Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Somehow, despite hearty recommendations from friends, I had never read anything by Neal Stephenson. I even went so far as to buy Snow Crash a few years ago, but it's sat unopened on my bookshelf.

So it might seem odd that my first Stephenson book was Anathem, but I forgot to pack a book for a trip, most of the books in the airport bookstore were unappealing, I recognized Stephenson's name, and it was a nice long paperback.

I would say I was impressed by Anathem, but "impressed" is not really the right word: blown away was more like it.

Anathem is intellectually rigorous without sacrificing any entertainment value. I won't spoil the plot, but I will tell you that this book will give you a basic understanding of concepts like many-worlds, the quantum mind, directed acyclic graphs, Platonic realism, configuration space, and the "long now". In many ways, this novel is like a mix of the intellectual rigor of Eco, the world creation of Tolkein, the social variety of Vance, and the epic storytelling of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. Although some people will surely find it excessively didactic, rest assured that this is excellent modern hard science fiction.

Enjoyable and unpredictable

The Time Traveler's Wife
by Audrey Niffenegger

This is hands-down, the best recently-written novel I have read.

Henry DeTamble is an adverturous librarian involuntarily and unpredictably travels through time. Clare Abshire is the artist he marries, who life is natural and sequential. This is the story of their life together across 72 years of Clare's life and 18 years of Henry's.

The book raises, without answering, several curious circularities caused by this time travel. Most notably, the first time Henry meets Clare, she is looking for him because she grew up with (older) time displaced Henry. The first time Clare meets Henry, he is already married to her and goes to see his wife's childhood. (He does not strictly control the time displacement, but he tends to visit times and places that are somehow important to him.) Niffenegger largely ignores this causal dillema, though the characters do spend some time considering time-displaced causation.

More interesting (and subtle) is a red herring, which I will not go into in detail, regarding Henry's death. Suffice it to say that a heavily forshadowed event does not go down as the reader is initially led to expect.

On the whole this is quite an enjoyable novel, and a rather unpredictable plot.

Tags: book, review, fiction, romance, Science Fiction