Neal Stephenson’s new novel is a great thick brick of a book, weighing
one-and-a-half kilos, its 937 pages ending with three appendices, or
“Calcas”, which are in effect geometric puzzles-cum-explanations. Phrases
like “six-dimensional space” are common enough in science fiction, but
Stephenson really wants his readers to grasp the idea, not just take it as a
datum, and he does not mind how long it takes to tell them how to catch on.
His career has shown a growing indifference to (sometimes a marked disdain
for) both convention and verbal economy. Though markedly original, not to
say contrarian, his first three novels could, at a pinch, be ascribed to
recognizable science fiction subgenres, and were of more or less normal
length. Cryptonomicon (1999), however, took off in terms of size and
unpredictability. Its title acknowledged the fantasy tradition represented
by the (entirely imaginary) Necronomicon so often mentioned in the works of
H. P. Lovecraft, but the crypto element looked less to Superman’s Krypton
than to the history of computers and code-breaking. Stephenson’s next
project, the “Baroque Trilogy”, moved away from science fiction itself to
the origins of science, and could be seen not as three but as eight
interlinked novels which just happened to be packaged as a trilogy.
Now Anathem expands the envelope still further, but returns to science
fiction. Or does it? It should perhaps be regarded as an example of “high
fantasy”, that is, a story set entirely in a secondary world, the creation
of which is a major part of the author’s appeal and intention. The issue of
the secondariness or otherwise of the setting becomes increasingly important
in Anathem, with Stephenson once again not just using, but scrutinizing the
logic of matters that are normally skipped over by less ambitious authors in
order to get on with the story.
There is in fact an agreeably familiar science-fiction scenario hidden inside
what looks for several hundred pages like a high fantasy: the world of Arbre
becomes aware of an approaching alien spacecraft, which its inhabitants (and
we) realize is a variant on the “Orion” principle popularized long since by
Poul Anderson, and to some uncertain extent endorsed by NASA: in essence a
ship which blows itself along by continually exploding nuclear bombs behind
it, thus reaching speeds impossible with merely chemical rockets. Why is it
coming; is it a threat; how do we communicate? These are questions which
have been explored many times, from War of the Worlds (1898) onwards, and
Stephenson deals with them quirkily but not unfathomably. What is much less
fathomable is the world of Arbre itself which looks more like Umberto Eco
than science fiction.
The focal character is a junior fraa called Erasmas living in a two-gender
concent of maths (fraas and suurs together), and hoping in time to become an
avout or even a saunt. The sense of something recognizable but not quite
fixed is there, even in the names. Erasmas is not quite Erasmus, fraas and
suurs look very like fratres and sorores, a saunt is something between a
saint and a savant, and a concent is a bit like a convent. A math, however,
is something both like and unlike a medieval monastery, being defined in the
twenty-page “Glossary” at the end of Anathem as “A relatively small
community of avout”, an avout being “A person sworn to the Cartasian
Discipline [not Cartesian, note], and therefore dwelling in the mathic, as
opposed to Sæcular, world”; see further the entry on Saunt Cartas.
Community, discipline, non-secular, all these imply “monastery”, but the
word math confirms the impression that the fraas and suurs, for all their
robes and girdles, are committed not to religious but to scientific and
philosophical purposes – natural science and natural philosophy, of course,
as Stephenson well knows, being regarded as separate disciplines only (in
our world) relatively recently. The concents are accordingly regulated by an
immense and complex clock, which determines the times at which there shall
be aperts, or openings, when the avouts may, depending on the rules of their
particular order, have contact with the outside or secular world.
Erasmas’s concent, in short, is more like a Baconian than a Benedictine
monastery, which makes one think that Anathem might be an example of
“alternate history”, in which, perhaps, the Renaissance and Reformation took
different turns. But this cannot be quite right either. Stephenson says
there is no need to read the chronology at the front of the book, “If you
are accustomed to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling
things out on your own” (note that there are two requirements here), but, if
you do, it suggests strongly that, while Arbre has had a history rather
similar to that of Earth, Fraa Erasmas is living about 3,000–4,000 years
into the future, and that the whole system of scientists withdrawn from the
world came into being at a date which one could identify with our present,
chronicled summarily as “The Terrible Events”. So, as well as being an
Orion-Shall-Rise story, and a sort of high fantasy, and quite like an
alternate history, this is also a post-Holocaust story, but very post-.
There are genre problems all the way, even for those accustomed to
speculative fiction.
At this point one might be tempted to use the term “postmodern”, but one of
the engaging factors about Stephenson’s writing is his open amazement at
many if not most of the features of modern education, especially in the
humanities, seen most accessibly in his third novel The Diamond Age (1995),
and shared by other science fiction writers. In Anathem, postmodernism pops
up as early as page 41 in the “Dictionary” entry on Saunt Proc, a
“metatheorician” who claimed that “all discourse that pretends to mean
anything is nothing more than a game played with syntax”. In the history of
Arbre he was opposed by Saunt Halikaarn, whose predecessors included
Thelenes (surely the Arbrian Socrates) and Protas (whose belief that human
concepts are “imperfect manifestations of pure, ideal forms that exist in
another plane of existence” equally surely equates him to Plato). Disputes
between the different schools of Arbrian theors are still going on as the
story opens, and there are many such schools including the vlors, Zen-style
martial arts fraas, but the reader’s sympathies are soon turned towards the
Halikaarnians; and the issue becomes urgent as the alien spaceship appears,
zeroes in on the nuclear waste dumps guarded ever since the Terrible Events
by major concents, and poses an imminent threat.
What the spaceship eventually seems to offer is something of an explanation
for the similar-but-different feeling which has permeated the book, and also
a reaffirmation of Protas/Plato. The philosophers were right, but for “plane
of existence” above, read “dimension”. The dimensions of space are, so to
speak, leaking into each other, and this accounts at once for the
Wordsworthian intimations so many have felt and the appearance of the alien
spacecraft which has, indeed, been dimension-hopping, one of those
dimensions being ours. The question is whether one can harden up Platonist
philosophy to the point where it becomes science or even engineering, and
Stephenson’s connection discipline, it seems, is geometry. The Arbrians call
the aliens the Geometers, and they announce themselves, conventionally
enough, by outlining the Pythagorean proof (Arbrians ascribe it to
Adrakhones) on their water-and-gravel constructed spaceship. But like
Protas/Plato, Adrakhones/Pythagoras is only the start. The thread leads on
to Leibniz, Husserl, and especially Kurt Gödel, although in order to trace
it one has to put down Anathem and go to the website
www.nealstephenson.com/anathemacknowledgements, for an extensive booklist
and theoretical discussion – spoiled only (and one is glad to find an
occasional crack in Stephenson’s apparatus) by a misspelling of the URL
address in his own text; the one above is the one that works.
There is no doubt about Stephenson’s ambition, nor about his seriousness. One
of the great things about (much) science fiction is that its authors really
mean it. They do think, for instance, that the human species is doomed to
exhaustion and dieback if it does not get itself into space, and soon, while
we have the technology and the resources, a window of opportunity shuttered
by NASA’s inept bureaucracy. They really do believe that humans could be
educated to their full potential and far beyond the levels reached by the
tick-the-box grading systems of modern colleges, if we exploited available
computer- and nano-technology. To them (some of them) mathematics is not
just fiddling with abstractions but a guide to ultimate reality. Some of
them think we need never die. In every case, though, there is strong
awareness of the obstacles in the way of converting possibility to hard
fact, some of them theoretical or technological, but even more of them
social, financial, attitudinal. Maybe what is needed is a retreat from the
“Sæcular world”, as Stephenson calls it, into the “mathic world” of pure
thought and experiment. But there will have to be an engagement sometime,
and much science fiction, like Stephenson’s, has a missionary quality; its
purpose is to get people thinking seriously about serious matters, not the
trivia that fill modern versions of the unexamined life.
One problem is that as science fiction broadened its appeal to mass markets,
much of it became trivial too. Early on in Anathem a fraa–suur discussion
about the origins of dangerous delusion moves from “a satirical play by the
Ethran playwright Temnestra that mocks Thelenes by name” (ie, the Arbrian
equivalent of Aristophanes’ Clouds) to “An adventure drama about a military
spaceship”, further details of which point the finger clearly at Star Trek.
Hundreds of pages later a fraa says sarcastically, and here surely the
target is Star Wars and “trusting the Force”, that there is nothing to be
gained from the belief that “everything will work out just fine because we
have achieved holistic oneness with the polycosm”. Stephenson’s motive,
then, must be at least partly evangelical, but it is a consciously elitist
form of evangelism. Does his immensely detailed and even laboured
historico-philosophical approach succeed? On the one hand, the seriousness,
the multilayered texture of hint and allusion, the quantity of data imparted
and demanded, all these make most mainstream literature (and most science
fiction too) look marginal, introverted, or at best ill-informed. On the
other, one cannot help feeling that Stephenson’s ideal reader – the sort who
will go and look things up on the website, and then follow the references –
cannot exist in very large numbers. Perhaps Stephenson needs to reread
Robert A. Heinlein’s story The Man Who Sold the Moon. If you want the Moon,
you have to sell people the idea. And while that cannot mean everyone, it
doesn’t mean just the potential fraas and suurs.
Neal Stephenson
ANATHEM
937pp. Atlantic Books. £18.99.
978 1 84354 915 4
Tom Shippey holds the Humanities Chair at Saint Louis University. His
books include Roots and Branches: Selected papers on Tolkien, which was
published last year and, as editor, The Shadow-walkers: Jacob Grimm’s
mythology of the monstrous, 2005.
