Books Anathem
Books and Publications Average Rating:

Rating: - Sci-Fi equivalent of Eco's Name of the Rose
An excellent treatment of several different themes - philosophy of knowledge, role of science versus technology, nature of faith, cloistered living, and good old Science Fiction.

Some mentioned a slow start, but I found it fascinating from page one. Stephenson has done a masterful job weaving big themes into a coherent and engaging story.

I will read it for the second time very soon!

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Rating: - An imagination bigger than our world
Like his previous works, Anathem is a bold world encompassing story. Few authors can raise your pulse and your intellect simultaneously, but Stephenson's blend of swashbuckle and science certainly does. My only regret was arriving at the last page.

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Rating: - the professor never loses touch with the humanity
i would say not as balls to the walls enjoyable as "snow crash" and it takes a little while before things start firming up but once it does, you all of a sudden have a VERY rich world, made all the richer for the alien terminology (you'll be racking your brains for a while figuring out "earth analogs" and it becomes a fun game after a while) and a familiar but distinct history.

does indeed play off the motifs and themes in "a canticle for leibowitz" but stuffs in the mindf@#$ factor of the "2001: a space odyssey" movie, stirs in "rendezvous with rama" for taste, adds half a cup of "a brief history of time" and then throws in kung fu for luck.

and it's all still in the established style of neal stephenson: telling a fun story and then every so often stopping it cold to lay out interesting ideas, often in the form of an aristotelian dialog or something.

in another's hands, his stories and his exposition could very well end up being extremely pedantic and cold but NS keeps everything working by keeping the beating heart of humanity at the core of his work. no matter how epic the ideas, you are still involved with people you recognize and end up caring about.

it's funny, in my mind, i see lio as being a similar mental image as goto dengo from "cryptonomicon" and i see orolo and a priest in "a canticle for liebowitz" as ian holm!

the whole thing builds to a thrilling, breathless space finale that i can totally imagine being played out in cinema as a tense but MOS sequence almost where the only sound is one of mic'd breathing.

and an ending that is as self admittedly pro forma fiction as it is satisfying.

p.s. if you are inspired to learn more about ORBITAL MECHANICS from the space part of the book, http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/ is a great free simulator! i'm already learning more about the stuff that stephenson introduced to me!

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Rating: - The Illuminatus Trilogy, without the sex, drugs, and rock and roll...
...hung on an Ayn Rand framework for a 'novel' that spends a lot of it's time making expositions via characters who are more like mouthpieces. He forgets the 'love interests' for hundreds of pages, dusts them off hastily, and then hinges important plot turns on them. However, the ideas are big and there are some great moments. Of all his books, the least satisfying Stephenson read.