Already Banal

What would the Slacker Graduate Student make of Anathem? Well, he (SGS are overwhelmingly male) would say Stephenson has read a couple of Philosophy 101 books and thought to himself "Humh, philosophy has some wild ideas. It would be really cool to write a book about philosophy. But the problem with writing a book about undergraduate, much graduate philosophy students is that I would have to spend years learning philosophy. Also I went on a retreat to a monastery  and although I don't believe in God, monasteries are pretty cool places in all sorts of ways and monks are pretty cool people and it would fun to live in a monastery, complete cut off from the mundane world and spend your time thinking about cool things for years on end, at least if you had beer and sex, OK, they do have beer in monasteries, but definitely no sex.  But the problem is that anyone who does become a monk C21st America has to be pretty pathological. So writing a novel about a monk studying philosophy in C21st America is necessarily very different from the kind of book I want to write - or could, at least without years of research. Of course, I could set in the past - The Name of the Rose! - but bloody Eco spend years studying scholastic philosophy as well as semiotics, so that doesn't help. But, heh, just a minute, there is a tradition of monastic sf - monkpunk! - well, OK, at least one sf novel set in a monastry. And... just a minute... if I set it on a kind of alternative Earth, where that has monastries that are a bit like a cross between the ones we have and Hogwarts and the Institute of Advanced Study then I could just make up the names of the philosophers and so wouldn't have to bother learning the names and views of the actual ones who came up with the ideas. And being an alternative Earth, the monasteries could have beer - and be mixed - and have sex (or at least snogging)!"

So the SGS can dismiss Anathem out of hand. "He's written a book about mathematical platonism, but no-one serious takes mathematical platonism seriously, " I hasten I don't know whether that is actually true, "and to compound the error he has decided to use made-up philosophers because he can't be bothered to use the real ones. I rest my case."

So much for the SGS. What about the rest of us? Well, few readers in history are more prepared to sit through 100 pages of philosophical dinner parties than me, but leaving aside the fact that it's a wild ride, does it all amount to anything?

The Weasel claimed that Anathem is not a Singularitarian text. I disagree. It maybe not be one explicitly, but it is certainly one implicitly. The biggest difference between Earth and Arbre is that civilisation on Arbre is much older thasn on Earth: while Earth has, so far, experienced a single global technohistorical phase, Arbre has experienced many. At one point, it is stated that the current tech level of Arbre is 7/10 (I think  it is 7; it could be 8). 7 corresponds to the tech level of early C21st Earth. We know that Arbre had femtotech, presumably corresponding to level 10 (and that there must still be someone - who?  The Ita? - running the femtotech mills somewhere). At the beginning of the novel, there is some discussion about an apparent decline in population of the unnamed city (why is it unnamed?). This seems to imply that Arbre is currently in down phase in tech terms. Of course, there is no reason why this should bother the Avout, but it might bother the Saecular (but, of course, their foods contains soma of some kind, although that does not seem to fit with the character of most of those encountered in the Saecular world). In particular, what makes Arbre drop away from a tech level that is about to produce a Singularity? Well, presumably the senior Heirarchs, especially the Inquisition, possibly in conjunction with the Ita and possibly the Powers-That-Be (in fact, how do we know that the Inquistion are not the Power-That-Is? - they are certainly one of them) manipulate events, possibly using the Singularitarian technology of Incanters and the Rhetors, their big ball of wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey stuff, to manipulate events.

Which leads us to one of the (many) fundamental problems of the novel. Does Raz have any agency? He is a curiously incurious character. OK, a self-absorbed adolescent interested primarily in physics, and lives in a particular social milieu that does not encourage interest in the outside world, but you'd think he at least know the name of his hometown and of basic things like the other continents. Now, Raz certainly does things, brave things during the books, lots of brave things. He ends up as a member of a commando cell penetrating a hostile alien starship. He's there with Fraa Jad at the crucial moment and, presumably, helps to collapse the wave packet (bring the prticular timeline into existence) by being the necessary observer. And as such it could be argued that that is enough, especially in a YA novel. But, of course, he's mostly there at the end because someone has saved his sorry ass at various points (such as by the Valers in "St Petersburg" - I think he can be save in assuming that NTS has visited there in the last few years as well as certain Mediterranean archaeological sites, as well as taking a road trip to the Far North, the kind of thing one might well do if one lived in Washington State; I wonder also if he might have been to Murmansk, with a population of over 300,000 by far the largest city in the Arctic Circle, on his Russia trip). So how far back does the manipulation of worldlines and timelines go? Why is a Raz, a fairly indistinguished fraa from an obscure, provincial concent, evoked in the first place? And why does he end up a member of a commando assault cell. He's no Valer.

This is, in effect, a YA novel. Which makes the underlying cynicism of the novel all the more surprising. We know that Stephenson is heavily influenced by Pynchon. Raz is doing the work of Them, he's not asking any questions (well, he is, but they are not the right ones, or the ones we might choose to ask, no matter how interesting they might be). It's pretty clear that the world as presented to us by Raz bears only a passing resemblance to the way in which Arbrean society is actually constructed. Is this the lesson that Stephenson wants his readers to take away - that we are all being manipulated all the time by Them, even if we love (and are loved by) some of Those and the scales must fall away from our eyes, both philosophically and politically. The novel has a happy ending, Raz gets the girl and the promise of useful and interesting work in a mathic-saecular environment. He has shown courage and courage is a virtue surely. And he has suffered loss - Orolo and Jad. But he is living in the best of all possible worlds that They (the Thousanders, the Ten-Thousanders) have chosen. Perhaps that it is all any of can hope for. After all, just because your paranoid doesn't mean They're not out to get you.

Of course, the biggest fundamental problem is that Goedelian time travel means travelling to another Platonic plane. Why? Is it even possible to construct a Goedelian time machine from an Orion starship in a universe anything like ours. How fast would the universe have to be rotating? And why are the only aliens they encounter humans (with just some implausible differences at the femtolevel)? OK, this could be more timey-whimey stuff, but why? Why would you not want to meet aliens. It's a big universe out there and perhaps the aliens might have something to say about the problems of philosophy.