Blimey, after finishing Anathem this morning I feel like someone’s been attacking my mind with some arcane knowledge injection technology. If this is what it feels like after finishing a Neal Stephenson book, I wonder what it actually feels like to be Neal Stephenson! It’s taken me a week and a half to read Anathem, a book I have been salivating at the prospect of since about this time last year. Despite my excitement, I didn’t buy it when it came out, and despite being given it for Christmas, I didn’t read it straight away. There was something not very appealing about the cover, and I knew carrying it to work and back every day would give me a dodgy shoulder (reach for those violins!) – but prompted by its nomination for the BSFA Best Novel Award, I decided to take the plunge.

My first reaction was that my initial reservations must have been founded on an instinct that this book was totally unlike anything that has preceded it – the stunning cyberpunk of Snow Crash, the grand sweep of the Baroque Cycle or the hard-to-classify techno-thriller Cryptonomicon. With Anathem, what Stephenson has actually invented is almost a new genre in itself: hard spec-fic. We are used to hard SF (red shift, relativity, acceleration burns and stuff that requires us to use our brains), but I have never encountered a book before that marries speculative fiction (the term preferred by the author over science fiction) with such topics as geometry, quantum physics, the nature of perception, alternative realities, and other blurry areas where science and philosophy collide. The topics are explored in extreme detail, through the use of proofs and Socratic dialogues, and there are times when this gets pretty involved – but you can’t skip over it because it’s utterly central to the plot. Before I say any more I had better give you a bit of an idea about the initial set-up…

Fraa Erasmas is a member of the Decentarian Order of the Concent of Saunt Edhar – translation (you will find yourself doing a lot of this): he is a sort of scientist-come-monk, in a sort-of-monastery-come-university, and the Decentarian bit means his section only opens its doors to the outside world every ten years (there are also Unarians, Centanarians and Millenarians). At the start of the story, it’s that time for the Decentarians to get their interchange with the ‘Extras’. Erasmas and his friends start to gradually become aware of strange circumstances surrounding the telescopes on the roof of the clock tower, and when Earasmas’s mentor is sort-of-excommunicated (Stephenson has invented an extensive dialect for all these events, which takes a while to get used to, so forgive me if I paraphrase), they know something dodgy is definitely going on. Shades of Harry Potter ensue as they hatch plans to try and find out why Fraa Orolo was kicked out for aiming telescopes at a particular patch of the sky. When they too, start being removed from the Concent, in order to take part in a sort-of-task-force, they discover what Orolo had been looking at: a massive UFO in polar orbit around the planet.

Anathem is a very unevenly paced book: the initial set up feels fairly sluggish, and Stephenson’s cleverly distorted use of terminology, the way that their language is subtly twisted on its axis from ours, slows the process down further (for example, “bullshyt” has become a technical term meaning “speech that employs [...] convenient vagueness, numbing repetition and other such subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said”). When Erasmas leaves the Concent, things start to pick up pace nicely, and he has some engaging adventures; later, the brakes are thrown on with shocking suddenness once he reaches the Convox, the Mathic task-force studying the UFO phenomenon. Decision making is achieved by lengthy (and I do mean lengthy) discussions of an explanation for the appearance of the UFO, including topics like the the Hylaen Theoric World, which is Stephenson’s version of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (I just had to look that up!). There is a point to it all, but fainthearted readers may find it too much to take. If you skip it, though, subsequent stuff may not make sense, so stick with it, and wait for Erasmas’ brainwave which stunningly advances the plot. The adventure that follow are suitably out-of-this-world (hint, hint) and Stephenson gives free rein to his imagination with some clever devices and a satisfying conclusion to the tale.

Neal Stephenson has always asked a lot of his readers, and I admire and respect him for it; but unlike his previous work, his fascination with geometry, quantum physics, philosophy and mathematics is much more central to the plot here – so much so that it occasionally threatens to obscure his considerable imaginative and storytelling talents. While I enjoyed Anathem a great deal, it’s not a book that I can recommend without the caveat that you may, while reading it, need to draw on a considerable amount of mental stamina to keep all the ideas fixed in your head. And if your brain doesn’t start to leak out of your ears, you’re a better man / woman / extra-terrestrial than me…

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