What I’m reading… (Anathem)

Mostly this site is going to be about what I’ve written, or am writing, but I’m also someone who thinks they’re clever and that their opinions on stuff are important and impart universal truths (hey, this is the internet) so from time to time (or rather to fill the gaps when I’ve nothing new to post…) I’ll talk about stuff that inspires me. Y’know, kind of like a blog…

At the moment I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Anathem (and also one of the Saint books by Leslie Charteris, but that’s for another day). It’s a good book, very engrossing, and despite the fact that like all of Stephenson’s books it’s big enough for you to hollow out and live inside, I’m getting through it quite quickly. (Quicker than I’m getting through Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, anyway… And I still haven’t finished Lord of the Rings, which I started reading when I was eight…)

The book has a main plot which moves very slowly (kind of like Moby Dick or, and this comparison is more apt, the Brothers Karamazov) and is peppered along the way by primers for scientific schools of thought. These digressions into thought experiments are fun, although I feel like I’ve seen them before. This may be because I wrote my BA dissertation on Philip K. Dick and so read a lot of stuff about the nature of reality (including Plato’s Republic and some summaries of Kant) back then, but also because last year I read Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality and this year I’ve been working my way through Godel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid by Douglas R. Hoftstadter. But this is part of the text, as there is much talk about how all ideas already exist in some form or another. It also brings out the old story that calculus is probably the only way that we’ll be able to communicate with an alien species if we ever encounter one. I can’t disagree that I don’t believe that language will be the way forward in any such encounter, but I think we have to accept that just because all we can think of is numbers, it doesn’t mean other lifeforms will. But I digress…

What I’m really intrigued by, as someone who had to make a choice between science and art (I did English, Maths, Biology and Chemistry at A level) and therefore still looks fondly on at what scientists are up to, is the world that Stephenson has built for the novel. The main characters are all scientists/scholars, brought up in the scientific disciplines to search for proofs and to work on theories. But the microcosm society that they live in (a hermetically sealed complex called a concent, which keeps them away from the general populace or extramuros) is so clearly based on religious trappings, that it puts the lie to the more extreme science-worshippers like Richard Dawkins. The scientists/scholars are referred to as the avout, with it’s clear connotations of the devout, and particularly influential thinkers are raised to the position of Saunt, a contraction of savant, but deliberately evocative of saint. Science at the moment cannot be held up as a way of life, because as yet it does not teach us about how to live our lives. It tells us how to evaluate, but tells us nothing of forgiveness, or the higher social concepts that we have developed.

So a good book, but the bits that are making me think and bending my mind, are the implicit elements of the book, the bits that warrant the huge page count. Anyway, next post I intend to talk about why a lot of the stuff that you’ll see on this site will be science fiction-y (although science fantasy is probably a better descriptor) and why that’s important to me.