The dialogue is stiff and artificial, full of exposition awkwardly jammed into characters' mouths through unconvincing 'as you know, Bob' devices and the like. What's disappointing and perplexing is how flimsy Anathem's delivery system is, how little appeal it has on the level of pure story. ( Anathem, in fact, includes a lot of exchanges that sound, self-consciously, like philosophical dialogues.) And by using an entertaining story as a delivery system, an author can get concepts across to people who would never encounter them otherwise. Sometimes ideas go down better when put in the mouths of characters - anyway, that's one possible explanation for the appeal of philosophical dialogues. Casti's The Cambridge Quintet, which is to say that it is a fictional framework for exploring ideas that have sprung from the minds of great thinkers of Earth's past and present.There's nothing wrong with this as a goal. Stephenson is pretty explicit about this in his acknowledgements:Īnathem is best read in somewhat the same spirit as John L. The book intends to do one thing, and one thing only - it intends to expose the reader to a set of concepts and arguments Stephenson finds interesting. Virtues like plot momentum, characterization, drama, verisimilitude, and the like are subordinated to exposition.

I don't think it would be unfair to call it an piece of expository nonfiction disguised as a novel.

Anathem is a very odd book, and one whose appeal I do not understand.

Anathem book