I have so many things that I would like to write about, but thanks to my health dipping downward again it has been difficult to focus on a train of thought for long enough to commit it properly to paper.
What I've been doing:
- Watching Battlestar Galactica (and being both intrigued and infuriated by it).
- Suddenly wanting some books about 20th century history to read (hello, library card).
- Having ideas that are easy to have when you aren't in a position to implement them. (Will they last until I get my mojo back?)
- Playing UnAngband (a surprisingly awesome hybrid of Nethack and Angband).
- Letting several posts simmer quietly on various back burners.
- Observing the gradual disappearance of my willingness to make pointless noise.
- Hatching plots.
I've been doing other things as well, of course, but you get the idea.
Note for the wisdom-challenged: This post is about a book I am reading. While it will not have plot details or actual spoilers, if you are the sort of person who does not like hearing things about a book before reading it and you intend to read this book it is probably better not to read this post. Thank you and good night.
Neal Stephenson's new book, Anathem, is out. When I heard that it was coming I took evasive action immediately; I didn't want to read a whole lot of blurb-driven speculation that would colour the way I read the book itself. Stephenson has written four of my favourite books of all time (Cryptonomicon plus the three books of the Baroque Cycle), so it's fair to say I was looking forward to this one.
Unfortunately, there were reaction-spoilers in the hover text for this XKCD comic (WARNING: reaction-spoilers! Caveat clickor!). Caught between excitement over new Stephenson and creeping XKCD-generated dread, I opened Anathem a couple of days ago in a state of profound anticipivalence.
My initial reaction? It's true! It's all true! Randall Munroe is a prophet of doom. Damn it.
Let me explain that in a somewhat roundabout way:
In the Baroque Cycle, the thing I hated most of all was the clever-pants way in which real-world historical figures would be coyly introduced as characters, with clever hints about their identities dropped by Stephenson leading up to the Big Impressive Reveal. To be fair, Stephenson is far from the only author to do this; maybe it's impossible to put historical figures in your fiction without doing it! I do not know.
All of Stephenson's pre-Anathem novels have been set either on Earth (albeit a far-future or historically modified Earth) or on planets that are probably Earth (or at least could be).
Anathem, on the other hand, is set on an Earth-analogue planet, Arbre, which is explicitly not Earth. There are lots of made-up words (cf. XKCD) which are almost-but-not-quite like English words, and an awful lot of space in the beginning of the book is devoted to showing the reader bits and pieces of Arbre and its history (OH LOOK ANOTHER PARALLEL ISN'T THAT CLEVER) using lots of those made-up words (WHAT'S THAT? A PARALLEL? HAVE YOU NOTICED THIS CLEVER THING YET?). All of this makes it much more difficult than it needs to be for the reader to get comfortable (in what is really an intriguing setting) and await the unfolding of the plot.
While I am writing this prematurely, as I am only about halfway through, I am of the opinion that it could quite easily have been set on a far-future Earth, thus dispensing with the "need" for much of the cleverness while still allowing for clever new words and different views of history. After all, several thousand years in the future language will certainly have mutated and it would be entirely unsurprising if (for instance) Plato had become a mythical figure surrounded by all sorts of disputed lore. There would have been plenty of room left for Stephenson to be clever, with perhaps a bit less room for him to overplay the cleverness quite so dramatically.
If it turns out that Anathem is set somewhere other than Earth because there is going to be some kind of contact with Earth and that is what everything is leading up to, I am going to be very very cross.
For all my complaining, though, at some point the cleverness stopped grating, Arbre became familiar enough that I was able to focus on reading the story rather than being constantly distracted by recognising things, and I forged ahead. I can tell that this happened, because on page 305 I had what I can only call a "Holy Crap!" moment. Not because of a dramatic plot development, per se, but because of a fairly minor event which, in context, was earth-shaking in its significance. The characters knew that this meant there was Serious Business going down - and, judging by the way my jaw dropped when it happened, so did I. Without realising it, I had managed to suspend disbelief (and irritation) and go along for the ride.
Nine pages later, a throwaway line filled me with glee (and inspired the title of this post).
Okay, Neal, your sins are forgiven and I will probably enjoy this book after all. PROBABLY. Don't forget that I could still get very very cross.
Postscript: There is a bit later on that reads like it came straight from the same cranky, technology-elitist Stephenson who wrote In The Beginning Was The Command Line:
This took longer than I'd expected beacuse it wasn't made for literate people. I couldn't make any headway at all with its search functions, because of all its cack-handed efforts to assist me.
Heh heh heh.
