Results tagged “anathem”

And no, I don’t mean this guy.

Every so often I find the time to read one of those “classic” science fiction novels that I somehow seemed to have missed (I blame it on college years dedicated to literary and post-colonial fiction). Recently, I was lucky enough to sit down to a big heaping pile of Neal Stephenson in the form of Snow Crash.

Now, Neal’s been getting a lot of buzz about his latest book, Anathem—which I’m hoping to read in the near future—but until I do, I’m going to have to content myself with the fact that he’s one of those modern masters.

Oh well.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read Snow Crash, it is, very briefly, one of the first novels (obviously William Gibson’s Neuromancer is right at the top of that list, as well) to truly explore the Internet and hacker culture in a significant way. The hero and protagonist of the book is a young pizza delivery man named Hiro Protagonist. While that may sound cheesy, it actually works well on both the metaphorical field Stephenson develops in his virtual world, and the jumbled, violent vision of the future he envisions for the “real world.” Along with the skateboarding messenger girl Y.T. (and yes, it’s originally from 1992, so of course there’s skateboarding), Hiro finds himself enmeshed in a mystery that bounces back and forth between the real world and the Metaverse, wielding real and electronic katana blades to get the job done.

It was with no small excitement that I read, in a recent issue of Wired, an article
about Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, which is in stores today. And though the details about the novel were tantalizing enough, my imagination soon caught fire from something else—and I felt perhaps something like the dizzying opening of the mind that Neal Stephenson himself might have felt when he first heard about about the Clock of the Long Now.

The Clock of the Long Now is just that—a clock. But it inspired Neal to write Anathem. This is, in a strange way, exactly what this clock—which will take sixty years and tens of millions of dollars to construct—was designed to do.

More after the jump…