★★★★★ Logic and multiple worlds

Anathem

Neal Stephenson

** spoiler alert **

I read Anathem eleven years ago (23-Nov-2011). Actually, I believe I listened to the audiobook during my daily workouts over the course of some weeks. It's a long book -- 1010 pages in kindle. Fellow Neal Stephenson fans will recognize this as nothing out of the ordinary for Stephenson. He is an author who writes long books, partly because he is always ready on the slightest provocation (or really, none at all) to leap into a 20-page treatise on orbital mechanics (Seveneves) or the genetics of North American feral pigs (Termination Shock). Those of us who love Stephenson recognize this as part of the experience and enjoy it. I would have thought the audience for this was small, but his books sell well and he's harvested a not insignificant number of major awards.

The premise of Anathem is that we live in a quantum multiverse. (This proposition may be true, for certain values of "true" -- see From Eternity to Here by Sean Carroll and The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.) Furthermore, in Anathem these parallel universes can communicate through Platonic forms that are shared by all universes. This is also the premise of Charles Stross's Laundry Files series, which is probably my all-time favorite science fiction series. The idea is that mathematical truths should be true in all universes. Thus in all universes 101 is a prime number, or, more esoterically, in every universe the smallest simple group of non-prime order has order 60 (Alternating Groups).

The idea that such logical commonalities may be used for communication has deep logical flaws. However, I am comfortable with the concept of fiction, so I'm happy to suspend disbelief. It helps that both Stephenson and Stross are clearly aware of the difficulties with the idea.

In Anathem the universe is invaded from another universe. The avouts of the mathic world join with the extramuros of the saecular world to combat the invasion. (Anathem has many of these odd vocabs -- the title "anathem" itself evokes the English words "anthem" and "anathema", and this ambiguity is clearly intentional. The "mathic" world is composed of organizations that somewhat resemble monasteries, but the avouts pursue mathematical and scientific investigation.) One of the avouts who joins the battle, Fraa Jad, has a sort of quantum magic -- he can influence which way quantum superpositions resolve, meaning that he has some ability to influence the direction of random events.

I enjoyed it, a lot, but it's not for everyone. There will be long sections that, for me, were full of fascinating ideas, but that will, I suspect, bore most readers to tears.

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