This is Neal Stephenson’s eighth novel: the previous seven have resisted genre boxes, ranging across and often combining elements from hard SF to alternative history and detective thriller.
Anathem seems to sit firmly in SF territory. On the planet Arbre (which Stephenson’s prefatory note declares firmly “is not Earth”) society is divided. Six thousand years of history has led to the seclusion of scientists and philosophers (avouts) in monastery-like “maths”. They are allowed only brief, ceremonial contact with the secular world and no contact at all with the workings of the digital technology that, with soporific soap-opera and mood-altering drugs, keeps the “exes” (ordinary citizens) allegedly content. This seclusion allows the secular powers to control the pace of change and, hopefully, to forestall any recurrence of past wars, holocausts and genocides. Within the maths, pure intellectual endeavour, often ritualised into Socratic dialogues, extends knowledge — possibly to almost magical levels.
The young avout Fraa Erasmas (“Raz”), starts asking questions and breaking rules after his mentor is unjustly subjected to the rite of Anathem (in other words, expelled). Meanwhile evidence mounts that the time of Arbre’s introspective isolation is running out and that the threat of world-destroying-weapons has merely been — literally — buried.
Stephenson is a cunning and entrancing writer and the nearly 1 000 pages of Anathem form an onion of a novel, functioning simultaneously as philosophical debate, geometry primer, satire on university High Table politics, coming-of-age tale and novel of (perhaps) first contact. Many of Stephenson’s books have used third-person narration, allowing readers direct access to the writer’s voice and asides. Here he crafts a first-person narration in the voice of Raz, who has a gentler but no less penetrating eye. In his delicately drawn relationships with his classmates in the math, he makes a delightful companion through the complexities — even the geometry. Raz is a warmly “human” hero — from a place that is not earth.
So far, so Name of the Rose meets Book of the New Sun, though more solidly narrative than the former and less dour and dark than the latter.
But there are more layers to the onion. One is a constant tension between crude empiricism and Platonic idealism (an analogue metaphor of the cave recurs). It becomes clear that the math-bound thinkers cannot meet new challenges without the dirty-hands praxis of extras such as Raz’s tough engineer sister Cord; their separation holds its own potential horrors.
A second is the puzzle of whether civilisations can communicate via shared mathematical givens even when they share nothing else — including biology. And the plot-turning third is a world of quantum physics where I do not simply “think therefore I am”, but “think, therefore I may be in several simultaneous, parallel, but different worlds”.
You can’t always trust authors’ definitive declarations — particularly about a tale set in such worlds. As Stephenson insists, Arbre is not earth. In Socratic dialogue with him a critic might point out that its history contains events remarkably similar to those of earth history (some, unevidenced legends from before the planet’s current calendar). There are parallels in beliefs, in technology and sociology, and even in cant — sometimes robustly so: Arbre’s “technical term” for empty jargon is “bullshytt”. There are recognisable earthtics, such as the obsession with hand-held digital devices. For a writer like Stephenson, there are no accidental anachronisms.
And yet Arbre cannot be earth, because a society that readers could identify far more easily with “our” earth is suddenly and shockingly invoked.
In a universe where human creativity functions as a quantum machine, Arbre could be the earth of one of our pasts, or one of our futures, or sitting just next door in some world-sized Schroedinger box. And that’s the meta-metaphor, because exercising such creativity is precisely what writers in the universe of speculative fiction do. Anathem is the work of a master craftsman.