My favorite book at the moment, and for the past decade or so, has been Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Partly because the main characters are mathematicians and astrophysicists and, like in many of Stephenson's books, they spend large chunks of time talking about their academic interests. Partly because Science Monks! I mean, yeah, some of the science is kind of sketchy. But still, Science Monks! Locked away from general society in the pursuit of Knowledge. Clocks and bells and Saunts and specific styles of singing and dressing. The whole setting of the Science Monks, and why Science, and why Monks, and the fear and veneration and ignorance of what it means to devote yourself to study. Ascetics who make very creative use of the few possessions they're allowed. Also the lexicon; I love the lexicon. "Enthusiast". "Plane". "Syndev". "Sack". "Reputon glass". "ROBE". The way that these terms are tied in with the history and the world-building, and yet are perfectly understandable by people outside it. I find myself accidentally using some of it in my thoughts, especially "enthusiast"; such a great word for a concept that we have but I'm not sure if an equivalent term exists in English. And certainly not least, the parking ramp dinosaur. Anyway, I love this book.
oh god i adore that book and now i need to find where i buried my copy so i can reread it. i was just thinking about the permitted/forbidden crops business the other day, and the (tessellation?) pattern problem.
now i feel like i need to reread this book. even though i think i've read it this year and generally have a good memory for books, and i have tons of other books that i'm reading. just... it is a big book, with lots of stuff going on it - like, it's understandable and awesome but... talking about anathem does seem rather like an exercise in "where do i even start?", haha. oh, i found a starting point now. Spoiler: ending spoiler well, i recall that i was surprised by the characters being aliens from another universe, even though, well, their culture was rather different from ours. i originally thought that they were humans that moved onto another planet and that over the very long time that they were there, simply lost their knowledge of our culture and built for themselves a new one. 'cause, well, they were humanoid and i expected that aliens specifically wouldn't be, that it would be too star trek (no offense, star trek, i like you) if they were and that anathem wouldn't go for that kinda thing. it's an assumption that i think comes from the type of science fiction i normally read. i wonder if that would have came as less of a surprise to me if i had originally read it after starting the weirdmageddon tango rp, instead of before it, considering how "aliens from another universe" is a big thing in it. then again, if i had, i wouldn't be able to discuss in the thread rn, haha.
Oh hey, I've been reading Snow Crash, which is also by Neal Stephenson. (I gather it's about language and fictional hacking, which are two things I'm super interested in, so I couldn't resist.) I wanted to move on to his other books when I finished with it, assuming I liked his writing, because he seems to do a lot of nerdy sort of stuff. I'll have to do Anathem next, it sounds neat.
No, if you're reading Snow Crash, don't read Anathem next. Read Diamond Age next. They're not officially Connected, but they're connected. But then read Anathem after that.
I read Anathem some years ago, I remember liking it a lot. I'll have to reread it some time. (Snow Crash I reread every one or two years, because it's seriously one of my favorite books ever.)
A bit of phrasing that I was abruptly reminded of while reading about the current US election cycle: "the infinite clown-fight that was Saecular politics". Sounds about right.
I don't really realize how much this book has entered our household lexicon until I hear my wife say "I have been acted upon by a force of unknown origin" twice in as many days.
There's an Anathem thread and I didn't notice it? The first two years of my relationship with Bash, we'd be having a great conversation about science or philosophy or whatever and I'd just get to a point where I couldn't keep going because I needed to reference Anathem. Eventually, he read it. To me. As bedtime stories. <3 I like it better than any other Neal Stephenson, except parts of the Baroque Cycle. Well, and I'm not sure where I place Seveneves yet.
