Review Anathem
Jan. 19th, 2009 05:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackOverview
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 :)
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 :)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 01:14 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 01:16 pm (UTC)MWH==Many Worlds Hypothesis (see, Everitt)
:-)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 01:24 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 01:26 pm (UTC)Making this testable though... very hard.
no subject
Date: 2009-01-20 01:31 pm (UTC)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 :)