A very interesting descendant of my all-time favorite book, A Canticle for Leibowitz. It's alternately fascinating, tedious, funny, mystical, and thrilling. Anybody who is a dilettante of philosophy and aerospace engineering should consider this one. Stephenson's imagined societies are ultimately a little too similar to each others' and to ours to achieve that magical strange-yet-plausibility that LeGuin so often does, which was my only real disappointment with the book. ( )

Weirdly not boring.

UPDATE: Apparently I really like this book, since I'm reading it now for the third time. Upping my rating to 5 stars. ( )

Just as good the second time! ( )

I don't really understand how Neal Stephenson is a bestselling New York Times author. Is there really that large of an audience for a 900 page book that sandwiches a narrative of Greek philosophy, quantum mechanics and astronomy with a time line at the beginning and an ending of 50 pages of glossary and mathematical problems?

That's not to say I didn't like Anathem, although, having said that, in large part I liked it because I had the time to memorize entries from the glossary (you grow out of needing it around page 400 or so), to look up quantum mechanics, google philosophers and work out a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. This is a book to be read on vacation.

I loved Anathem. It's one of the few books that really begins on a small scale and then gradually scales up to epic scale problems, while entertaining the reader along the way. Similarly, it is one of the few books in which the author tries to posit scientific and philosophic hypotheses while still remaining an entertaining work of fiction and without becoming preachy or (unlike many of Stephenson's other works) an unreadable information dump. His science is entertaining and while it is bettered by outside knowledge, he explains his points in such detail that outside knowledge is not necessary. Stephenson is respectful of quantum mechanics, in contrast to myriad "science" fiction novels that throw around Everett and quantum mechanics as excuses for all manner of convenient magic.

That's not to say that I had no complaints: whole sections of the book drag, particularly because they seem to be rehashing what the reader already has either been told explicitly or intuited and many plans made by characters seem to ultimately go nowhere. More grievous is the closing arc, which has an unfinished feel. After 850 pages of having every action described to the minute detail, the last few pages feel like they're in outline form. Time jumps, plots are dropped, key points are ultimately only intimated and never explained outright. All of these are fine narrative devices but are in stark contrast to the rest of the book and therefore feel unfinished. ( )

Masterful science fiction. All kinds of fascinating exploration of causality, time travel, idealism vs mysticism, set in a plausible enough maybe 3700 years in the future.

It doesn't enter the realm of high literature. The characters don't have much depth. All the speculation is a bit like a game, rather flat. Classic science fiction - great for what it is. It doesn't really try to be anything else.

Kind of slow to start. Takes a bit of faith to keep going through the first hundred pages or so. Kind of takes off like a rocket! ( )