(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Lee and Jon came over yesterday and I made Lee watch Danger 5. All of it. All that stuff about how it's the best thing on television? Still true. I desperately wish it had a fandom. I desperately wish my Inglourious Basterds crossover weren't the only fanficion this show has.

I created a facebook group for the International League of Sciencemongers, because I wanted to be a member of same. Why do I live in a world that doesn't have an International League of Sciencemongers already?




I picked up Anathem at the library today at lunch and read the first fifteen pages. Guys, please tell me Stephenson doesn't fuck up the ending? I don't think my fragile psyche could deal with another Snowcrash scenario on a book that opens as well as Anathem does. The linguistics porn is like Ferret-candy. And already the characters are so vivid and interesting and I want more. While at the same time every third word makes me go "Wha?" This is SF in classic strange culture puzzle mode. I love it. I just want to wallow in this world. I want there to be sprawling play-by-post/play-by-email roleplaying adventures in this world. Since the world isn't fair, I'm sure this doesn't exist. But anyway, 15 pages and already I'm in love. I know, I know, with Stephenson that's just asking to be jilted, but I can't help it.

Comments

[zandperl]

I have read the audiobook of Anathem around 3 times, and I expect to do so again in the future. The last third is a real mindfuck and there's a moment near the end where you suddenly realize you haven't actually been reading the book you think you've been reading, but an entirely different book. That's 50% of the reason I keep rereading it. The other 50% is the reading, including Gregorian-chant-esque songs at the start of each major book section. They really set the tone. The worst part of the audiobook is that the timeline at the start is read aloud and makes no sense if you haven't read any of the book yet, and you can't easily flip back to it while reading to put things into perspective.

[seekingferret]

I'm interested in which moment you were referring to where you suddenly realize you haven't actually been reading the book you thought you were reading. I didn't have a single moment where I felt that, though I did feel like each chapter marked a pretty significant shift in tone, storytelling style, and themes, so that they each felt entirely self-contained (cloistered?) in a way while contributing to the overall plot.

SPOILERS

[zandperl]

It sounds like you've finished the book, but in case I'm wrong or if anyone else hasn't there's massive spoilers below.

Part of what makes this story interesting to me is that by the end, you (or at least I) realize the most important character to the story is really Fra Jad, not the protagonist Erasmus. (Please forgive any spelling errors - I read this as an audiobook so didn't get spellings, and I'm looking at the Wikipedia page now for the first time to try and remind me of the order and place names.) There are many MANY clues to this (such as when he assembles the Teglon), but it really clicked for me during their madcap flight upon the Dabun Urnud where Jad keeps changing timelines and pulling Erasmus along with him. Fra Jad was really the payload of the mission and the rest of them were just the delivery vehicle. I keep re-reading the entire novel just to try and understand this tiny section of the book.

This is also when you realize that all the things Erasmus and friends were tossing around as legends and speculation are really true: the Incantors and Rhetors (or at least the Incantors) really do exist, that dinosaur/dragon fossil really did appear in that parking lot, and it's even possible to make quantum mechanical events turn out the way you want (to stop aging). There is still confusion in my mind over the and many-worlds interpretation of events, in that what's the point of sending Jad if all he's doing is picking which world HE and his companions are in; to the people who sent him, they continue in their own world and his consciousness moves into a different world with different copies of the people who sent him.

Re: SPOILERS

[seekingferret]

Yes, I've finished the book.

Hm... I'm not sure even having finished the book that I'd call Fraa Jad the most important character. In some senses I'd think you'd have to say Fraa Orolo was. Certainly Fraa Orolo's Dialogs are the places I keep mentally revisiting to figure out what happened. In some senses at least it is inarguably Fraa Erasmas's book, inasmuch as it is his bildungsroman and his construction of the concent of Saunt Orolo is the book's culmination.

I also realized all that legend stuff was true way before the fight. Again, Orolo's Dialogs point the way: Erasmas and Orolo's Dialog about quantum minds pretty much made it clear to me what was going to happen. He spells it out for Erasmas when he says that Jad had developed a praxis, but after that Dialog I'm not sure we needed it to be spelled out so much. And then if you couldn't work it out from that, the Messal section recapitulates it all. Young Raz is not the quickest thinker in the world, but narrator Raz is well organized in thought and lays out all the evidence we need to draw conclusions ahead of his younger self.

what's the point of sending Jad if all he's doing is picking which world HE and his companions are in;

That's what is so brilliant about Stephenson's use of Directed Acyclic Graph theory. It conceptualizes a polycosm where the worlds relate to each other and have (Hylaean) priority with respect to each other. Jad's praxis actually does matter because some worlds mean more than others.

[teal_deer]

can I join the sciencemongers???

[verity]

Keep me posted on Anathem! I kind of gave up on Stephenson in the middle of the second book in the Baroque Trilogy, because I just didn't like anyone and not even cross-stitch code and implied fisting were enough to keep me reading, which is pretty impressive.

[seekingferret]

Yeah, I never made it to the Baroque Cycle because both The Diamond Age and Snowcrash are great novels with horrible endings, and I didn't think I could bear it if I invested myself in something as long as the Baroque Cycle and had the ending fall flat.

Some people I mostly trust on literature have told me Anathem doesn't do that. I'm still really nervous about it.

Actually, the only Stephenson novel I liked the ending of was The Big U.

[seekingferret]

ANATHEM IS AMAZING. Just so well structured and characterized and plotted, and so much chewy, chewy food for thought. So many different ways to read it, too. starlady's review of the book makes it sound like an almost entirely different book from the one I read- and she loved it too.