clock … watching time, the only true currency

I’ve never hidden my appreciation for the previous works of Neal Stephenson. So I was one of the many fans attending the release party for his newest book, Anathem. The evening, nearly two months ago on September 9, stumbled along a little bit, as audio difficulties delayed the events. But a thrumming chorus of anticipatory readers waited (mostly) patiently and even paid polite attention to the mathematical chanting which served as a sidelight for the main event: Stephenson himself.

The author read the first few pages of his new novel, and then sat down in conversation with Stewart Brand and Danny Hillis of The Long Now Foundation. (There’s video.) I enjoyed this part of the event, and then headed home with my signed copy of the book. I finished Anathem a week or so later; these words have been percolating since.

Stephenson participated in some of the early investigations into what it means to think long term. Anathem pulled direct inspiration from Stephenson’s own contributions. Look at these annotated sketches from nearly a decade ago: 1 / 2 / 3. A clock operating on a near-geologic scale organizes the lives of a community. Stephenson builds his book with such a living monument as one foundation of the story.

The scheduled, temporary interaction between insiders and outsiders briefly pictured in 1999 sparks a much larger investigation of different philosophies in the real world…or a world that could be real. Stephenson uses the term “speculative fiction,” which works for me.

In Anathem, different philosophies live separately, until events force them to cooperate to address problems on a scale larger than individuals, individual communities, or even individual worlds. In the build-up, the separation of the “avout” (intellectual monks, after a fashion, running the clocks among other things) from the “extras” (you and me) gives Stephenson a lens to view life just a bit askew. It’s fun, and he plays with language, inventing several dozen almost-familiar words and using them without apology throughout the book.

The story becomes a quest, with a final journey that reminded me (oddly) of the terminal run in Neuromancer, William Gibson’s catalytic first novel. In both cases, the characters must face an odd (even alien) entity in orbit. Neuromancer’s assault is more individual, and coldly corporate. Anathem’s requires a symphony of effort for the concluding sequence, and leaves open the idea of empathy between different philosophies. Was anyone else was struck by these parallels?

I’m using “philosophy” with broad sweeps here. Stephenson includes very specific academic ideas that have been discussed for (literally) millennia. Those themes are mixed with quantum physics and other mind-bending ideas — and most of them feel right at home in this story. (There’s detailed online acknowledgements and references.) I enjoyed the pulling at my brain, but I didn’t always slow down to niggle out the subtleties before flipping the page and looking for more of the human stories which (appropriately) make this a tale worth reading.

If you read Stephenson, you like a mix of thinking with your plot. Cryptonomicon holds up even more strongly over time, and remains my favorite Stephenson novel because the plot “won” over the thinking. But Anathem earns its spot on the (crowded) shelf.