Welcome to the world of Aubre, an analogue to our familiar Earth (look for off-kilter references to everything from Star Trek to hip-hop fashions), at once so familiar and yet so estranged and estranging. (If estrangement be the soul of SF, this book is nothing but soul!) The people of Aubre—humans like us—have access to nearly 8,000 years of recorded history, granting their world a correspondingly deeper richness than ours: richness of language, culture and thought. But it's been a cyclical history, troubled by various rises and falls of civilization.
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Anathem is a book no one else alive could have written. |
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Our narrator is one Erasmas, a young avout in the concent of Saunt Edhar. ("Saunt" is a corruption of "savant.") Utterly dedicated to his calling, yet not without extramuros sympathies and attractions (seen early on when he is allowed out of the concent and gets to visit his sister, Cord), Erasmas, under the tutelage of his older mentor Orolo, is about to choose an order and field of study. But although he does not know it, his whole predictable cloistered life is scheduled to undergo a revolution.
Orolo, an astronomer, has detected an anomaly in the skies: Some alien vessel is orbiting Aubre, its intentions unknown. This heretical knowledge leaks out gradually, and it results in Orolo's excommunication. Soon Erasmas and his young buddies—Arsibalt, Jesry, Lio, Tulia and Ala—will be forced to follow Orolo, encountering a world that doesn't understand them (nor do they fully comprhend that world), along with mysterious beings hailing from beyond even the most far-out concepts of the avouts!
If Ursula Le Guin and Umberto Eco set out collaboratively to write a Hardy Boys adventure of detection and employed the selected works of Gene Wolfe (the New Sun sequence [1980, et seq.]), John Crowley (Engine Summer [1979]), Brian Aldiss (the Helliconia series [1982-85]) and Austin Tappan Wright (Islandia [1942]) as models, they might have come up with Anathem. But only if they also tossed in all the other thousand-odd notions and literary predecessors teeming in the fecund, fantastic, febrile mind of Neal Stephenson. (And there's one crucial authorial influence we'll discuss in a minute.)
What Neal Stephenson has done here is multiplex and admirable, yet not without its inherent defects.
Neal Stephenson has instantiated an utterly sovereign and believable subcreation. The world of Aubre is the kind of autonomous place that Tolkien invented in Middle-earth. And, as with Tolkien, the subcreation relies on several foundations. First and foremost is language. Neal Stephenson's glossary of invented terms is nearly 20 pages long, and he employs them with creative flair. A special language breeds a unique and substantial worldview, in both characters and readers.
Neal Stephenson's mapped out a history for Aubre that has the organic feel of real events, and which is meaningfully inhabited by his characters on a minute-by-minute basis. Moreover, this history is not static, but evolves during the course of the book.
And he's filled his world with vital philosophical ideas (modeled in a creatively warped fashion on ideas from our timeline) that have the power to motivate life-or-death decisions among characters that are juicy and rounded. Erasmas and his voice are utterly otherworldly, yet inviting.
Having pulled out all the stops in his world-building, Neal Stephenson has also not neglected to concoct a crisis and plot that are unpredictably intriguing, and which dovetail with the intellectual themes.
Having acknowledged all these superior tactics, goals and achievements, what then constitutes Anathem's intermittent yet inescapable moments of failure?
Perhaps some of the trouble lies in the very act of world-building itself, carried to such extremes. This quintessential mode of SF and fantasy carries its own seeds of destruction, as recently itemized by M. John Harrison:
"Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. ... Worldbuilding numbs the reader's ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, worldbuilding is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there."
So there's a bit of that trouble present. But also there's the Asimovian talking-heads ambiance.
Asimov is the secret propellant in Neal Stephenson's rocket fuel. "Nightfall" and the Foundation books (1942, et seq.) are the hidden templates of Anathem, moreso than even my earlier examples or other relevant stuff by Mervyn Peake and Walter Miller. The eminently rational discursiveness and dialectic modalities that even at shorter length in Asimov's work could begin to pall are at work in Neal Stephenson's book in great windy passages.
But there is simply no denying, ultimately, that Neal Stephenson's talents are as large as his ambition and visionary ability. Anathem is a book no one else alive could have written.
If you visit the Web site for this novel, be sure to listen to the music of the Aubrean avouts found here.
-Paul
