Enough people love this play that it presumably has some good qualities. But I just couldn't get past the snide, obnoxious characters, and the facile,Enough people love this play that it presumably has some good qualities. But I just couldn't get past the snide, obnoxious characters, and the facile, frequently inaccurate treatment of science and math, which panders to the "science is just the product of fallible human impulses and, like, we don't really know anything for sure anyway, man" attitude that has become the norm among intellectuals and wannabe intellectuals who, for one reason or another, aren't interested in science.
As a presentation of math and science to a lay audience, the play is a failure. It feels as though Stoppard read James Gleick's Chaos (or a similar popular text), misunderstood it, forgot half of it, and then wrote the play on this basis of what remained. When Stoppard tries to write about chaos theory, he fails to mention the central concept -- sensitive dependence on initial conditions (the famous "butterfly effect") and its appearance even in simple systems -- and instead only tells the audience that chaos has something to do with iterated maps.
He mentions that iterated maps can produce fractals that look very much like realistic mountains, leaves, ferns, etc., and implies that the failure of 18th/19th-century dreams of predictability has something to do with the failure to use these realistic, fractal models of objects in physics calculations. (One of the characters proleptically quotes Mandlebrot: "Mountains are not cones, clouds are not spheres.") This, of course, raises the question: if we do have fractals now, is predictability no longer doomed? The answer is no, because (almost) all interesting physical systems exhibit sensitive dependence on initial conditions; but Stoppard does not clarify this. An audience member unfamiliar with the material will leave the play under the impression that physicists like Newton and Laplace were overly optimistic about prediction because they did not know about iterated maps, which (somehow!) are supposed to make prediction harder. Since the idea of an iterated map is very simple (indeed, it is explained in the play), this makes these geniuses look rather stupid.
Of course, they actually did know about iterated maps. (One of the most famous iterated maps is called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's method.) They didn't appreciate the unpredictability of very simple systems, but that unpredictability is a subtle issue, and Stoppard's play doesn't begin to get into it.
There are other errors, too, and they too (uncoincidentally) serve to make early physicists look dumb or oblivious. For instance, at one point one of the characters -- Thomasina, a precocious child who is learning physics -- reads a paper which, given the date and the description of its content, must be Fourier's paper on the heat equation. This paper is famous for introducing Fourier series, but Thomasina seems to think it is remarkable for another reason. She exclaims that Fourier's equations are "not like Newton's equations," for they specify a direction of time, while "Newton's equations" are reversible. This claim comes as quite a surprise, since the heat equation studied by Fourier is simply a continuous version of an equation called . . . wait for it . . . Newton's Law of Cooling. Presumably by "Newton's equations" Thomasina specifically means Newton's three laws of motion. But even there, she's wrong: although in some special cases Newton's laws are reversible, they can also describe irreversible forces, and indeed Newton himself believed that the most fundamental forces were likely to be irreversible. (This would explain the fact that many real-life phenomena, like stirring milk into coffee, seem to be irreversible -- another case where Stoppard seems to imply that early physicists simply ignored something obvious.)
The play views the march of science with an amused sneer: oh, look at these funny plodding people, convinced that they know so much, yet battered this way and that by their culture, swelling with utopian ambition in the Enlightenment, inventing lurid tales of heat death in the age of Romanticism, and once the 20th century rolls around they create "jazzy" math and lose faith in the old verities . . . Now, I'm not denying that scientists are fallible human beings, but Stoppard's sneer is unearned. The issues involved in the development of theoretical physics are esoteric, irreducibly mathematical, and mind-bendingly subtle. This is serious shit. Really, really smart people have been working very, very hard on it for centuries. I'm sure that Stoppard and some parts of his audience would like to imagine themselves as Thomasina, instantly spotting the errors of those grim old scientists and dispatching them with a light, witty touch. Would that that were possible! But science is really hard; when our predecessors have made mistakes they tend to be subtle, recondite ones. Try to catch the masters making obvious blunders and you will just fall on your face, as Stoppard has done.
And Thomasina gripes about having to plot simple mathematical curves like parabolas, because they don't look like real natural forms. Never mind that simple curves are tremendously important in science anyway. Never mind that facts like this are precious and remarkable precisely because they are surprising; if science always conformed to our intuitions (about, say, which shapes are important) it wouldn't have much value. No, Tom Stoppard's audience just remembers its own confusion and displeasure over math in high school and would like its prejudices confirmed. Maybe all those funny curves we had to draw as children really were meaningless! Take that, school! Now let's go home from the theater and never think about math again.
(Also: love/sex is "the attraction that Newton left out"? Seriously??? I know it's just a joke but it's an awful, cringe-inducingly cutesy one. I have a high cutesiness tolerance and this play is too much even for me.)...more
Nope. Sorry, Charles Yu. But just -- nope. This doesn't work.
The world in which this novel takes place differs from ours in two key respects:
1) HumaniNope. Sorry, Charles Yu. But just -- nope. This doesn't work.
The world in which this novel takes place differs from ours in two key respects:
1) Humanity has discovered (though it is not made clear when this discovery was made, or by whom) that the fundamental laws of physics are actually the laws of narrative -- specifically, of science fictional narrative. The book's reality is a vast multiverse in which individual universes, and parts of universes, behave like stories from different sub-genres of science fiction. This can all be described quantitatively. It is possible to quantify the extent to which an given person is a "protagonist" or a "hero," for instance. The worlds described in existing science fiction stories, such as Star Wars, actually exist and can be travelled to.
2) Time travel is possible.
At first glance, it would seem that 1 is far more interesting than 2. (2 is, after all, just a simple consequence -- one consequence among many -- of 1, since time travel stories are a certain type of science fiction.) But Yu's book focuses almost exclusively on 2, using the setting provided by 1 mostly for one-off jokes and quips. As we will see, this fact exemplifies the book's fundamental flaw.
Yu's narrator, also named Charles Yu, is a melancholy time machine repairman. He misses his father, with whom he had a close but strained relationship. His father, a pioneer in the science of time travel, got lost somewhere in the wilds of space-time, possibly on purpose. Yu-the-narrator lives in his time machine, drifting in some null space waiting for service calls, playing with his dog Ed (who was "retconned" from a space serial) and nursing a crush on his operating system's AI persona, TAMMY. The plot is set into motion (in a sense) when Yu encounters his future self emerging from his (the future self's) time machine and, acting on impulse, shoots him (his future self). This, of course, sets up a time loop, and Yu is left wondering how he will end up emerging from that time machine (given that he knows he's facing death by doing so), and whether the shooting -- which has already occurred -- can somehow nonetheless be averted.
It sounds like a cute, clever story, doesn't it? And in some ways it is. But it's crippled by a vast miscalculation of tone that made it, at least for me, very irritating to read. The basic problem is that, although the protagonist lives in a mind-bendingly different world, Yu is intent on telling a conventional story of hipster melancholy, father-son emotional dynamics, and self-discovery. Indeed, Yu actively flaunts the sharp division between his "human" story and his science-fictional conceits. The protagonist's memories of his father, and his attitudes toward life in general, are resolutely early-21st-century real-world American in flavor. Bizarrely, there is no sense that the discovery that the world is a bunch of interlocking stories obeying "the laws of science fiction" has made any impact on the way humans relate to each other. Yu's narrator lives in a world in which statements like the following ones are simple statements of fact:
Reality represents 13 percent of the total surface area and 17 percent of the total volume of Minor Universe 31. The remainder consists of a standard composite base SF substrate.
Inhabitants of Universe 31 are separated into two categories, protagonists and back office.
Protagonists may choose from any available genre. Currently there are openings in steampunk.
In order to qualify as a protagonist, a human must be able to demonstrate an attachment coefficient of at least 0.75. A coefficient of 1.00 or above is required in order to be a hero.
If the world could actually be described in these terms, wouldn't everything be different -- including father-son relationships? If it were to actually occur, the discovery of the narrative nature of reality would revolutionize both physics and psychology -- it would in fact be the greatest paradigm shift ever to have happened in each of those fields. It would fundamentally change the way we see ourselves, our role in the cosmos, our relationships to one another.
"Now wait a moment, Rob," you may want to say. "Yu's book sounds like a comedy, if a comedy with an emotional core. Isn't all that stuff about science fiction just a bunch of jokes? You can't blame Yu if he doesn't want to seriously work out the implications of his punchlines. There's such a thing as being lighthearted."
Now you, hypothetical reader, are absolutely right that Yu uses his setting mostly as a source of punchlines. Most of the time we get any explicit details about the science fictional multiverse, they're things like this:
My cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star, and whenever we talk he always says how nice it'd be if I joined him. He says they have a good cafeteria. So that's an option.
Ha ha! See, if cheesy space operas were really real, people would, like, have boring jobs, and say bland grown-up phrases like "so that's an option," and stuff. Oh Charles, how wryly you wreathe together the fantastical and the mundane! Of course it should come as no surprise that the cousin, and the Death Star, never come up again. This isn't worldbuilding -- it's stand-up comedy.
Which would all be fine if this were a more raucous, more committed comedy. But Yu wants to tell a human story and portray a person's actual consciousness in a convincing way. And his jokeyness just absolutely screws up his chances there. Because the reader is faced with a horrible problem: it is impossible to imagine what it would actually be like to live in the book's world. Of course Yu tells us what it's like, but it's not convincing, because his narrator seems exactly like a likable loser from the U.S. in 2010 AD. And we feel that being a likable loser -- being anything, in fact -- would be very different in a world in which "my cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star" could be a bald statement of fact.
What would it be like to find out that science fiction was real, and that reality was science fiction? What would it really be like? It would be terrifying, for one thing. Terrifying, and awe-inspiring, and filled with new opportunities barely possible to imagine, and also with the potential for crushing irony and triviality. (Imagine, for instance, the humiliation of not just living an unhappy life, but living an unhappy life knowing that you live in a bad work of fiction.) Among many other things, such an existence would be frequently hilarious. This is one reason why it's not, in the end, right to complain that I want to take Yu's premise "too seriously." Comedy is all about taking things seriously, because absurd things are funnier when you feel like they're really happening. Did you notice something else about that "Death Star" line? Did you notice that it wasn't all that funny? Cute, maybe. The kind of line that makes you nod your head and say, "okay, good one." But not the kind of line that makes you laugh so hard you feel like you're having some kind of potentially fatal chest spasm. For me, anyway, humor of the latter type usually comes not from mere absurdity but from absurdity as experienced by a real, reflective, self-aware human consciousness. What's funny isn't the phrase "my cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star," but the experience of a real person having to live in a world in which that is actually true -- a person who knows, as you or I would, just how stupid a concept that is, and who still has to live with it anyway. So the light touch with which Yu treats his setting is not excused by his comedic goals, because this is the kind of material that's funnier if you take it seriously.
But anyway. Yu wants you to really care about his protagonist and about that guy's relationship with his father. The problem is that it is impossible to believe in that relationship because it does not seem to be affected by its surroundings. It hovers in some blank imagined America, the supposed Platonic story of father and son, separated from culture and technology and all of that extraneous stuff. (Yu practically screams at you that he's making this distinction, by treating the father-son stuff seriously while turning the setting into a bunch of jokes.) Whose worldview is this, in which "human feeling" is this free-floating, timeless thing that exists unchanged even in the wildest corners of "science fictional universes"? I'll tell you: it's the worldview of someone who doesn't understand science fiction.
Science fiction says: you can't separate your human story from your culture-and-science-and-technology story, because those things affect humans, and the effects they have are interesting. Science fiction says: there is no such thing as the Platonic father-and-son story; there are many different father-and-son stories, some very different from others, all results of the interaction between the biological makeup of humans and the many different cultural, economic, and technological situations in which we can find ourselves. (To take a relatively mild example, the book's Charles Yu lives through a conventional American adolescence, still living at home and viewing himself as essentially a non-adult at age 16. In some cultures, he would have been considered an adult, on par with his father, at a much earlier age. The stories of those cultures are less familiar, but no less human.) Science fiction says: if we search for "human feeling" and ignore the details and particulars of our material existence, we're never going to find what we're looking for. If you can't imagine what it's like for someone to look for a job ("my cousin is in accounts receivable on the Death Star"), then it becomes harder to understand his deepest relationships. Details matter, setting matters, culture and technology matter. You, who may never have met me and may live across the globe from me, are using your glowing box to read this thing I wrote on my glowing box -- an interaction that would have seemed like a fantastical dream 100 years ago. That is not nothing.
Why am I so damn serious about this silly, knowingly silly book? I don't know. It wasn't terrible, and I can't say I didn't enjoy parts of it. But something about Yu's implicit attitudes toward his creation irks me. I think this may be the most anti-science-fictional science fiction novel I've ever read. Maybe that's the point. But maybe it's not, and that's unnerving.
And Yu's writing absolutely drips with the sense that he's trying to combine cold reason and human emotion, something that grows more and more grating in light of his continual failure to realize that the two are not opposed in the way he thinks. The book abounds with sentences like:
The volumetric integral of the function defined by the loop represents the maximum amount of life that CY-1 can have, including joy and pain.
What is the purpose of adding "including joy and pain"? He's talking about someone's lifespan, and of course that includes everything they can experience, joy and pain being two essentially arbitrary examples of the general principle. The only point of including those four words is so that Yu can have written a sentence that includes both the phrases "volumetric integral" and "joy and pain." Look at him, juxtaposing reason and emotion! There is supposed to be something here about the ways in which science and life interact through technology. But there isn't anything there because none of this feels like it's coming out of an authentic human consciousness. There are no people in this book....more
This was in a special category for me: books whose positive reception make me question my membership in the human race. After finishing it I stared atThis was in a special category for me: books whose positive reception make me question my membership in the human race. After finishing it I stared at the glowing blurbs on the back, looked up some positive reviews online, and thought, who are these people? What could they have been thinking? How could they possibly be so different from me? After that it took a few days of solid social interaction with good friends to convince me that I actually had something in common with my fellow humans -- that they weren't a bunch of ineffable Lovecraftian things hiding in bodies that looked like mine.
(The most extreme version of this experience I've ever had was with Special Topics in Calamity Physics, a book widely praised but so staggeringly, contortedly bad that when I tried to review it, I got to 4300 words and gave up in despair because I hadn't even half exhausted all the issues I had with it.)
What The Magicians very clearly wants to be is a darker, more realistic, more laddish version of Harry Potter or Narnia, combining the cutesy, whimsical worldbuilding of children's fantasy with adolescent protagonists who are horrible little shits in the way real adolescents are horrible little shits. So far, so good, I guess -- I mean it could have been a really funny parody, at least. However, Grossman isn't really going for parody. His book is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, and he seems to want the reader to feel invested in his characters and impressed with the psychological realism of his twist on the fantasy novel. Unfortunately, I was unable to rise to this task, because of the following basic fact about The Magicians:
Everything in this book is determined by Grossman's desire to imitate or respond to his literary models, not by considerations of human behavior. The characters don't act the way they do because real people (or even some distorted version of real people) would act that way, but because their actions contrast with the way Grossman imagines a "standard" children's fantasy character would behave in the same situation. The fantasy world(s) in which the story is set do not make sense, but are supposed to be impressive simply because they are darker and grittier than their literary models. If you stop thinking of everything as a genre joke and start thinking of it as an actual story about people, it falls apart completely.
This is especially bad because the Grossman yearns to be patted on the back for writing a "realistic" fantasy novel. But unlike, say, China Mieville, he doesn't try for realism by seriously thinking about how the darker side of human nature would play itself out in a magical world. He just takes a set of models (HP and Narnia), makes them darker and more vulgar (in implausible and nonsensical ways), and then, having conflated edginess with realism, sits back and expects us to be impressed.
For the first two-thirds of the book, the primary model is Harry Potter, and the primary "realistic" twist is that the characters in magic school are bored. Although the main characters are all very impressed with the idea of learning magic when they first reach the magic school (which as in HP resides in a coexisting culture kept secret by magic), they quickly lose interest and start spending all of their time drinking to excess, playing pool, and bitching about people they know and the general tedium of their little lives. This is kind of a funny idea, but the transition from curiosity to indifference is not made real. The characters simply go from one pole to the other in the course of a very short number of pages (covering months of in-story time). As with everything else in the book, Grossman seems to have been so pleased with his clever twist on his literary models that he didn't think he needed to make it psychologically natural. The characters are bored, and being bored is unadmirable, and that means it's realistic -- what more psychology do you need?!
The characters' incuriosity spares Grossman from having to fill in many of the details of his fantasy world -- if no one asks a question, the reader never hears its answer. Harry Potter also relies on this mechanism, but it makes much more sense there because the characters are younger. They enter magic school around age 12 -- an age when many people are still forming their basic worldviews. As a result, it's easy to imagine that they just take the existence of magic in stride, rather than going around grabbing lapels and demanding explanations. Grossman's characters, though, are 18 when the book begins, and it's difficult for me to imagine an 18-year-old who wouldn't freak out in some way when confronted with the existence of a hidden magic world. Remember, the characters are literally discovering a vast conspiracy -- wizards have been hiding magic from everyone for centuries. Why do they do it? Why don't wizards use magic to improve the world of ordinary humans? Harry Potter at least makes gestures towards answering these questions; The Magicians doesn't even do that, because the main characters -- bafflngly -- don't seem to give a shit.
Grossman even goes out of his way to specify at the beginning that his protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, is a physics nerd who, at 18, is taking college-level advanced physics classes. (I was pleased to see him name-check Differential Geometry, which is exactly the sort of subject that such an advanced high school student might know a few things about.) Now, I also like physics, and if I were transported to magic land one of the things I would ask, in the course of my frantic label-grabbing question-asking "how can this be fucking possible?" tour, is how magic interacts with the laws of fundamental physics. I mean, physicists have developed these theories that seem to explain everything we can observe, and yet there's this extremely powerful force out there which could be harnessed by weird crusty old dudes centuries ago yet has escaped the notice of modern physics entirely? How?! Well, that's a question that Harry Potter sure isn't interested in answering, and one might hope that a book that fancies itself a grown-up HP, especially with a physics-nerd protagonist, would concern itself with it. Nope! Quentin doesn't care. He basically forgets about physics after the first few chapters. I understand that some people get less nerdy when they get to college, but come on -- at least show me the psychological process, Grossman. Later on there's a part where Quentin's studious girlfriend is working on a thesis about how to magically violate the uncertainty principle (ha!) and Quentin just thinks it's boring. Again, things work by the logic of cliches rather than the logic of psychology -- in the beginning Quentin is playing a nerd and later on he's playing a jaded college senior and his ostensible interests just adjust to fit the cliche of the moment.
Why are these people so unhappy? They are in college learning a fascinating subject, their personal lives seem to involve no special difficulties above and beyond those of the average privileged college student, so where's the problem? Grossman so thoroughly fails to provide a motivation (remember, it's dark, so it must be realistic) that it starts to seem like all of the characters, and particularly Quentin, are probably just clinically depressed. This raises the question, though, of why none of them even consider this. The book covers seven years of magic school in a few hundred pages, which is a pretty remarkable span of time in which to be miserable and never ever think about why (except "magic land didn't satisfy me like I thought it would" -- again, good genre subversion but bad psychology -- why don't they wonder why they are unsatisfied?). The characters start out as 18-year-olds with the maturity of 14-year-olds and end up as 25-year-olds with the maturity of 14-year-olds. It's conceivable that someone could change this little in seven years, but again -- give me the damn psychology, Grossman.
The only likable character in all of this is a sort of punk-ish nerd who the main characters all hate because he's really awkward, even though he spends all of his time doing interesting shit rather than drinking and bitching. Is this some kind of joke about how even in magic land (paradise for nerds?) awkward people will get treated poorly? But then we're supposed to sympathize deeply with the main characters and the difficulties they face as boring entitled assholes and I just don't get it. Where is my entry-way into these characters? I've read and enjoyed a lot of books about really awful people, but in all of those cases there was something that rang very true about the characters' particular brand of awfulness. Grossman's characters aren't awful in a way that feels real, they're just awful as a genre joke. Ha, bet you've never seen Harry Potter starring an asshole before! Nope, I haven't. But why is he an asshole? What's going on in his head? Come on, this is Creative Writing 101 stuff!
In the last third of the book we switch over from Potter pastiche to Narnia pastiche and there's some metafictional stuff and a bunch of thematic stuff I would probably discuss if I cared more about what Grossman is trying to do. But I don't. His handling of his themes is so crude and inhuman that I just don't care what he's trying to say.
There were a few scenes that I did really like, mostly those about elements of the fantasy world itself -- like a scene where the characters transform into birds and fly to Antarctica, or one about a powerful and sinister wizard who looks like Magritte's "Son of Man" painting. These scenes make me think that, ironically, Grossman would do much better if he tried to write a more ordinary, non-subversive fantasy novel. But this imaginative stuff never lasts for long, because Grossman has to keep us regularly updated on the characters' horrible lust triangles and how totally shitfaced they were last night. Blech....more
Anathem is a very odd book, and one whose appeal I do not understand.
I don't think it would be unfair to call it an piece of expository nonfiction disAnathem is a very odd book, and one whose appeal I do not understand.
I don't think it would be unfair to call it an piece of expository nonfiction disguised as a novel. Virtues like plot momentum, characterization, drama, verisimilitude, and the like are subordinated to exposition. The book intends to do one thing, and one thing only -- it intends to expose the reader to a set of concepts and arguments Stephenson finds interesting. Stephenson is pretty explicit about this in his acknowledgements:
Anathem is best read in somewhat the same spirit as John L. Casti's The Cambridge Quintet, which is to say that it is a fictional framework for exploring ideas that have sprung from the minds of great thinkers of Earth's past and present.
There's nothing wrong with this as a goal. Sometimes ideas go down better when put in the mouths of characters -- anyway, that's one possible explanation for the appeal of philosophical dialogues. (Anathem, in fact, includes a lot of exchanges that sound, self-consciously, like philosophical dialogues.) And by using an entertaining story as a delivery system, an author can get concepts across to people who would never encounter them otherwise. What's disappointing and perplexing is how flimsy Anathem's delivery system is, how little appeal it has on the level of pure story. (SPOILERS FOLLOW.)
The characters are made of cardboard. The dialogue is stiff and artificial, full of exposition awkwardly jammed into characters' mouths through unconvincing "as you know, Bob" devices and the like. This is the kind of book in which characters often make jokes that are not actually funny, requiring the narrator to explain to the reader that a joke has been made -- the point being not to make the reader laugh, but to convince the reader that the characters are people and not robots. The setting is a fictional alternate universe which is described in loving detail, but which is strangely uninteresting, since many features of its culture turn out, upon examination, to be features of our own world given new names. (The alternate history includes a Rome-like empire called "Baz"; Catholics are "Bazian Orthodox" and Protestants are "Counter-Bazian"; Socrates, Plato and the Sophists are "Thelenes," "Protas" and the "Sphenics"; academic scientists/logicians are "Halikaarnians" while humanists are "Procians"; philosophy and theoretical science are "theorics"; the internet is the "Reticulum"; smartphones are "jeejahs"; Occam's Razor is someone-or-other's steelyard; etc.)
The plot moves at an absurdly slow pace. Its core is a set of maybe three or four major revelations, each separated from the next by hundreds of pages of dithering and blather. There is a huge amount of scene-setting before finally, on page 300 or so, we get introduced to something that, in some science fiction novels, would appear on page 1: the characters discover that an alien spaceship is hovering over their planet! It isn't until maybe page 600 or so that, after a huge amount of overly obvious foreshadowing involving theories of "the polycosm," that the next big plot point drops: the spaceship is from an alternate universe!
In some science fiction novels, the alternate universe concept would just be tossed off in the course of a page or two, and things would move on. In Anathem, the concept itself is the whole point. There are, I would guess, upwards of 100 pages of dialogue in the book solely about whether alternate universes could exist, whether they could interact with the universe in which the book is set, their possible relation to a much-discussed realm of Platonic mathematical forms (the "Hylean Theoric World"), whether they can be understood by invoking the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, etc. The book does very, very little with its alien spaceships and alternate universes; it ends, so to speak, where many science fiction stories would begin. Rather than crafting stories about the effects of these concepts, it crafts a story about people who try to understand them.
Yet very little understanding is achieved. Despite all the long-winded argumentation, the key concepts and arguments remain vague. The basic line of thought that leads the characters to the alternate-universe idea in the first place is odd and questionable. (Much of the argument hinges on the fact that the aliens and their ship are made of "newmatter," a special sort of matter that could conceivably be formed in an alternate version of the Big Bang -- but which the characters also know how to produce technologically on their own planet, which would seem to render the alternate universe explanation unnecessary.) The characters talk on and on about the Hylaean Theoric World, but it is never clear exactly what the term means. A realm of perfect mathematical ideas that influences the real world? But what form would that influence take? Mathematical inspiration? The mathematical nature of fundamental physical law? Both? No one is ever quite clear on this score.
Why did this book make me angry? Because it sacrifices so much for so little gain. With 1000 pages of pure, hardcore exposition, uncorrupted by any need for likable characters or humor or action or plausibility, the least Stephenson could do was create a truly captivating web of concepts. Yet all he really gives us is a few ideas about alternate universes and Platonic forms bolstered by a few vaguely specified and unconvincing (though very, very long-winded!) arguments. The book received a good deal of high praise from reviewers for being "philosophical," for challenging the reader to engage with big ideas. What's funny is that the conceptual burden of Anathem is actually much lighter than that of many science fiction and fantasy novels (no -- of many novels, period). Readers are capable of absorbing information at a much faster rate than Stephenson presents it; a reader of Anathem is more in danger of being bored than being overwhelmed. The difference is that in other novels, readers will gladly do the "work" of puzzling through a confusing fictional edifice as long as they have some prior investment in finding out what happens. Give people a fun protagonist or a bit of action and they'll ingest ten Anathems worth of "theorics" without complaint. In some perverse way, maybe the very austerity of Anathem is its appeal: people (like the book's many rave reviewers) felt that something so boring must be good for them, like eating vegetables. To me, it just felt wasteful and insulting.
(I haven't even mentioned one of the core conceits of the setting, which is a group of academic, non-religious monasteries called "concents" that live in slow, measured contemplation in isolation from the outside world. I think the concents are a cool idea, but one that Stephenson doesn't fully make convincing. In any case, I don't want to go into them because the book isn't really about them, just as it is not really about the characters. As Stephenson himself would admit, the whole setting is a pretext for conceptual exposition.)...more
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