Book review: Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Anathem is a novel by Neal Stephenson.
It is almost impossible to summarize Anathem — it’s 930 pages, plus an extensive glossary, three appendices, and a web page full of acknowledgments and sources. So, what can I say about the novel?
I think Anathem is a great novel, but you may hate it.
It’s a novel of ideas — very intensely so. It’s science fiction, and it’s a variant of a particular genre of science fiction called alternate history. But usually, in alternate history, a particular event is changed, and the author guesses as to how history would change — the South wins the Civil war, Adolf Hitler is stillborn, that sort of thing. You can recognize the names of people and places. In Anathem, this is not the case — although a lot of the characters are analogues of ancient Greeks. You can see Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato and others, but not by those names, and there is no place called Greece.
Anathem in fact, is almost an alternate history of philosophy novel.
One way to look at it, one that the author might have been playing with, is, “Suppose that the ‘dark ages’ came immediately after the classical Greek period” because, while there are analogues of the ancient Greeks, there are none of the Romans, and none of the Romans; there’s no Jesus or Mohammed.
