resulted from container ships and other technological advances which led to a decrease in the security of large corporate profits that supported the deals between labor and management.
• People want to live on charming Main streets, but the people who work there can’t afford to live there. My neighborhood, Cobble Hill, is fantastically charming, but I couldn’t work there and afford to live there. On the flip side, I can afford to pay rent there, but I couldn’t afford to buy there. I earn around 5 times my first salary, but I can’t afford to purchase in the neighborhood I rent in. Oh, how I’ve worked the numbers but it ain’t happening.
• Fascinating nugget: Sam is a City employee, and her pension is administered by William Thompson, the city comptroller. He has heavily invested in the Fremont Mining Corporation which owns open pit gold mines in Papua New Guinea. They seem to dump toxic waste in fragile river ecosystems, which is legal since they seem to bribe the local officials to make it legal. This sucks, and Sam would never support it but Bill Thompson (he’s now a potential mayoral candidate) just is in charge of maximizing Sam’s pension.

So long ago that it seems like a dream - I was in a lecture about short stories.

The one thing that stuck in my head meat was a description of a short story called “The Heat Death of the Universe.”  In it, the author alternates between describing a young, newlywed mother and the dismal rules of entropy.  All closed systems tend towards disorder, and you see a parallel between this woman’s sealed life and our universe.  Each tends towards disorder and the end of everything.  It sounded amazing and I knew that I’d have to read it some day.

Years passed and it was never really the most important thing to do, but I would think of that story from time to time.   I noodled around on the New York Public Library’s catalog a week or so ago and I requested it.  The first story is an instant classic, just amazing.  The others are not.  One, “Sheep” is a mish mash of repetitive images of sheep, cowboys, an examination of pastoral images, sheep jumping fences, stories collapsing into each other.  I’ll save you the pain of it and give you the most amazing quote from it.

“Where the wolf feeds well, it will feed again.”

Right there, in a nutshell, is why it is important to right by the littlest folks, to stand up when you see small problems or small bullies, and to fix broken windows.