This review bothers me. I don’t read a ton of sci-fi, but I read Anathem for work. All 937 pages of it. On my vacation. And the reason it bugs me, is that while I’m reading Dirda talk about death rays on the planet Orth, I know, having read this book for nine-hundred pages, that Orth is a language, and that there are no death rays. Like Wired, apparently Dirda’s review copy didn’t come with the extensive glossary in the back.
So the review, as I read it, is more like “The first two-hundred pages were too slow, so I skimmed around, found some suitably-overwrought passage with made-up words, and muse about the thin line between cheap genre-fiction and literary science fiction until I hit my word count,” which is a fairly damning thing to do when you’re reading a book that partly accosts modern society’s lack of an attention span.
The big idea in the book, inspired heavily by The Long Now Foundation, is that we are too distracted. In a world where people won’t stop talking on their cell phones, Stephenson creates a cloistered society of people that don’t leave their walls but every 1, 10, 100, or 1000 years. Meanwhile, they pursue math, physics, and intellectual debate. It’s like Hogwarts for nerds. And in an election year, where we’re bombarded by sound-bites of disingenuous arguments, it’s an interesting conceit for a science-fiction novel. Dirda glosses over this whole set-up, even though I’d call it the biggest thing worth talking about in the book.
I don’t completely disagree with him. I enjoyed the Anathem, but I didn’t love it. But he misses the point so thoroughly that I have to wonder what makes him more qualified to be the Post’s book-reviewer than, say, me.
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