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    Anathem (Hardback) By (author) Neal Stephenson

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    Short Description for Anathem Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, and unpredictable "saecular" world.
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  • Full bibliographic data for Anathem

    Title
    Anathem
    Authors and contributors
    By (author) Neal Stephenson
    Physical properties
    Format: Hardback
    Number of pages: 800
    Width: 156 mm
    Height: 234 mm
    Thickness: 237 mm
    Weight: 1,544 g
    Audience
    General/trade
    Language
    English
    ISBN
    ISBN 13: 9781843549154
    ISBN 10: 1843549158
    Classifications
    Dewey: 813.54
    Nielsen BookScan Product Class: F1.1
    BISAC category code: FIC000000
    BICMainSubject: FA
    Illustrations note
    Illustrations
    Publisher
    ATLANTIC BOOKS
    Imprint name
    ATLANTIC BOOKS
    Publication date
    01 September 2008
    Publication City/Country
    London/GB
    Biographical note
    Neal Stephenson is the author of eight novels, including the cult successes Snowcrash and Cryptonomicon. he has been shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award five times, winning with Quicksilver. Three of his last four novels have been New York Times bestsellers. He lives in Seattle.
    Review text
    A sprawling disquisition on "the higher harmonics of the sloshing" and other "polycosmic theories" that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own.Stephenson (The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune - and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the "anathem," a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. It's a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed "the Terrible Events" of a thousand-odd years past. Our hero is set to an epic task, but it's no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers; more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. The hero's quest affords Stephenson the opportunity to engage in some pleasing wordplay a la Riddley Walker, with talk of "late Praxic Age commercial bulshytt" and "Artificial Inanity systems still active in the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies," and the like, and to level barrel on barrel of scattershot against our own time: "In some families, it's not entirely clear how people are related"; "Quasi-literate Saeculars went to stores and bought prefabricated letters, machine-printed on heavy stock with nice pictures, and sent them to each other as emotional gestures"; and much more.Light on adventure, but a logophilic treat for those who like their alternate worlds big, parodic and ironic. (Kirkus Reviews)