Howdy, kids! Welcome back to The Book Report.

Last week I gave a brief look at how Quantum Theory helped Michael Crichton come up with his time-travel adventure Timeline. This week I want to fall a little deeper into the rabbit hole, and return to an author I’ve blogged about previously: Neal Stephenson.

Image from http://www.longnow.org/

In the mid 1990s, engineer and inventor Danny Hills came up with the idea of building a 10,000 year clock as an icon to long term thinking. The clock came from an observation he had:

“When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 02000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 02000, and now no one mentions a future date at all. The future has been shrinking by one year per year for my entire life. I think it is time for us to start a long-term project that gets people thinking past the mental barrier of an ever-shortening future. I would like to propose a large (think Stonehenge) mechanical clock, powered by seasonal temperature changes. It ticks once a year, bongs once a century, and the cuckoo comes out every millennium.” (The added zero in front of 2000 is used to resolve the deca-millennium bug, to keep digital clocks from resetting to zero in a little less than 8,000 years)

Hills and Stephenson chatted about the clock at a conference, and Stephenson came up with the idea of a series of rotating cylinders (“or cooler yet, spheres…”) with an opening in each. Each cylinder/sphere would nest just within the next cylinder/sphere, and rotate at different speeds, such that the openings would line up to reveal whatever is at the center once every 10,000 years.
From this idea, Stephenson started thinking about his own millennial clock, and the seeds for his 2008 novel Anathem were planted.

The word “anathem” is a kind of mash-up of “anthem” and “anathema”, creating a word that means both words at the same time. The novel Anathem takes place on a world similar to earth in many ways. Readers will find many parallels with our own world, though it may take awhile to figure it out (such as realizing a “jeejah” is essentially a cell phone). The real heart of the novel takes place in the math.
But again, math has several different meanings in Anathem, and the heart of the novel takes place in each meaning of math. Arbre, the world Stephenson created, comes with several thousand years of history, and in that course of time, civilization fell and rebuilt itself three different times. One of the only constants to last through all three Great Sacks is a community of philosophical nuns and monks who live in a type of conceptual convent called (mashing up the two words and combining their meanings) a concent. The fraas and suurs (think friars and sisters) of the concent stay separated from the rest of the world, and just as a convent is designed to maintain the purity of belief, a concent is designed to maintain the purity of Knowledge. It’s quite an amazing and delicate system Stephenson writes, but for the purposes of this post I don’t want to delve in deeper into the workings of the concent. For a more complete list of Earth-Arbre correlations, go here.

The Quantum theories that Anathem delve into are fascinating. One recurring theme in the novel deals with time, and influenced heavily by Julian Barbour’s novel The End of Time (pub. 1999), which makes the argument that time is an illusion from a physicists standpoint, shaped only by how we perceive our memories of the past and our hopes for the future.
The multiverse gets dealt with in Anathem as well, with special influence from David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality (pub. 1997), who argues that the four main strands of science (quantum physics, evolution, computation, and knowledge) are not as unrelated as they appear.

One idea I found incredibly intriguing stems from Sir Roger Prenrose’s novel The Emperor’s New Mind (pub. 1989), where he makes the argument that the human brain is essentially a quantum computer. What it does is present a logical reason for some of the fantastical things that happen in the novel, putting a lot of science into science-fiction.
While I’m sure a lot of readers think that science is boring and more science in science-fiction takes the fun out of it, I could argue that it simply isn’t the case, but then we run into the problem of what is true for me isn’t true for everybody. I suppose that the best argument I can make is that just as epic high fantasy can be a more rewarding for some readers, but probably not all, epic high sci-fi will be a rich experience for some readers, but not all.
(And let me add that if you think that Twilight represents the pinnacle of vampire literature, you will probably find Anathem pretty boring.)

Anyway, give the book a read. I sincerely hope you’ll find it as entertaining and engrossing as I do.

Until next time,
Still paddlin’ the old knew…
_-Akatzen-_

Hey, kids! It’s Akatzen here with another book report.

In 1992, Microsoft released Windows 3.1, an update to Version 3 released in 1990. Selling over a million copies in its first year alone, Windows 3 represented an epochal shift in mainstream personal computing towards GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) and away from CLIs (Command Line Interfaces) such as MS-Dos. (While GUIs had been around for quite some time — Xerox released a GUI model in 1981 — Windows 3 made GUIs mainstream.)
Just one year previous, Linus Torvalds started writing the code for Linux and Tim Berners-Lee introduced the public to the World Wide Web. Essentially, it allowed users to easily browse and open files around the world, but it is worth noting that “web browsing” did not become mainstream until 1993 when the Mosaic Web Browser hit the market.

The reason I say it is worth noting is because of one of Neal Stephenson’s visions of the future: the cyber-punk novel Snow Crash, published in 1992, a time where computers looked vastly different and had far fewer capabilities than the machines they are today.
The cyber-punk genre may sound a little strange to you, but films like The Matrix and Blade Runner owe much of their flavor and ambiance to cyber-punk.
Matrix 4?

The title of the book comes from a particular software failure on the Apple Macintosh: the system crashes and what appears on the screen is a bunch of gibberish resembling the static of an untuned or broken television.
As for the book itself, Stephenson originally envisioned the book to be a computer-generated graphic novel, with art by Tony Sheeder, but ran into difficulties when they realized that the image-processing software didn’t exist yet (and now it does. Go check out Mythoi: Wiglaf).
Stephenson eventually dropped the graphic novel idea in favor of producing pictureless fiction, and the ensuing novel is not only incredibly interesting, informative, and entertaining; Snow Crash also presents, in many areas, a shockingly accurate view of the future.

In many ways, Snow Crash has also had a direct influence on the direction and innovation software has gone.

In the Metaverse (the book’s idea of the internet’s future—think of it as a Virtual Reality mash-up of Second Life, Tron, and the World Wide Web), users navigate the ‘verse (ie. Browse the web) via the use of avatars. Yup, anytime you create a virtual persona of yourself (like you do on the Wii, the Xbox360, or any number of online applications), the avatar you are making is entirely due to Neal Stephenson’s use of the word in Snow Crash.

One of the programs the main character (Hiro Protagonist) uses is called Earth. What it does is create a 360 degree view of the earth from satellite photography, enabling you to view any place on earth you can think of, and zoom in as close as you want. Anyone who’s ever used Google Earth will find this description incredibly familiar. In fact, one of the developers at Google said the idea for Google Earth came, at least in part, from the similarly named program in Snow Crash.

Then there’s the burbclaves (essentially H.O.A. citystates), the complete corporatization of America, the devaluation of the dollar, the anti-rape measure called a dentata, and the ability for normal people to degenerate into savages after a crisis: a ridiculous picture of the future that feels ridiculous only because it’s actually possible.

Throw in some computer tech speak (like that GUI/CLI jargon I started the post with) and a highly intriguing exploration of ancient Sumeria, the Tower of Babel, and how civilization may have come about through a virus and you have an incredibly interesting and entertaining novel.

And then there’s the sex, drugs, rock and roll, sword-fighting, and motorcycle chases. There’s no getting around it: this book is cool. (Um, and by cool, I also mean that it has a few Rated R moments, so don’t toss a copy at your 12 year old computer geek younger brother or anything without making sure it’s something he’s mature enough for. So yeah, no copies for Mr. Wolff.)

Anyway, this book is highly recommended by Yours Truly, so give it a read. You won’t be disappointed.