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"Anathem" Exclusive Video At MySpace

Posted by kdawson on from the chants-of-a-lifetime dept.

Shawn M. Smith writes "We've recently discussed Neal Stephenson's imminent new novel 'Anathem.' Now, MySpace has an exclusive video, The World of Anathem, that accompanies the book, filled with the 'Gregorian chants' and ambient noise that were so eloquently described by numerous Slashdotters who had scored advance copies of Stephenson's latest tome."

4 of 57 comments (clear)

  1. Math music by F34nor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One description of the chants is that they are based on mathematics. If this is interesting to you, you might want to check out a band call Slint. They tried to create a kind of fractal timing where different threads would converge and digress over time. Dark intense and interesting music.

  2. Re:Video by Izabael_DaJinn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No kidding. They don't give sci-fi authors much budget or something..even at big publishing houses? I suddenly feel better about the one I did (almost) all by myself for my book on almost zero budget. Then again maybe Neal filmed this himself as well ;-)

    --
    Careful What You Wish For....
  3. Re:Err by kochsr · · Score: 2, Interesting

    yeah this was pretty bad. i imagine pretty much any video interpretation of his fiction is going to be terrible because his stuff is pretty far out there, and you would need a high budget to make half of the stuff actually look believable.

  4. Re:Err by TimeZone · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The jocks in football jerseys are the "extramuros", the people who live outside the mathic concents. Most of the extras have nothing against the avout, but some (those in the video) do not trust the avout and become violent. The extramuros culture in Anathem is pretty reminiscent of the culture described in Snow Crash (consumerism run amok). For the record, there are not many fight scenes in the book, so I don't know why the video was so heavy on the kung-fu. If you enjoyed Snow Crash and / or Cryptonomicon and enjoy math-based humour (xkcd anyone?), then I'd highly recommend Anathem. I read an advance copy a while ago, then sent it on to a friend of mine who also enjoyed it.

    As for the video, it really only makes sense if you've already read the book, so it's not particularly successful IMO.
    TZ