Review Anathem

[jack]

Overview

OK, so now I've read Anathem. I enjoyed it very much. It was a lot easier to get into than the Baroque Cycle, I basically read lots and lots over the weekend, never feeling the need to put the book down for a few days to recover, though I feel a little exhausted now I've finished.

It is indeed very reminiscent of Name of the Rose, although Rose probably evokes the feel of its world a lot better. I love the academic mosastic style of every conversation, several of which were utterly hilarious. And I'm fond of the characters, although I suspect when I view the book with more distance, they may not actually be as unique as they could be. We'll have to wait and see to discover how much I love it in retrospect.

I love the idea that polycosmicity, invented by thinking very hard, had such results. Although I doubt the inter-universe interaction described is actually completely consistent.

Cosmography

Just to say, I have some idea of what interactions between worlds were proposed. I'm not positive exactly what Fraa Jad could do. (Or even whether the story would be consistent assuming Erasmas' experience with him was a dream.)

And I'm still thinking about the way the related cosmoses supposedly work. Does the dodecahedron count as a particularly big bit of cross-talk?

Connection to Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle

Where are the loose ends from the Baroque super-cycle? Somehow the reticence with which the books discuss Enoch Root and the Solomonic Gold makes the mystery much more compelling than more heavy-handedly telegraphed mysteries, especially because they hint at some fundamental physics which underlies the whole series.

I expected it to tie up more obviously to Anathem. We have definite hints that the gold might be (natural or artificial) newmatter gold, and that similar mental universe-munging can do certain other universe-manipulating tricks and/or prolong a human life-span.

But we merely know that that is possible to do things like that in principle, I didn't see any actual mentions of direct links. If the characters' theories about how the polycosmos works are correct, obscure influence can flow from Arbre to Earth, but not vice versa.

And the ideas on Arbre don't sound exactly the same, fwiw: Evoking, whatever it is, sounds like a way to both extend life, tweak the universe, and produce new-matter. Whereas Enoch appeared to use the gold in some way to extend life (and not just extend life, in the sense of pre-emptively preventing DNA decay, but to resurrect relatively gross[1] tissue damage).

I do feel satisfied to have answers to the sort of background ideas Stephenson had from which the Root/Gold theme presumably flowed, whether or not the details are ever explained, implicit or consistent.

[1] Take it as a pun if you like :)

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

It was a lot easier to get into than the Baroque Cycle,

In the event that anyone ever has difficulty telling you and me apart, I shall point them at this statement; not that I found Anathem difficult to get into, but the Baroque Cycle is one of those things that feels like home to me.

I had thought Stephenson was planning a far future chunk of Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle to resolve the whole thing, but the newmatter here being the Solomonic Gold was not a connection that had occurred to me, and is interesting. I did not like the different physics things as a whole, though; it sort of makes poetic sense but it's a jarring failure to me on a literal level and it does not seem to really be absolutely vital to the story.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

In the event that anyone ever has difficulty telling you and me apart, I shall point them at this statement;

ROFL. Yes. Although you make it sound surprising that two people might disagree :)

I always describe Cryptonomicon as the me-est book. The first time I read the Baroque cycle it was rather confusing, with the massive historical digressions, and the way it skates obliquely past important things in the plot. In retrospect, I am incredibly fond of it. But judging from the general consensus of people I've heard discussing it, it's impenetrability isn't just me, most people think it is (unnecessarily) impenetrable. Whereas I read Anathem pretty much straight through.

the culminatory revelations contain some poetic takes on physics which many readers have hated, and which I found mildly irritating in that they do not appear to be relly necessary to the shape of the story

Yeah. I know what you mean. I ask myself, could the story have worked without them? But I can't imagine the story without them; it just seems so much what Stephenson wanted to talk about.

I think I put my finger on what in particular bothered me. I like the idea in principle that you can work out cool things based only on thought and observations of thought. However, most science fiction alternate-physics hypotheses generally manifest in subtle or gross differences in physics experiments. Anathem seems to be saying that in principle you can deduce advanced incantry by extending for a thousand years the sort of thought experiments described in the books. Those thought experiments seem equally valid in this world, or a hypothetical Newtonian or Turing-machine world, where they would presumably be false, and hence must be flawed.

Come to think of it, I guess that's my core objection to deducing the existence of God from pure logical arguments; it contradicts my observation that I think a world without God is conceivable[1].

[1] Sort of the reverse of the ontological argument? :)

I had thought Stephenson was planning a far future chunk of Cryptonomicon/Baroque Cycle to resolve the whole thing

I had heard Cryptonomicon was originally intended to have far-past and far-future threads in it as well, which became the Baroque Cycle and I assume Anathem. Although I don't know for sure if Anathem is supposed to be in the series, or only based on the same ideas.

the newmatter here being the Solomonic Gold was not a connection that had occurred to me

I was particularly looking for a resolution of those things; if you're looking for the question "what matter in these books has properties subtly different to nature" it jumps right out :)

I also googled to see what other people had already said, and didn't find anything I thought very well thought out, although I found several speculations of that, and of Enoch Root, so I can't remember for sure what I thought before I read about it.

Some people speculated that Jad was Enoch, but that didn't make sense to me. Enoch doesn't seem to track as either a rogue Millenarian, nor as a Millenarian founder, and in either case how would he have crossed worlds?

I was surprised there wasn't more dissecting of previous books by now, or of Anathem already, given their geek-popularity I'd have thought they'd all be analysed every way possible, and if I got bored of thinking, I could look up all the popular theories in one place and find the answers, but there doesn't seem to be. (The most helpful I recall was http://www.cafeaulait.org/cryptonomicon.html, but it didn't settle things in my mind :))

[naath.livejournal.com]

Jad would seem to be the wrong age for Enoch unless they have time travel as well as universe-hopping.

Enoch could be a person who figured out the things that the Millenarians figured out on Arbre for himself on Earth. Quite possibly a very long time before the events of the B.C. so maybe Stephenson is going to reveal that the Ancient Egyptians had this knowledge or some such thing.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Jad would seem to be the wrong age for Enoch unless they have time travel as well as universe-hopping.

Well, they both seem sort of ageless. And they might have time travel, (the dodecagon spent a hundred years SOMEWHERE in between visits) although I think they do.

Enoch (or Solomon, or someone) forming some of the ideas independently makes the most sense, if there's a connection.

[naath.livejournal.com]

100 years futsing around in space? maybe they needed to get out of the gravity well of the star to use it?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would fit. Now I recall they thought they had pegged the times of the two cosmoses progressing in a fixed ratio. However, the physics is sufficiently little understood I don't think it's ruled out time-travel might have happened in there somewhere.

(Come to think of it, maybe that's the point; maybe "past" represents not just "back along our own worldtrack" or "towards a 'less hylean' worldtrack" but both, imagine two axes at a slant; hence you can move towards hylean so long as you also move twice as far into the future at the same time, or something.)

[naath.livejournal.com]

Oooh, maybe Enoch got onto the Dodecagon when it showed up at Earth? that would be fun :-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That's what I first assumed when I saw it. I assumed Enoch had to appear in the book somewhere, and that if I was looking for someone immortal called "Enoch" I'd soon spot him. I figured out Antarcs were us shortly after they described the layout of the four worlds (if you hope one of them is, it was the only one plausible). After that, and when we met Jules Verne III, I expected Enoch to turn up on the spaceship manipulating things. However, the only Antarc we really see was Verne, who it seems wasn't Enoch. So apparently he didn't.

[naath.livejournal.com]

I appear to have missed any such mention of the gold being "new matter" and had assumed that Stephenson had decided to include Mystical Bullshit for the lolz (I hated that part; I guess in a new-mattery way it makes more sense and is less annoying).

The intra-universe travelling is done in the opposite direction to the HTF - so presumably Earth-Arbre interchanges could actually happen in both directions; but I'm not sure I grasped that very well.

Stephenson appears to have been reading Penrose and/or Josephson elaborating on Everitt. I don't think attempting to *make sense* of this is especially useful since they are both Hatstand. Everitt and DeWitt refrain from such flights of fantasy, and mostly wrote Lots Of Equations to demonstrate that the MWH gives the same answers as the C.I. does (I wouldn't bother reading it).

Fraa Jad appears to be able to do something along the lines of keeping his conciousness coherent across a number of world-lines so he can communicate with other versions of himself. I'm not sure how the low-level cell repair comes into that; perhaps you select the version-of-you that has the least damage on a daily basis?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I appear to have missed any such mention of the gold being "new matter"

I don't think there were any hints; just that the gold was somehow different from normal gold. And that so is newmatter. (And if the worlds of both stories are connected, not just thematically similar, then it seems inevitable, whether the gold is simply gold-from-another-universe, or is gold-programmed-to-do-something-special.)

I always assumed there would be some closure to the arc of the gold and Root. Now I'm not sure. Though if the hylean theoretic world stuff is supposed to be that, I don't know if it counts as non-mystical-bullshit (even if Leibnitz said it) :)

Stephenson appears to have been reading Penrose and/or Josephson elaborating on Everitt.

I didn't recognise the ideas well enough when I read it, I wouldn't have been able to peg them to sources. However, the acknowledgements section linked to a very long article on his website describing where all the science had come from (Penrose was definitely prominent).

I don't think attempting to *make sense* of this is especially useful since they are both Hatstand

(Whoops -- I lost you. I can't parse Hatstand or "MWH"?)

I'm not sure how the low-level cell repair comes into that; perhaps you select the version-of-you that has the least damage on a daily basis?

That's how I imagined it.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Hatstand==bonkers
MWH==Many Worlds Hypothesis (see, Everitt)

:-)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Thanks. OK, that makes sense :)

I think I did guess MWH and CI should be many worlds hypothesis and copenhagen interpretation, I just couldn't remember the official names, so I wasn't sure.

mostly wrote Lots Of Equations to demonstrate that the MWH gives the same answers as the C.I. does

That's the point, IIRC? We just need someone in the next century to come along and either (a) invent an interpretation which seems consistent, non-subjective, and not propose untestable facts or (b) invent a test for many-worlds or similar hypothesis.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Well, yes. But if you said "many worlds is a cool idea" then someone might say "but it doesn't work" so you have to go away and write down the numbers and get the right answers out the end so you can say "see, works".

Making this testable though... very hard.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

you have to go away and write down the numbers and get the right answers out the end

Oh yes. And I should probably know a little more about what it actually says than I do. But I'm happy to stipulate that someone has run the numbers and shown the interpretations identical, without doing so myself; that doesn't sound implausible :)

Making this testable though... very hard.

Right :)