Anathem by Neal Stephenson

This was an excellent book. I think I enjoyed it even more than Cryptomonicon. However, it did have a tendency to get bogged down in theoretical discourse, it sometimes felt like a coming of age novel, and, I'll be honest, a lot of concepts went right over my head. It's even more noteworthy since it's a Hugo Nominee for 2009!

Amazon.com had one of the best summaries of this book. I honestly could not summarize this book and do it justice. This is one of those books that should just be experienced, like Crytomonicon or Dan Simmon's Hyperion or Olympus series.

Amazon's description summarizes Stephenson's writing as: In this follow-up to his historical Baroque Cycle trilogy, which fictionalized the early-18th century scientific revolution, Stephenson (Cryptonomicon) conjures a far-future Earth-like planet, Arbre, where scientists, philosophers and mathematicians—a religious order unto themselves—have been cloistered behind concent (convent) walls. Their role is to nurture all knowledge while safeguarding it from the vagaries of the irrational saecular outside world. Among the monastic scholars is 19-year-old Raz, collected into the concent at age eight and now a decenarian, or tenner (someone allowed contact with the world beyond the stronghold walls only once a decade). But millennia-old rules are cataclysmically shattered when extraterrestrial catastrophe looms, and Raz and his teenage companions—engaging in intense intellectual debate one moment, wrestling like rambunctious adolescents the next—are summoned to save the world. Stephenson's expansive storytelling echoes Walter Miller's classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, the space operas of Larry Niven and the cultural meditations Douglas Hofstadter—a heady mix of antecedents that makes for long stretches of dazzling entertainment occasionally interrupted by pages of numbing colloquy.


It could be debated that this is a coming of age novel - the main character is 19 years old and knows very little about the world at large beyond his cloisted walls until he is forced to face them when he gets booted out. It could be debated that this is a book about first contact. It could be debated that this is a discussion technology vs theoretics. There's A LOT going on in this book...

My friend Gail read this a while back, and if you don't mind potential spoilers (I personally don't think she gives anything of import away) you can get a feel for a different perspective. Disorganized, As Usual