All posts tagged with “anathem”


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Regarding Anathem and the dreaded science fiction infodump

I received Neal Stephenson’s new opus Anathem for Christmas. It’s a big, beautiful, absolutely glorious SF book. Maybe I should qualify that with a “so far,” since the book is nearly 900 pages long and I’m only about 150 in. Regardless, it’s a wonderful and I am thoroughly enjoying it.1

But what’s curious about the book is its approach to the dreaded SF convention of the infodump. You’ve seen them before — the few paragraphs of text (often in italics) that quickly bring readers up to speed, telling them about the robots/hyperdrive/fractious interstellar politics that will drive the story. SF movies are particularly bad about this. Take the famous opening crawl of Star Wars, for example, or the beginning of Alien or Blade Runner. Terminator 2 features a bit of opening narration.

Anathem, on the other hand, doesn’t use this crutch. Well, sort of. It’s set on a fictional world that, unlike most in SF, has a long history of several thousand years. In order to bring the reader up to speed with the strange politics, religions, and history, the book has:

  • An author’s note, complete with a four-page, 6,000-year timeline
  • Dictionary definitions of made-up words spaced liberally throughout the text
  • A glossary of terms
  • Three appendices

That’s quite a lot! But all this information is more helpful to the reader, in the end, than doing it any other way. It helps preserve the integrity of the narrative and — here’s the best part — gives readers options. Those who want to forgo the timeline and endnotes and blah blah blah can just dive in and let the story reveal itself to them. Others2 can take the big picture approach. This isn’t as elegant as a solution as Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell’s footnotes, but then again Neal Stephenson’s world is quite a bit more complex than the alternate history dreamed up by Susanna Clarke.

In a way, Anathem reminds me of The Name of the Rose — the monastery-like setting, the world poised on the edge of disaster, the young and naïve (and overeducated) narrator. I hope that the end satisfies just as much.

  1. Not just the text of the book, either. Despite what has been said here about the coming death of print, Morrow Publishing has created a wonderfully physical object. The text is beautifully set, with lots of little embellishments and accents. And if one removes the (pretty typical) dust jacket, one finds a wonderfully foil-stamped cover that would probably warm the heart of a mathic avout, or at least any terrestrial bibliophile unfortunate enough to live in the 21st century. ↩

  2. Like me, who can hardly make it through a book without reading the last page first. So far I’ve read all the appendices but managed to hold off glancing at the last page. I don’t think my willpower will hold out much longer. ↩


books fiction gadgets science fiction neal stephenson anathem
The video and telecom-addled civilization that bustles outside [the secular monastery in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem] is full of shallow and incorrect knowledge. People who’ve never taken time to study anything feel they know everything. Constantly distracted by their jangling electronic gizmos, they can’t comprehend the powerful ideas and complex systems wrought by thousands of years of civilization. Their smart machines make them dumb. Inevitably, they look to the cloistered nerds to save them.
Neal Stephenson’s new novel makes me want to kill the Internet. Now that sounds like a book I’ll enjoy. (via nickdouglas)