In the distant future, Anathem will be revered as one of the great books of our time. Not only because it’s a gripping story, but because it seems to predict how philosophy will resurface from the catacombs that science buried it under. The discipline has been in decline ever since the Enlightenment, while science has been on the rise. In Anathem we see the potential for a merging of the two; that as we continue to theorize about the metaphysical implications of quantum theory and multiverses, new schools of thought will emerge that are more based on quasi-religious philosophies and less on the scientific method.
Set on the Earth-like planet Arbre, Erasmas (strangely whose name sounds like a portmanteau of the man who raised me) tells the story of how he and his Concent- a sort of university cum abbey- try to figure out why a spaceship is hovering over their planet. Erasmas is part of an elite group of thinkers called theors who probe the mysteries of the cosmos using thought alone, long after the technology used to extract scientific knowledge was banned to them by the Saecular World. They aren’t even allowed in the Saecular World unless it’s a holiday, at which point they're encouraged to show people glimpses of theoric life.
The most important thing to know before tackling this beast of a book is that it will require some patience to get attuned with the interesting world Stephenson has created. He uses a lot of kooky words to replace things in our language, most of which are regular philosophical terms. In fact, the whole book is like a survey course in logic, as there are many dialogues which display the lost art of rhetoric. He also finds no shame in throwing out historical events on Arbre as if we should already know about them (don’t worry- there’s a chronology after the Table of Contents). But if you’re patient enough to get through the first few hundred pages, which all take place at the Concent, you’ll be rewarded with an unforgettable adventure through the world of Arbre, outer space, and even the fabric of space-time. That being said, lot of this book is work. It challenges you to solve an increasingly complex mystery of causation, evincing daunting subjects like abstract geometry, time travel, and inter-dimensional "worldtracks".
The Ending (spoiler alert)
For anyone who's a bit lost about what happened at the end, maybe this summary will help. It may not have appeared so at first, but Arbre is the home planet of the Geometers. A thousand years before the current events take place, the Geometers emigrated to outer space using a technology that allowed them to travel through different cosmos. Mind you, this is in a different narrative. In the book a narrative is something that branches apart from a worldtrack. Worldtracks are sequences of causation that exist in an infinite amount of cosmos, whereas narratives are sequences of causation that exist as outcomes of the choices people make. Narratives have little bearing on the natural world, whereas worldtracks are restrained by the laws of whatever physical parameters a cosmos may possess.
Since the Geometers left Arbre in a different narrative, there was no way for anyone in the current one to know about them. That's why they were deemed aliens upon returning to their planet. However, there were theors who did know about worldtracks and narratives. After noticing geometric patterns on their spaceship that resembled their own, they deduced that the Geometers had returned home after a millennium of traveling through cosmos. These were the Thousanders, whom Fraa Jad was a member of. In fact, the Thousanders were the ones who'd signaled them to return to Arbre because they felt that a Reconstitution was in order, which would free them from the Concents and diminish the power of the Saecular World. I'm not sure how they did this, but somehow, they signaled them back using the "Wick": an inter-dimensional thread which extends through "Hemn Space" into other cosmos. Meanwhile during this thousand-year stretch, the Geometers inhabited various planets in four different cosmos, one of which was Earth, suggesting that in the Anathem multiverse we on Earth are descended from avouts on Arbre. Meaning, our ancestors came from a planet in an entirely different cosmos.
Lastly, I will touch on the mystery of Fraa Jad. Not only was he a Thousander, but a gifted Incanter. An Incanter is a person with the ability to alter physical reality or change the past by whispering incantations, which he does several times in the book. He was magically able to "cut and paste" narratives on top of one another to create a scenario where he could save the world, negotiate with the Geometers, and die while meticulously allowing Fraa Erasmas and his friends to claim all his glory in order to cover up the power he had. The reason for this cover up was that the avouts didn't think the Geometers, much less the Secular World, should know they had people who were capable of changing the past. That kind of knowledge would bring disaster to Arbre and any other planet colonized by the Geometers.
Anathem is such a fascinating book: truly one of the all-time greats. It really expanded my mind and made me see things in a new light. It shows new potentials in story-telling and philosophy that I think may influence other writers in the distant future. Because let's face it, this is a book far ahead of its time, and most of the world isn't ready for it yet. We may even make scientific discoveries that the book would seem to prophesize, elevating its status as a classic. It always makes me nervous to make claims like this, since I haven't read every single book, but along with Cloud Atlas I believe this is the best book released this century so far, and the finest speculative fiction novel since Gravity's Rainbow.
