I’ve always liked philosophy, which is why Anathem is my favorite Neal Stephenson book.
The history of Western Philosophy is not just a sequence of thinkers and ideas, but a conversation that stretches back to the pre-Socratics. The work of Locke and Hume was a response to Hobbes and Rosseau; Descartes answered Aristotle, Plato responded to Thales and Anaximander, and so on.
What Stephenson has done in Anathem is not merely to invent an alien culture, or even an alien philosophy, but an entire alien philosophical tradition, one with different schools and branches, with traditions and arguments that go back millennia.
The book is a challenging and crunchy read because, like Dune, it introduces a lot of new concepts in a short space - you often find yourself referring to the extensive glossary at the back of the book to figure out what is meant by a particular word. Just as in our own world, many philosophical concepts are named after their originators, so when a character quips, “Don’t go all Kefedokhles on me”, the meaning is not immediately apparent.
The story takes place in a world much like our own, but also alien. It is a world in which some sort of catastrophic technological Singularity took place thousands of years earlier; to prevent a recurrence of this disaster, society made a decision to put a halt to scientific and technological advancement. Thus, the world has been fixed at a roughly 20th-century level of technology since that time.
However, the leaders of this civilization also realized that unexpected events might occur (what Iain Banks famously called the “out of context problem”) requiring scientific expertise. For this reason, enclaves of highly-educated scientifically-minded individuals are maintained against need, but isolated from the rest of society. These “avout” live in monastic communities called “maths”, and are free to study whatever scientific disciplines they wish - but without the benefit of computers or any kind of high technology.
Each “math” has at it’s heart a clock (inspired by the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now), and daily life is guided by ritual, which includes singing and chanting at various hours of the day. The books title, “Anathem”, is a portmanteau of “Anthem” and “Anathema”, and is the song sung when someone is being expelled from the order.
However, the book isn’t all just high-minded philosophy. There are compelling and likable characters, tension, travel to exotic locales, drama, danger, and conspiracies - a rousing good story. That would be notable in itself, but this is also in a work which tackles the difficult topic of Plato’s forms (or the alien equivalent thereof) and multiple realities.
, largely because I deeply admired Richard Dawkins books and adopted some of his rather stern academic ideas. On the other hand, the philosophical writings of Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett intrigued me. The former is a computer scientist and the latter was a close friend of Dawkins.