I am going to confess to something that may end up losing me a lot of geek cred: I have never before read any Neal Stephenson. Yes, yes, I know. Blasphemy, right? How can any modern day sci-fi geek show his head in public without having read Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle? Well, I haven’t. Granted, I do own a copy of Cryptonomicon–I just haven’t gotten around to reading it.

But ever since I saw the trailer for Anathem, I knew I wanted to give this a read. (If nothing else, then because of the fact that they made a trailer for a book, which is something I just found neat.) The premise is a twist on one commonly used in science-fiction: on the planet Arbre, which has suffered from several civilization-level catastrophes. One of the consequences of these catastrophes is that an order, known as the avout, have sealed themselves from the outside world in order to focus on contemplation and learning.

The twist of this book is that unlike the classic book A Canticle for Liebowitz, the avout are decidedly not a religious order. They are a group of scholars, philosophers and scientists, who dedicate themselves to learning and a long-term view of the world. They have none of the trappings of civilization–no cell phones (or jeejahs, as the avout refer to them), no Google, no calculators. They have a strict, ritual discipline, but that discipline is devoted to enabling learning and reasoning skills. They’ve developed ways to use music to calculate math (samples of which have been created and are available here).

Most importantly, the avout have settled themselves in concents in order to look at the big picture. Part of the reason they eschew the technology of the outside world is because of the minute-by-minute demands on their attention. Instead, they separate themselves into four basic groups: Unarians, who cloister themselves in the concents for a year, Decennarians, who separate themselves from the outside world for a decade, Centenarians, who separate themselves from the outside world for a century, and Millenarians, who go for one thousand year separations from the world outside.

Of course, within these four basic groups are several different orders of avout, all of which have differing basic philosophic orientations. The protagonist, Erasmus, is from the Edharian order, who are, for lack of a better analogy, Platonist physicists. But other orders rear their heads, too. Procians, who basically see philosophy as nothing more than pretty word games and rhetoric. There are orders dedicated to the study of martial arts. And of course, my personal favorite, the Lorites, who were founded by an avout who believed that every human idea has already been thought of. They are scholars of ideas and Stephenson wrings a lot of amusement out of Lorites interrupting arguments by using centuries-old analogies.

Anathem isn’t devoted solely to life within the concent, though. It isn’t too long in before it’s clear that something has the outside (or “Saecular”) world concerned, and it isn’t too long before the avout are called upon to work with the “Saecular power” to confront a new crises on Arbre. It’s at this point that Stephenson really gets his juices flowing. Much of the travelling part of the story is a scathing satire of modern society, including over-devotion to sports, religion, TVs, cell phones, the Internet, and everything else, regularly interrupted by wonderful little arguments over religion and a million other things.

Now, Anathem isn’t all just philosophy and social commentary. There is also a clear plot about the threat facing Arbre, which I have to say took me by surprise, although Stephenson does a great job of building up to it. He also takes great pains to show that it is exactly the avout’s devotion to learning, philosophy, and science that give them the tools to counter the threat.

If I have any complaints about Anathem, it’s that I didn’t think that all of the philosophy was developed that well. Clearly, Stephenson is a champion of Platonism, the Forms, and Leibniz (or at least, the quantum mechanical equivalents thereof). However, the main philosophic foils he sets up are really the sillier philosophers of Europe such as Hegel and Heidegger. As someone who isn’t a fan of Plato and whose philosophy follows more in the footsteps of Aristotle, Spinoza and Locke, I was a tad disappointed at the lack of attention given to one of the primary branches of Western philosophy.

Still, given that it’s a 900+ page book, I daresay that my quibble, if addressed, would probably have made the book unsellable, so perhaps that’s for the best. How can you complain about a book that heavily features both philosophic speculation and kung-fu science-monks, anyway? You can’t. The bottom line is that Anathem is an excellent, thought provoking adventure story that’s well worth your time.