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Neal Stephenson's "Anathem" Due In September
Alexander Rose writes "Neal Stephenson's new novel, ANATHEM, germinated in 01999 when Danny Hillis asked him and several other contributors to sketch out their ideas of what the Millennium Clock might look like. Stephenson tossed off a quick sketch and promptly forgot about it. Five years later however, when he was between projects, the idea came back to him, and he began to explore the possibility of building a novel around it. ANATHEM is the result, and will be released on September 9th, 02008." Read Rose's complete posting for more information about the release of the book, which he describes as set "in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."
But much like a parachuting bear with a bazooka, that sounds really awesome to me.
01999
02008
Can I have some of whatever your smokin'?
Will he write an ending for it, or will it just sort of stop in mid-page?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
"01999" and "02008"? Methinks someone is taking the cautionary example of Y2K a little too far.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle." Sounds horrific.
Other than to say that I am probably unhealthily excited about this. The Baroque Cycle proved ( to me at least ) that Stephenson's a great writer. His earlier books had great ideas and great characters but didn't stitch together well at the end. A little too much of the old deaus-ex-machina. But the Baroque Cycle was nearly flawless.
So, he has my money. I'm buying it the day I can get my dirty mitts on it.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
I read Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash and thought both were great, except for the endings. I thought the endings were rushed, as if he spent a years carefully writing each novel until his publisher suddenly showed up at his door and said "Dude, you've got 24 hours to finish this novel." I'm waiting for a specific review of the ending of this one before I decide whether to buy.
No, obviously since it starts with a zero it's in octal. Mmmmh.. except for some reason calc.exe doesn't like 8s and 9s when I try to punch these as octal numbers...
You just got troll'd!
Read Rose's complete posting for more information about the release of the book, which he describes as set "in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."
My god, I've gone cross-eyed.
The thought of transvestites in spaceships singing some kind of opera put me off a little bit. I blinked and read it again. Oh, thank god!
This is my sig.
prefixing a zero onto the date is GENIUS!
and so very very cool.
when will mySQL start storing dates in MMDDYYYYY format?
or is it more properly 0MMDDYYYY?
I want my iPhone to display years this way, because it's sooooooo cool
The Long Now Foundation:
10,000 Year Membership
We now offer a millennial opportunity for a non-transferable 10,000-year membership to The Long Now Foundation. This Membership costs ten thousand dollars and the first 7 10,000 Year Members receive a unique signed and numbered print from Brian Eno.
Actually I understand they're preparing for the next software/overflow bug.
* so that would be cocaine ?
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
But the Baroque Cycle was nearly flawless.
Having enjoyed Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon, I really wanted to like the Baroque Cycle. After trudging through the first 200 pages that practically dared the reader to continue, I gave up on it. Where was the hook that made Snow Crash and Crypto such page turners?
(and don't say page 201)
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
its the Y10K bug
mod me funny
in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."
Wow. I'm already bored.
...which he describes as set "in a [...] world"
There, that's better.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Don't worry. It's just an in-joke for those who read _and_ understood the summary.
sudo ergo sum
why not use letters instead of digits as a prefix? that should push the Y100K problem back a few years.
would it be so hard to write A2008.....B2008...etc?
-I only code in BASIC.-
01999 is a faulty number. Octal digits are only 0 to 7. :P
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Will all the leading-zero whiners please take 0.5 fucking seconds to think about what a "millennium clock" might be?
Seriously, get your act together, people. This is supposed to be news for nerds, here.
sudo ergo sum
Sadly, there wasn't one.
The books really did come together as a positive literary experience in System of the World but more in the sense that the many threads come together and tie in with Cryptonomicon rather than being an actual page turner.
Alas, I didn't win one.
While you're there, sign up for a lifetime membership, or, if you're cheap or broke, a free membership. It's only fair, since my posting this might cause all their bandwidth to be eaten up.
Er...the submitter is the one using the extra 0. The submitter is not the author.
Your brain is not a computer.
Stephenson! Big fan :)
I usually get his books in hardback, but do publishers still release first editions, or limited runs of books with special bindings. If so, how do you get hold of these?
PS That US cover is awful (again). UK one is slightly better
That's like a blend of the best of Tiramisu and Beef Jerky... The only thing that those stories had in common was the author. Vastly different styles, they weren't even in the same genera, as far as I'm concerned. Snow Crash was a fun romp with intelligent, thought-provoking sidelines; The Baroque Cycle lost me [to boredom] 1/2 way into the first book.
The Diamond Age had the same problem.
Reading a Neal Stephenson novel is like strapping yourself into the back seat of a converted jet trainer to tour the Grand Canyon. For a lot of people, by the time they've gotten used to dodging pillars of rock at half the speed of sound and they're really enjoying the view the pilot flips over the rim and... that's all, tour's over.
I get used to the view pretty quick, and I've come to accept the endings, so I'll be picking up ANATHEM anyway.
"in a genre bending alt-future-retro world where mechani-punk technology meets space opera in a blend of the best of Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle."
Geek crap.
it is awesome: I just finished it. I found the first 500 pages to be incredible- Stephenson puts you right into this utterly familiar and also completely alien world- the scenes within the monastery are completely compelling.
A '0' prefix is superfluous unless it's found AFTER a decimal point.
..."ATALAS SHRUGGED." It was very good, but not quite on par with his first novel, "THE FOUNTAINAHEAD."
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
You realize this is Slashdot don't you?
Oh, you must be new here. Welcome.
I found out all I wanted to know from Amazon -- the book is 960 pages long. The guy still doesn't have an editor with the balls to say no. Until he finds one, I can't get too excited about a new Neal Stephenson novel.
Snow Crash was great. Cryptonomicon would have been great if he'd cut at least 300 pages of fluff. I didn't even bother with the Baroque books.
He's very self-indulgent as a writer.
Long term planning is nothing new. The Antikythera Mechanism, for one, was designed long before computers and had the task of calculating(very accurately in fact) the exact paths and positions of the local celestial bodies. However, while the mechanism itself withstood enough chronological decay to allow current epoch researchers to piece it back together, it's unlikely that it was constructed with forethought, and no documentation or preparation seemed evident in its discovery. As Hillis mentions in his essay:
"I think of the oak beams in the ceiling of College Hall at New College, Oxford. Last century, when the beams needed replacing, carpenters used oak trees that had been planted in 1386 when the dining hall was first built. The 14th-century builder had planted the trees in anticipation of the time, hundreds of years in the future, when the beams would need replacing. Did the carpenters plant new trees to replace the beams again a few hundred years from now?
I wonder if other current builders use this practice, or if our "Now Now Now" attitude precludes it's usefulness?
Fiction explores this concept often. The Kwisatz Haderach in Frank Herbert's Dune is a great example. The Babylon 5 series and it's undercurrents of recursive history is another. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time. The Lexx series - the original movies, not their child series that has been recently run.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
This book will do for cyberpunk what Cryptonomicon did for crytography: make a bunch of idiots think they understand it while at the same time showing the author's own ignorance to anyone who actually does have a clue about the subject.
Luckily the "cyberpunk" genre is already full of pedantic authors with less talent than Steve Ballmer (cough*gibson*cough), so Stephenson will fit right in.
The butler did it. There, I said it.
"Good news, everyone!"
What did it for me was 20 hours in various airports over the course of a week and a half. Having spent the money I trudged through it, and started to like it about 2/3's of the way through. AFter that "The confusion" and "System of the world" were bonus.
After trudging through the first 200 pages that practically dared the reader to continue, I gave up on it.
The first half of Quicksilver is something of a slog. Not Stephenson's finest work. However from the second half onward it gets MUCH better. The Baroque Cycle is overall well done (if overly long) and I quite enjoyed it but the series takes a while to get going.
Bruce Sterling (coined the term "cyberpunk" for associate William Gibson's SF style that he imitated) promoted the Millennium Clock (Clock of the Long Now, from the Long Now Foundation) on his "eco-future design revolution" Viridian movement mailing list. We discussed it at length, but everyone missed the point.
The #1 design problem in a Millennium Clock is how to be sure that people 10,000 years from now (and along the way) will be able to "read" the clock, make sense of the clock's striking. Knowing that it's a "clock", knowing that it struck before at regular intervals, that it will strike again. "How to tell the time?" is a problem more for the uncontrolled people the clock is designed to signal, than it is for a clock that can at least theoretically be controlled from its beginnings across millennia.
Mechanical failures or 100% success is irrelevant if people as far in the future from now as we are from shortly after the end of the last Ice Age, twice as distant as the people whose ancient Egyptian and Sumerian writing is decipherable only by the most learned experts, can't recognize the clock enough that they know it's marking time.
So I proposed that we concentrate on that problem. After all, we've already got a giant, maintenance free, frictionless and durable clockwork flying around the sky every day. The Sun, Moon, Earth, planets and stars are all marking time every day. Their alignments at each year, century and millennium are evident to everyone on Earth, distinctive, and already "built". What we need to do to ensure our descendants can read any clock through the next 10,000 years is exactly the same task for inventing a mechanical clock we build and encode with time symbols, and for discovering how to use the existing "clock" (that humans have already used as timekeeper for our whole history).
Maybe we should indeed build some monuments pointing at the "clock". Maybe to indulge our current fetish for precision matter engineering in the service of information manipulation, we sould build precise models of the sky at each time the clock strikes. Maybe we should spread thousands of Volkswagen sized synthetic diamonds, into which glowing radioactive doped renderings of the sky at each "gong" are obvious to everyone. Perhaps with a "Rosetta Stone" embedded inside, showing how we presently represent those times at those gongs (eg. "00:00 January 1, 2000 AD") also embedded in there, the privilege of the builders. Perhaps we should launch satellites (redundant - 10,000 years is a long time, even in the near-vacuum of orbit), powered by solar panels, that laser down to some such markers, burning away debris that might cover them, but passing through the readable, transparent monument. Perhaps we should carve the sequence of images into a circle on the face of the Moon, so anyone can glance up and compare the century/millennia arrangements in the Lunar pictures to the sky framing it.
But building a clock that can be stolen, lost or broken, and which could easily become an unreadable enigma even if still available and moving in 10,000 years, is a distraction. In fact, our obsession with building that clock, rather than learning how to communicate with our distant descendants, shows just how important such a project is to its real goal: changing our naive approaches to longterm thinking. The failure of Version 1 of this Millennium Clock is a perfect expression of why we need to learn to devise a clock that succeeds.
We missed the 2000 AD launch of a clock that people will recognize striking in 12,000 AD (or whatever they call it then). Lucky for us, we have 992 years to figure out how to do it right before the next deadline for what could become its first consecutive strike, that 10 millennia hence people will still know was a "clock" that started "now".
--
make install -not war
Oh great - another mention of a novel where bother are trying too hard to be "Hip and 21st century".
That doesn't sort chronologically, so no it's not correct. The correct ISO 8601 format is 2008-09-09. Which would be big-endian, but I think that's an incorrect use of the term.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Does this mean it will suck half as bad or twice as bad as Snow Crash and the Baroque Cycle? Or will the degree of suckage be determined by a formula based on a sequence of primes that can only be fully understood by an improbably hot woman?
I quite liked it (but I like almost everything else by Stephenson, though I couldn't abide Quicksilver). Yes, the book is long, in that it has nearly 1000 pages (probably over, if you include the glossary and a handful of math proofs / dialogs at the end). But it didn't _feel_ long to me. You only even get a hint at what the plot is, maybe 200 pages in. Everything up until then was basically world exposition and character development. But again, it didn't feel slow-paced to me (like Quicksilver did).
It does, however, include some similar ideas as Snow Crash, with one group of people arguing that symbols have inherent meaning, and another group arguing that symbols are only given meaning by context. If you don't like meandering thoughts and discussions, then you probably wouldn't like Anathem (or anything else by Stephenson for that matter).
TZ
Stephenson's detractors are just pissy because Stephenson stops right after the climax and doesn't bother with a denouement. They're like women who complain that the guy just leaves them after he's gotten his rocks off, and doesn't stick around to cuddle so they can pick the pimples on his ass while he's dozing.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
I just finished reading the 900-or-so pages of my "advanced reader's copy."
There's definitely a clear end. It might be nice to have a bit more denouement, but it's not like some of his other books. It's a reasonably satisfying ending.
I don't see what the isssue is here.
"Little is much when little you need."
I said it above... I just finished the review copy.
I think there's a pretty decent finish. Depending on how you count it, maybe 40-50 pages worth. I won't spoil the ending to say much more, but I doubt it was written in 24 hours and it wraps up a number of questions.
I for one would kind of like to know what happens to Gunther Bischoff after he escapes from the sub. I have read and re-read the damned book looking for clues and I think that Stephenson just sort of forgot to resolve that story arc. Lame.
I'm enjoying it quite a bit. It's dense and complex, with lots of discussion of philosophical ideas from all of Western history. The world is also incredibly rich and detailed; it's one of the best jobs of worldbuilding I've seen in a long time.
It's not particularly accessible, though. There's a glossary and lots of idiosyncratic vocabulary, so it's slow going for the first hundred pages or so. Once you get used to it and you learn some of the history, it gets quite a bit easier.
I'm looking forward to seeing how it ends--particularly since everybody who's finished it says it's more satisfying than most of his endings.
Donaldson? The man who snorts the uncut Thesaurus most would have to be Gene Wolfe.
I've read Donaldson, but not Gene Wolfe.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
This sounds a lot like 'Magister Ludi and the Glass Bead Game.' You know, the Hesse book that won a Pulitzer.
Anyone else remember it?
My guess is it started as a stupid bar-bet kind of discussion: "how would you get the gold out of the middle of a rock? Heat the stone, and melt the gold!" And Neal replied, "Hey, I bet I can write a story where that's the ending."
Later, he was reading Ross Anderson's page and came across his Van Eck stuff and said, "hey, I just figured out a clever way to defeat this. I bet I can add this to my story!"
Finally, he was reading Schneier's Cryptogram, and discovered the Solitaire cryptosystem. The light came on, and he said "I know exactly where to put this in my story!"
So now he's got three tricks, which he calls a "plot". He throws in a handful of random historical Nazis, some computer geeks, a beautiful girl, a GPS unit, and then starts writing. When he gets to page 915, he stops writing and calls his publisher.
Did I miss anything?
John
Don LaFuckingFontaine to read the voiceover.
you had me at #!
Neal Stephenson and his work generally leaves me cold. Not my favorite. However there is a new David Weber novel called By Schism Rent Asunder just out today which is the second of a series and involves a space faring Humanity that is beat down by an advanced race bent on exterminating man and now exists only as one hidden colony of religiously run anti-technology folks. One person's mind wakes up hundreds of years later in a robotic/computer mind and body and is left with the task of 'becoming Merlin' and bringing the factions back up from a pretechnology mindset. The first book brought massive sailing ship battles and a fine Machiavellian story, I've no idea where the second book goes, just picked it up today. I have a couple Neal books but they just aren't real page turners, in my opinion that is.
Enjoy your Karma, after all you earned it. Feel your Karma Joe, feel it burn.
I read an advance copy of Anathem last weekend. I can say that it's one of Stephenson's best novels to date.
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That's why I prefix my salary with 5 zeroes on my resume.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I've always found that you either like a writer's style or you don't, and the subject is almost irrelevant. If I've read and genuinely enjoyed one book by an author, it's extremely unusual for me to really dislike or struggle with any of their other ones.
It's only with something like an Agatha Christie book that the plot has to be perfect for me to want to read it, as you wouldn't read her for her style alone.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...from a stoop sale in Brooklyn! I didn't even know he had something new coming out. You all have my permission to be jealous.