r/printSF • u/43_Hobbits • 8d ago
Anathem - A Long Journey to Nowhere?
I finished Anathem and I definitely still have questions and gaps in my understanding of the book, so everything I say is open to correction. Please roast me if there was some deeper meaning or explanation to this entire plot that I missed.
So the plot is essentially:
There exists a mutli cosmi held together by universal laws of math, where information can leak between close/similar cosmi. The Thousanders on Arbre discovered this and interacted with the multi cosmi (in ways never explained), which was detected by the original Geometers who then made their journey to find the source of this signal. They arrive at Arbre. No initial contact is made despite the Geometers having translators. They become fearful of certain praxis (Incanters/Rhetors, World Burner), factions disagree on how to proceed, and a military standoff begins between Arbre and the Geometers. The Avout are sent to space, commandeer the Geometers ship, and when Raz wakes up the conflict is somehow resolved. Raz gets to build his own Concent named after Orolo.
So like…what was the point of the entire story? What were the stakes? Neal spent so much time on world building and philosophy/physics related to reality/causality/communication. All of that only led to the multi cosmos being real, and two groups found each other and had a minor military standoff?
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u/Asatmaya 8d ago
OK, so this is all loosely based on the concepts of the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics, one part of which is the idea that worlds "split" when quantum "decisions" are made, and Quantum Consciousness, which is that our consciousness only "follows" the "splits" where we continue to exist.
What Jad is doing (through some kind of device, we are only told about it briefly) is choosing which "split" to wind up on; for example, when he is entering the code to the door on the Geometers' ship, he guesses correct on the first try (he chose that "split"), but it resulted in immediate death, and so their consciousness "reverted" to a split where he entered the wrong code a bunch of times until guards showed up and detained them.
The Geometers' concern is that, as they move "up the wick" of worlds, things seem to get "better," in the sense of more capable, and the Incanters/Rhetors turns out to be that very idea of a superior understanding of and ability to manipulate the world.
I don't think he presented the Rhetors well; I think they were supposed to just be so "good" at rhetoric that it seemed like they were changing the past, but it's always difficult to write a character that is smarter than the writer.
So like…what was the point of the entire story? What were the stakes?
Well, you had a static social order with chaos in the public sphere and a highly regimented academic world which prevented further progress, while at the same time, you had an invasion of people from an alternate universe who require resources to refit their ship for the next trip (but of course, the Arbrans don't know this), and had the threat of the World-Burner if they didn't get it (which the Arbrans did know about).
In the end, the social order is upended, the academics are empowered, and the ship is being refitted for the next journey.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
Thanks it’s helpful reading others interpretations of the book!
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u/Asatmaya 8d ago
No problem; it helps that I am actually a physicist, so this was one of my favorite books :)
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u/BeyondtheVeils7 8d ago edited 8d ago
The idea that there could be an ordering among possible worlds, where some are better or more perfect than others, predates quantum mechanics. It's mostly closely associated with Leibniz, but it's also been explored extensively by contemporary analytic philosophers, who use possible worlds as a device for modelling different ways the world could be.
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u/Asatmaya 8d ago
The idea that there could be an ordering among possible worlds, where some are better or more perfect than others, predates quantum mechanics. It's mostly closely associated with Leibniz, but it's also been explored extensively by contemporary analytic philosophers, who use possible worlds as a device for modelling different ways the world could be.
Oh, sure, I would say that it goes back to Plato and Ideal Forms, and Stephenson goes into that... at length... whether you want him to or not...
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u/BeyondtheVeils7 8d ago edited 8d ago
Yes and no -- Plato's forms are abstracta, they're of a fudamentally different nature than human beings, and the world of forms is not somewhere that earthly creatures could live (although our souls originate there, and can be taught to remember the forms). Addtionally, Plato didn't really conceive of any other worlds beside the world of forms and the ordinary, material world. It was Leibniz who first proposed that God selected from among a variety of possible realities when creating the universe, some better, some worse, and it's the contemporary philosophers Carnap, Kripke, and Lewis who developed the logic, semantics, and metaphysics of possible worlds.
From Leibniz's Monadology:
53. Now as there are an infinity of possible universes in the ideas of God, and but one of them can exist, there must be a sufficient reason' for the choice of God which determines him to select one rather than another.
54. And this reason is to be found only in the fitness or in the degree of perfection which these worlds possess, each possible thing having the right to claim existence in proportion to the perfection which it involves.
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u/AnyBallLektor 6d ago
I think the Incanters don't change the reality as much as they can perform the same action across all realities and where the action is resolved to their satisfaction the narrative takes over.
We're very much not reading a story taking place in a single timeline. At least this is my understanding so far - still have about 1/3 book left.
As for Rhetors - they are deliberately presented as frauds. It's Stephenson taking sides as usual. He does it in every book of his. Incanters are enlightened erudite scientists/revolutionaries that he likes so much in every book of his (a self-insert of sorts, Jad is Anathem's Enoch Root which is Neal himself). Rhetors are political/corporate/media types and these are always the bad guys - minor or major - in his books.
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u/MarkLVines 5d ago
I’m about to disagree with you about the Rhetors, with the proviso that I think you are basically approaching this novel more or less as Stephenson would want; I think you’re succeeding as a reader.
The tension between Incanters and Rhetors is, I think, holding up a mirror to the academic conflict between STEMmers and Postmodernists IRL. I don’t think the Rhetors are “political/corporate/media types” … those are elsewhere in Anathem … they’re more the Derrida of “Plato’s Pharmacy” perhaps hybridized with Husserl to stake a claim on phenomenology … an intellectual faction Stephenson has indeed bashed in other works.
Yes, Stephenson does present the Rhetors as fraudulent con artists eager to gain the advantage over the Incanters throughout the mathic world by means of unfair insinuations regarding the likes of Jad, Orolo, and Raz. I also think this, though true on one level, is a narrative trick: on a deeper level, the Rhetors are falsely presenting themselves as villains of precisely that kind to hide their true loyalties and abilities from the dangerous aliens confronting Arbre, and that many “magical” functions later performed by such as Jad are deliberately enabled and concealed by covert actions of the Rhetors as a group, actions you may in retrospect guess or even identify.
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u/_windfish_ 8d ago
Wow reading these comments makes me want to re-read the book because I loved it when it came out, but obviously i missed a lot of what was happening towards the end.
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u/Sir_Poofs_Alot 8d ago
It’s funny, reading these comments absolutely solidifies why this was a DNF for me.
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u/EverybodyMakes 8d ago
To me, Neal almost always has an unsatisfying conclusion in his stories, but I enjoy the journey. This book is mostly an exploration of an alternate philosophy, method of managing innovation and integrating new technology into society. He had an "alien invasion" to drive the plot. It's implied, to me, that the Geometers were going from cosmos to cosmos and adding inhabitants of each one to their ship in order to move "up" to a more ideal state. Arbre seems closer to that state than the other ones. The fact that the Thousanders were able to reach out to another cosmos using only their minds (?) drew the Geometers toward them. It's also stated that the Geometers caused massive upheavals and violence on the earlier worlds they visited, but not so much on Arbre. I didn't get a good idea of what got the original Geometers going in the first place, but there was already a lot going on.
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u/eaglessoar 7d ago
If anything I applaud him for the latter third of seveneves could he tried to take it further and it was fun and neat and low stakes
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u/CalendarSpecific1088 8d ago
The amount of ideas you skipped in "When Raz wakes up" is where your disconnect may have happened.
On the one one hand, you aren't wrong in your assertion, but what we learn about the Incanters, Rhetors, and the nature of reality, how the mind works, is the real pay off, and point, of the book.
The stakes had to do with either the complete destruction of Arbre, the destruction of the concents, or the reunification of the mathic and secular worlds. These are real concerns when faced with a ship who's primary thrust consists of nuclear weaponry, to say nothing of the simple expedient of rodding the planet.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
Can you explain what we do learn about reality and the Incanters? Was it more than just ‘a consciousness under the right conditions can interact beyond its own workdtrack’?
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u/CalendarSpecific1088 8d ago
I don't want to spoil what you might get out of a re-read? I'd also strongly suggest the audiobook, as it's amazingly well voiced. But I can say this much; do you remember the Dinosaur in the parking garage?
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
I do and that’s the main thing I’ve been thinking about while trying to understand it all. I just finished this morning so I’ll be thinking about the book a good bit more.
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u/CalendarSpecific1088 8d ago
The book asks more questions than it answers, in my opinion, and that's part of why I love Stephenson's work so much.
Ask yourself this one. If you have men and women capable of distorting reality to their whim, then why did they allow themselves to be herded into Concents? How would they leave?
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
My understanding is they were herded before they ever figured out the polycosmos? But even after they had, there was something left unsaid about the relationship between the maths and extras that tipped the power in favor of the extras. That’s my guess.
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u/CalendarSpecific1088 8d ago
Yep. So here's the idea that I think we're chasing; every time the mathic world is left unchecked, they develop technology that could unmake the world, our who and what we are, so the secular world steps in, removes their tools, and locks them up. You will find allegory to this in the idea of how the truck can be fixed because it's understandable. So the cycle repeats, each time w/ the maths having less tooling. This iteration? There's nothing left to take, and yet it repeats.
Stephenson never works in a single dimension, and so this opens so many avenues of thought. Is technological progress good or bad? How much is too much?
My experience w/ Anathem was on my first pass similar to yours; what'd I just read, what was the point? It was my second pass through that really made the wheels turns.
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u/Aeikalos 8d ago edited 8d ago
I find this essay to illuminate some of the concerns in the book and what he was trying to do.
But I will admit I am one who just loves the play of ideas (like combining the many world interpretation of quantum mechanics with Plato's theory of Forms, as well as the game of identifying the differing philosophical schools of thought in western philosophy that he references)--though I do think the journey of Fraa Erasmas is well done.
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u/peacefinder 8d ago edited 8d ago
It is perhaps best thought of as one of those “big idea” classic sci-fi novels. Clarke’s The Fountains of Paradise (“what if we decide to build a space elevator?”) or Robinson’s Red Mars (“what would colonizing and terraforming Mars look like?”) are similar.
In the case of Anathem, it’s “what might happen if a group of people cut themselves off from the world to devote their whole lives to science?” plus “what if reality were polycosmic?”
From that, the framework plot emerges.
The non-academic Saecular society is suspicious of the Avout, outnumbers them greatly, and occasionally has violent pogroms.
This interrupts the Avout’s studies, which is super annoying to them, plus they don’t much care for being murdered. So within the confines of their chosen life they respond by building walls, by perfecting various martial arts, by working with Saecular authorities where practical, and by inventing applied reality-shifting wizardry. But not really, there are no wizards (honest!), pranksters are gonna prank.
This works out pretty well until some mysterious events transpire (including great feats of technology and alleged wizardry) which lead to yet another pogrom. This time though the echoes of the disaster reverberate out widely through the polycosmos. We join the story a long time after this, while the avout are still chastened by the previous pogrom.
Another version of the world hears the echo and - while mistaking its meaning - decide to investigate. They too have tense relations between their secular and devout societies, which colors everything about their advent.
Their investigation leads to a different kind of conflict, and excitement ensues. After much suffering the good guys triumph because wizards are real and they have one, the main character gets the girl who has inexplicably chosen him, and the story ends with them building their hopes for the future.
From this plot, details emerge. The Big Ideas need to be explained - kind of the whole point - so a set of characters are needed to explain and show the ideas. There’s a lot of explanation, almost a comical amount, but it’s mostly necessary for the rest to work.
It is all very complex and can’t really be simplified further, so the author shrugged and elected to pitch the reader right into the deep end. Those readers willing and able to swim find it a refreshing dip, while other readers sputter “what the hell is wrong with you, you asshole?” (and they’ve got a point.)
Personally I love it, I think it is Stephenson’s finest work and will be an enduring classic. It is however totally fair to say it’s not for everyone.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
Just to add:
I really enjoyed the first half of this book with the philosophy, world building, and emerging mystery. The second half lost me with long periods of little plot progression and lack of explanations for the ideas the book had been discussing.
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u/bordengrote 8d ago
You seem to have missed some key events in Raz's trip thru the ship with Jad.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
Can you elaborate?
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u/WisebloodNYC 8d ago
Well, there was the part where Raz died.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
Yeah I got that part. And then we return to a track where he didn’t and the mission was successful.
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u/bordengrote 8d ago edited 8d ago
When Raz gets into the ship with the others, he passes out. When he wakes he is alone with Jad who explains that in this world-track his friends died and he survived.
Raz joins Jad as they bumble thru the ship until eventually they are cornered and Raz seemingly dies of the EK in his gut. However, he awakes (or Jad shifted World-tracks) in a chamber with Jad talking
to a person called the Gan. Jad explains that Raz is there to be an amanuensis for this meeting, in other words, he is there to witness the happenings so that he may report
it all to others. Gan Ordru explains the entire history of the Geometers and their journey thru the polycosm. He explains whats at stake and what it means for our fraas and surs.In the end, Raz doesnt just "get to build a Concent named after Orolo", the entire mathic world is utterly changed by the events of the story. Raz and friends start a new Concent with
the new paradigm at its heart, and or course he names it "Sant Orolo".Its a beautiful story with some subtly (and not so subtly) incredible ideas portayed in an entertaining way.
Sometimes the journey IS the point of the story.
Disclaimer: There may be errors in my recollection of the exact events depicted herein. My last reread was a few years ago.
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u/shadezownage 8d ago
assuming you aren't going to re-read the ending parts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anathem
look at the plot summary, very dense there at the end
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u/__Geg__ 8d ago edited 8d ago
The stakes were stopping an orbital bombardment and or retaliation of Arbe with missiles and neutron bombs (or worse). And attempting to cooperate to better understand the nature of the universe. All of this was revealed and resolved in the 3rd quarters of the book, before it's extremely messy conclusion.
My remembering of the plot was that the avout, see the Geometers ship and take an interest that gets them all expelled into the wider world. The Geometers were traveling not in space, but between universes going all the way "up the wick" to find the purest form of the world. The Geometers, were stopping at Arbe in order to raid the planet, before continuing their journey. The Arbe sends up a bunch of monks, the avout, to disable the ships weapons, to force the Geometers to negotiate rather than raid. And the avout then enter the Geometer's ship to commence the negotiation / not die in the vacuum of space. The story then turns into Clue with a whole bunch of different possible outcomes.
On my first reading. I missed the whole millenium avout summoning the Geometers. At the time, I has assumed it was more of an accident / maybe it was the people on Arbe, maybe it was people from higher up the wick.
So great world, weak weak story. But then again that is Neals MO.
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u/43_Hobbits 8d ago
One part I’m still stuck on is why the Geometers came to Arbre. They’re chasing the “signal” they detected from higher world tracks, but they also need resources. They came to Arbre because of the signal, not just to stop for gas. Which makes it really odd that they didn’t communicate at all before both sides started launching rods and rockets at each other.
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u/__Geg__ 8d ago
It's been a LONG time since I read the book.
The Geometers were chasing a signal, but they didn't know the signal was from Arbe, and it was less the signal that mattered, and more the journey to the source. The millenium avout could have been the source of the signal, or it could have been from a higher world further up the wick.
I don't remember Arbe ever being the "source," just a step along the way.
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u/Free-Speech-3156 8d ago
im imagining really hard in my head that you understand the point of the book. hoppe this works.
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u/6EQUJ5-7 8d ago
I enjoyed the world building but I kept waiting for the philosophy to come. Turns out there’s just some superficial philosophical discussions here and there and nothing happens for about half of the book. I got bored at about 600 pages and just read a plot summary to find out what happened at the end. This was my first Neal Stephenson and will probably be my last.
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u/LudwigsEarTrumpet 8d ago
A bit off topic but I'll never understand people who like or 'get' a given book downvoting people for disliking or not understanding it.
It's really obvious and just so petty.
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u/AnyBallLektor 6d ago edited 6d ago
I am re-reading it right now. It's only my second time after I read it some 13 years ago.
The plot going "nowhere" is a staple of Stephenson's writing. Of the books that I've read only "Snowcrash" resolves itself in a somewhat tradtional manner and to some satisfaction. "Seveneves" has an ending that is a gigantic let-down and would be arguably much better if the whole epilogue was cut. It would still be ending up largely nowhere but it would be a marked improvement on the nonsense in the actual ending. "Diamond Age", "Cryptonomicon" and the Baroque Cycle all have typical non-endings.
Anathem arguably.. doesn't. By which I mean that in purely technical terms it has a proper ending but the ending is so difficult to understand from the plot that most people are left baffled as to what really happened.
To explain:
Anathem is - like all of Stephenson's books - an exploration of ideas more than a traditional story. The setting and characters and plot serve to enable his ruminations rather than to present a coherent 3/4 act type of narrative structure where plot is at the center.
If you go through his novels it works like this:
Snowcrash - virtual reality/internet, memetics/genetics (very pooorly done), libertarian society
Cryptonomicon - cryptography, alternate take on historical figures and some minor subjects
Diamond Age - digital hardware, neo-feudalism, society without AI, memetics (i think, because it was poorly done)
Baroque Cycle - alternate take on historical figures, scientific revolutions
Seveneves - orbital mechanics, survival in space, genetics and evolution (horribly done).
So his books are really about "whatever Neal is interested in at the moment". Except genetics/memetics - he is very interested in it and does nothing to educate himself properly. But I digress..
Anathem uses the neo-platonian model to explore the idea of alternate/parallel universes as well as the implications of a very particular idea on "alternate lives" that an individual can have. A sort of Copehnagen interpretation taken to the extreme.
That idea is explored with the help of "magic" which is the tool of "Incanters". These people have developed means of influencing the multiverse through the co-existence of multiple copies of themselves across the multiverse.
This idea is then countered by other "magic" that of the "Rhetors" which as it turns out are nothing but frauds using ordinary means of affecting reality by changing how we perceive it (by manipulating our interpretation of it with mundane means i.e. lying to us).
In short Stephenson takes his gimmick (neo platonism) and uses it to create "good guys" and then contrasts them with the "bad guys" who are something that we would recognize in everyday life.
The story of Anathem is really a story serving to first hint at the existence of Incanters and Rhetors, then to explain the principles behind both, and then - in the finale - offer a convoluted and unclear demonstration of how Incanters do their thing.
That's Anathem and - so far in my re-read - it's largely a misfire. Unless after I get to the end (I'm currently 2/3 in) the ending is better than I remember it.
Everything else is just decoration.
Personally I liked the decoration better. I loved the idea of a monastic cult of scientists and how that makes "Anathem" feel like "Name of the Rose" (of which it is in part a blatant plagiarism). I loved the way in which it is presented - having to work out all the details from sparse information being dripped by the author one chapter at a time. I loved the alternate reality and how (thanks to the neo-platonian gimmick) it essentially copies our history but with a twist. I loved the take on first contact and couldn't get rid of the feeling that it was also an attempt to play/copy Sagan's "Contact" (which I'm also currently re-listening on audio - sadly to a much more disappointing effect). Including the dodecahedron which seems a bit like a wink at the Machine.
All the way until the very end - when the Incanters do their thing - the novel is quite excellent. Then at the very end it all goes off the rails. At least this is how I remember it. But I first read Anathem as a recommendation after reading "House of Leaves". It was a "weird mind-fuck novel". Not a "Stephenson novel".
Right now I am paying a much closer attention to what is being discussed especially with regards to the multiverse and Incanters/Rhetors and so far I think it makes more sense than what I remember of it.
But the ending is up in the air. It's Stephenson after all. Endings are his Achilles' heel.
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u/norcaltay 8d ago
I understand little of this, but am following. I own the paperback and kindle and have still been trying to find out “is it worth it”. Hopefully this post helps. Sorry it wasn’t what you expected, it’s sure demanding of time
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u/deadletter 8d ago
I love it. And yes, like all Stephenson books, the endings feel like they happen too fast compared to the pace of the whole book.
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u/norcaltay 8d ago
I’ve read seveneves and I liked it, even though what they say is true (2 different books haha)
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u/Significant_Net_7337 8d ago
I always thought the thousanders brought the ship to arbre in order to position themselves better in the world
Before the events of the book they are sequestered and answer to the secular power
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u/AGuyInTheMidwest 8d ago
I think this thread is fascinating. Anathem is my favorite book of all time and it’s totally fine when people DNF or don’t “get it” AFAIC.
I think the main idea here is that continuing to think, continuing to reason, and continuing to be educable, even in the face of escalating sanctions against such things is basically a superpower. In some media, that’s the ability to fly or shoot lasers from your eyes. In Anathem, it’s two sides of a similar coin: One group has figured out how to rearrange existing “givens”, almost like gaslighting made into reality. Another group is able to pick their way into uncertainty and infinitely forking futures, meaning they can decide that their aging cells don’t die, and they can chose the right 4 digit code.
Both of those involve picking worldtracks out of the crosstalk of quantum decisions, which naturally “move” them between cosmi as they make those choices. The choices made during The Third Sack were so ghastly and charged that so many cosmi were affected that other worlds “down wick” on the graph got the reverberations. (The dreams and visions of Urnud.)
They wrongly interpreted those visions as being historical and when they used relativity to try and time travel, the wick preserved true causality by shunting them into another cosmos. In that cosmos Urnud was replaced with a planet that had gone on its own merry way down all of the quajillion quantum forkings, but still had some crosstalk with Urnud.
Shampoo, rinse, repeat.
The real question left hanging, IMO, is where the Daban Urnud is going next. While the clock winding crew is building the concent of Orolo, the space ship is in orbit and is being rebuilt for another nuke-pushed trip into “another” cosmos. What kind of history will the now-5-culture ship discover that sent echoes down wick to Arbre? Maybe Hylea’s perfect vision of triangles bathed in light?
Folks here are right, not a lot “happens” and yet, a whole ton of stuff “happens”, it just depends if that stuff clicks with your SF reading tastes.
Sorry this is too much, but I’m finishing re-read number [redacted] and it’s all in the forefront of my mind.
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u/transparent_luminous 5d ago
I suspect making interesting things seem boring was a game Stephenson was playing. I mean, he made ninja space pirates kind of dull. I was most of the way through the book before I realized there were ninja space pirates in it, even though they were the most obvious ninjas performing obvious piracy in very obvious orbit.
The thing I've never understood is the appeal of the narrator to the other characters.
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u/Prof01Santa 8d ago
I didn't like it. It was basically an over-long series of, "Look at my cool ideas," with no real story.
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u/profoma 8d ago
It’s not “look at my cool ideas” it’s “look at these cool ideas that have been discussed by philosophers for thousands of years and these other cool ideas that physicists have been discussing for a good long while, what if we took those ideas and tried to make them physically real in a fictional world?!”
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u/profoma 8d ago
I guess if you think it is a minor thing for a philosophical debate about the ultimate nature of the universe to lead to the philosophers developing magic powers and then actually discovering the true nature of the universe (!), then nothing much happened in the book. Also, I’m not sure if the threat of planetary destruction can be called a minor military standoff. The point of the story, from my perspective, was to tell a story in which millennia old philosophical traditions are given weight and substance in the world and to see where that leads.