Neal Stephenson

Last Friday I went up to Kepler's in Menlo Park where Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite authors, was speaking. Traffic sucked, so I got there a bit late and missed part of the reading. What I did hear was a bit confusing because he was reading from his new book (more on that shortly). The Q&A section was pretty cool. Neal revealed that he did not, in fact, invent Steampunk. Yeah, someone asked if he were responsible for Steampunk.

So, the reason Stephenson was at the store was to promote his new book, Anathem. I'm about 185 pages in and it's very interesting so far. It's about a planet called Arbre, which is like Earth, but is definitely not Earth. In this world where the protagonist Erasmas is member of monastic-like society which like in a sanctuary called a concent. I write monastic-like, because the Fraas and Suurs inhabiting the concent are devoted to mathematical knowledge like monks and nuns (Fraa is similar to Friar and Suur to Sister, I believe). As you might infer, there's a lot of language that is similar to, but not exactly like English or Latin words. There's even a glossary at the end of the book so you can figure out what some of the words in the sentences mean. This description sounds like it might be hard to understand and Stephenson himself seemed somewhat concerned that people were not going to like his book. However, I found that after a while I began to grok the specialized words and even relate them to Earth history (the planet's history has a lot of parallels to Earth history, if you know what you're looking for). Anyway, if I had to compare it to something, it'd be a sort of like The Name of the Rose, except the monks are devoted to Mathematics instead of God (They are referred to as avout instead of devout in the book.). I'm still waiting to see where the story is going, so perhaps that will turn out to be an inaccurate analogy, but so far, so good.