Anathem was a birthday present last year, and it made the perfect jury duty book. I hauled that thing (1000 or so pages) to the courthouse every day for three days, and sat in that (very nice, airy, light-filled) room with it until it was done. I like big books and even finished all three of Stephenson’s baroque cycle, so I was looking forward to this one. On the other hand, I’ve had my issues with Stephenson, so, you know.

Anyway, the book is pretty much “The Name of the Rose” meets “Idiocracy” meets “The Urth of the New Sun”. It’s got the first’s (more or less) monastery setting and rambling philoso-religious dialogues (which are an excuse for the author, whether Eco or Stephenson, to show off lots of library time), the second’s humorously stupid future (some 3000 years in the future and the masses still walk around wearing sports jerseys and drinking “sugared beverages” from gigantic plastic cups), and the third’s assault of words you don’t understand (in Stephenson’s case, because he made them up; in Wolfe’s, because they are archaic dictionary words no one actually uses any more).

I cynically expected I knew where the story was going, but it turned out I was totally wrong. So that was a pleasant surprise. On the other hand, where the story went was fairly goofy. There were a lot of interesting stories that could be told in this world; I’m not sure this was the best one. Obviously, it was needed to tie the whole thing together but it all seemed sort of.. dumb and anticlimactic.

And now a little more into spoiler territory. The final “omg he was dead all along” type revelation at the end of course seemed obvious in retrospect; I was a little disappointed in myself for not seeing it sooner. On the other hand, all the crazy many-worlds stuff that was used to craft the resolution just makes no sense if you stop and think it through. For example, since Raz has different memories from most other people at the end, the question obviously arises: what the hell happened to the Raz who did have those memories? Dead? “Absent”? Was he hurled into a different world-track?

And at a more abstract level, having multiple (in fact, all possible) worlds just saps all the tension out of a drama. Like, it’s nice to think “hey they fiddled with the worldstreams to make everything come out all right!” but, you know, it didn’t all come out all right in a lot of other worlds. The idea that there are an infinity of other worlds out there containing all other possible resolutions to a story kind of makes the fact that you happen to be reading the one with the happy ending seem unsatisfying at best and perhaps naive and childish. Now, it’s possible that Stephenson was aware of this metafictional paradox and, Borgesianly, was using it ironically to question the whole enterprise of storytelling in the face of a quantum mechanic worl- ha ha no, I don’t buy it either. Sorry, I like Neal Stephenson and he can tell a good story sometimes, but I don’t give him that much credit. He wanted his ripping yarn to have a totally awesome resolution and, hey, people using their crazy mental powers to diddle with the multiverse sounds pretty awesome, right? spoilers over.

But anyway to come back down from the metafictional plane, this actually is a pretty ripping yarn, and I enjoyed it and highly recommend it if you have jury duty, or even if you don’t.