It is not his best work but I daresay it is his most engaging.

Mr. Stephenson and I share a mutual friend. He came over on Thursday evening and thunked a hefty tome down on my dining room table. It had this printed on the bottom: “Advanced Reader’s Copy • Not For Sale”. I had written a review of his previous book; would I like to write one for this?

Well. Of course. Neal is and has been one of my favorite authors, starting back in 1992 when my friend Dave lent me his near-mint copy of one of the Nerd Bibles: Snow Crash.

The plot of REAMDE (and I will continue to use all-caps for the title) is both simple and complex at the same time. There are many characters with many stories, and all of them weave around and through each other. As is typical of Stephenson’s writing, the threads seem at times to be unrelated and only at the climax do they bind together again to display a cohesive tapestry to the reader.

REAMDE is a story that combines massively multiplayer video games, the Russian mafia, Chinese gold farmers, draft-dodging drug smugglers and Al Queda terrorists in a post-Osama world.

The title of the book comes from a gold farmer’s virus that has infected thousands of players of World of Warcraft-style video game. The virus works like this: if you are infected, it will encrypt the contents of your hard-drive with a key that only the makers of REAMDE possess. The victim must then pay a ransom – in the game – of 1,000 gold pieces (about seventy-five real dollars value) in order to get the decrypt key (and thus recover their files).

Purely by accident, The Wrong Kind of People get their shit trapped by this and the virus locks up some super-valuable data. The Wrong Kind of People have Muscle of the ex-Spetsnaz variety. Hijinks (read: murders) ensue and the stakes, in a series of co-incidences, keep growing higher and higher.

Neal’s strongest characters arise when he writes in “time-local” settings and the cast of REAMDE is as well-written as it is diverse. We travel the globe with this yarn and accumulate characters from several nationalities, ethnicities, creeds, and color while doing so.

The cast is also large – on the order of six or seven main characters and about ten secondaries. In the hands of a lesser writer this could easily have fallen apart but Stephenson manages to split the party up in such a manner that the reader need only concentrate on three or four at a time.

REAMDE hits the ground around page fifty and maintains a relentless pace thereafter. The final act ran a bit too long for my taste but this is mostly an artifact of the huge cast size: every thread must be tied off in some way or another.

Reading this book made me want to write games again.

Oh, yeah. What do I think is his best work? The Diamond Age, natch.

While I will read everything once, there are things I will not read twice. For instance, the works of Ayn Rand (shrill satanist screeds masquerading as “feminist” philosophies) or the over-hyped Illuminatus Trilogy (which boils down to a 3,000 page practical joke on the reader) will never grace my bedside table again. However, the books remain loved because they are books, and have a place within my library.

From time to time, someone new to the genre of “science fiction” will ask me for recommendations. “What’s good?” is a common question, followed by “What should I read?”. A difficult question. Science fiction is rarely about “the future.” These stories are typically metaphors for social issues that we, as a species, are facing now – just wearing clothes that have yet to be invented.

The following is a list for nascent science fiction readers.

It is in no particular order. Works were chosen for several reasons. Some because they are exceptionally influential in style, spawning new sub-genres. Others because they are simply well-written. Others because they are fun. I have included some notes that I hope will be helpful.

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester, 1952

Alfred Bester is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of sci-fi. He is an unsung master of the genre; few people know of his existence or his stories but everyone has been exposed to his ideas. In much the same way that Citizen Kane changed cinema, Bester’s works changed speculative fiction. The Demolished Man asks a simple question: In a world where people can read thoughts, where criminals are apprehended before their crimes are committed, how does one commit murder?

A Canticle for Liebowitz, Walter M. Miller, 1960

Another “lost” author, Walter Miller wrote two novels – Canticle in 1960, and a sequel that he died finishing (Saint Liebowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, 1995). Miller finished Canticle, won several awards for it, and promptly vanished from the writing scene for 35 years. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic story about how the Catholic church strives to retain human knowledge after a nuclear holocaust. I sometimes think that this story drives a large part of my dedication to the mission of Wikipedia.

Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling, 1985

In 1985, the sub-genre of cyberpunk was being invented. Schismatrix is, in my opinion, Sterling’s magnus opus: it is a story about a future war between two factions of posthumans: shapers (those who are genetically modified) and mechanists (those who are bionically augmented). There exists a “special edition” of the book entitled “Schismatrix Plus” which includes the core novel as well as several short stories that take place in the same universe.

Dune, Frank Herbert, 1965

Dune is a story that is many things to many people. Primarily, it is a discussion about politics and the philosophy of, and how economic scarcity affects social change.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Robert Heinlein, 1966

Heinlein was one of the masters of science fiction. Sadly, as his health deteriorated, his writing became . . . erratic . . . in quality and metaphor. Harsh Mistress, however, is a wonderful space adventure. Its science is, quite simply, bad – but Heinlein never really cared about that as much as he cared about describing esoteric societies. In this case, he deliberately chose the harshest environment he could imagine a society thriving and wrote about it. It is a fun read.

The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson, 1995

Stephenson has been criticized by many (myself included) that his endings are flawed. However, the end is not the beginning or the middle. This story is about an experiment: can free access to knowledge change a person’s life? Is education a silver bullet, the way to effect true social change? To say nothing of the neat ways he uses the idea of nanotechnology.

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein, 1961

Master Heinlein’s second entry in this list. Many people assume (incorrectly) that Heinlein was a rabid conservative, bent on social fascism. Nothing could be farther from the truth: he wrote about stories that would piss people off. Stranger in a Strange Land is the exact opposite of right-wing ideals; the hero of the story is a poly-amorous hippie, a “Tarzan” raised by Martians. I will say that Stranger does a lot towards cementing his reputation as being hyper sexist.

The Number of the Beast, Robert Heinlein, 1980

Heinlein’s final entry on this list is the story in which he explores the idea of alternate dimensions and universes. The title of the book takes its name from the number of known parallel dimensions: six to the power of six, to the power of six. It is a fantastical yarn, and one that isn’t particularly well-written – but its influence has been massive.

Neuromancer, William Gibson, 1984

Neuromancer is but one part of Gibson’s famed “Sprawl” trilogy. It is a dark work, often confusing, and written as if the reader is a contemporary. It, too, is excessively influential, and can be considered the progenitor of modern science-fiction.

A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick, 1977

This is a story about drug addiction. At its core it asks questions about what “identity” actually means. It’s a dark story, all the darker because of a heavy injection of autobiography.

Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, 1963

A darkly humorous satire, Cat’s Cradle pokes fun at religion, the nuclear arms race, and our inevitable technological apocalypse. Vonnegut earned a master’s degree in anthropology for this work. Its an easy read and well worth your time.

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1969

Le Guin is probably the master feminist writer in science fiction. It is a story about sexual identity precisely because the inhabitants of one of the worlds do not possess gender (save for a short period once a month).

Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin, 1985

A difficult book to locate, Always Coming Home tells less of a story and more of a way of thinking. Like most of Le Guin’s works, it is heavily focused on Taoist philosophy. She refers to the work as “future archaeology,” and many people will say that it is not science fiction. I am willing to engage in fisticuffs with those people.

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke, 1972

Clarke’s works are classically “hard” science-fiction. They are often thin on overall plot but extremely thick with atmosphere an potential. Clarke is at his best when he explains very little and leaves the reader to ponder the vastness of space. Rama is a perfect example of this. Clarke would later revisit the world of Rama with three additional sequels (written with the help of Gregory Benford). A word of warning: either read Rama and quit, or read them all.

This is going to be as spoiler-free as possible. However, there. . . really isn’t that much to spoil. More on that later. First, a story!

Many moons ago, when grunge was popular, before the Golden Age, I attended kolledge. I majored in philosophy – a widely misunderstood discipline that many people (including my parents) consider to be useless.

In my school, philosophy majors had to choose a focus: Ancient Track (which meant studying mostly Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, and other old dead Greeks) or Modern Track (which is mostly about post-Rennaissance philosophers, like Descartes, Kant, or even such modern marvels as Wittgenstein). I chose to read about Dead Greeks.

(You still had to take a ton of classes about the other track, mind you; this choice really only defined how the bulk of your 400-level classes were going to go.)

This was a fun time for me! For several hours a day I and my fellow students would sit around a table in a forgotten, musty room in one of the older buildings on campus and systematically destroy each other’s brains. We were surrounded by books, most of which had suffered water damage. Someone had scratched into the surface of the table the following:

I think, therefore I am. I think not. . . and POOF! I vanish!

That joke has made me laugh for over ten years now. Remember it as you read the book. It carries extra weight.

Anyways. I read a lot of Plato.

Now, you may be asking yourself something right about now. “Self,” you might be saying, “why does a book review begin with a bunch of crap about about majoring in philosophy?”

That’s a very good question! The answer is because it supplies to you, the reader, a small but important context about me and my mindset as a I read a book that is, essentially, a dialog about metaphysics.

In many, many ways, Anathem is the bloated child of A Canticle for Liebowitz and Plato’s Theaetetus.

I very specifically chose the Theaetetus (a somewhat obscure dialog) rather than something like, say, The Republic (which everyone has read some of) because of a couple reasons which will become clear.

Anathem is an alternate-world story told from the perspective of Fraa Erasmas. Erasmas is a theor, and theors are ascetic mathemetician philosophers. They live in these huge, stone monestaries and are divided into three groups: tenners, hundreders, and thousanders. The groups do not co-mingle (and are forbidden to do so) except for specific times.

Every ten years, the tenners can leave the monestary for ten days. Every hundred years, the hundreders can do so (and at that time their maths [the crap they work on] are published). Likewise, every thousand years the maths of the thousanders are published (note that thousanders do not live for thousands of years; they just get published, mostly).

Fully the first hundred or so pages is without meaningful plot. It serves to set the tone for the story, to introduce and immerse the reader into the history of this alternate world, and to allow Stephenson to circle-jerk about how much he has been reading Plato.

And I mean that, because, seriously, nearly every philosophic discussion is pretty much cribbed from Plato, and many of them are taken from the Theaetetus (which concerns itself with the nature of knowledge, fundamental truth, and the nature of perception). The theors even use the Socratic method to educate one another (though they don’t call it that).

Like all of Stephenson’s books in the past decade, Anathem feels like he (Stephenson) got excited about something and then spent a ridiculous amount of time researching it and was further compelled to splatter it out onto pages just to show us how much research he did do. Unlike the previous books in the decade (Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle), we are spared a lot of tedium.

(Well, that may not strictly be true. Again: I majored in philosophy, so it wasn’t tedious to me; it may be for others.)

Even though the novel is a “sci-fi” book, it is remarkably thin on the “sci” part. There is some, but the primary plot point is almost lifted directly from an earlier work by a different author. However, where Heinlein’s story was a fanciful whiz-bang actioner, Anathem is devotes itself more to the intellectual discussion of “alternate dimensions”.

This brings us back to Platonic dialogs again.

For thousands of years, much philosophy was told through stories. That is, explained through the use of story and metaphor to enable the student to better grasp what was being discussed by relating it to something they already understood. Plato did it (obviously), but my library is filled with other examples (such as Candide or Reveries of a Solitary Walker). In more modern times, Ayn Rand used the method to explain Objectivism. Zen koans are often small anecdotes and analogies.

Anathem is a dialog that contains many smaller dialogs. It has a lot of lessons which are delivered in a story format and serves as a modern parable about the schism between science and religion. It is deliberately constructed that way. I do not know if Stephenson actually believes some of the ideas that are espoused or not but that is irrelevant to the lesson being discussed: it is more about teaching people to think in new ways.

Anathem is a very typical Stephenson novel. If you’ve read his other stuff, you know what you’re in for. If you haven’t, I would not suggest Anathem as your introduction: pick up The Diamond Age instead, and from there move to Cryptonomicon.

I think it could have been trimmed by a couple hundred pages – especially in the middle, where Erasmas goes on a little adventure that doesn’t really advance the plot (I’m thinking of his time on the ice).

[A minor lesson in history, which shall reveal unto you one of the more clever jokes contained within Anathem:

Theaetetus was a greek geometer, which means “mathematician” for you unedumacated folk. His primary contributions to math involved proofs about Platonic Solids – most importantly, the icosahedron, which all nerds know as the d20 and also just happens to be the shape of the spaceship that the alien Geometers orbit the planet with in Anathem.

/end]

I was extremely pleased to discover that he had acknowledged Plato in the afterword. I would have been irritated had he not.

So really, I feel that I’m looking at a version of A Canticle for Liebowitz in which, instead of rediscovering blue prints, devising the principles of electricity, and building the first lightbulb seen in over a thousand years, all the while dealing with a couple of philosophical problems as well as cannibalism, they. . . eat stew.

Worse: I, as a reader, am constantly having new, made up words thrown at me. Seriously? You couldn’t call the monk “Brother” Numbnuts? We have to use “Fraa” Numbnuts?

Excellent.

Okay Mr. Smarty-pants. Make with the funny and the interesting or I start thinking of you as “The Confusion II: Electric Boogaloo.”

I’m in the middle of the third hardcover collection. The first two collections are the “core” Elric books; the rest were written long after (and oddly, volumes 3 and 4 were produced by a different publisher).

One of the “problems” with the Elric mythology is that Michael Moorcock didn’t write them in order. In fact, the first novel written, Stormbringer, is the last book from a chronological standpoint (since it deals with the end of the universe, it kind of has to).

However, I read them in the “chronological” order, not the publishing order, so they make a lot more sense (in fact, given the bizarre structure of Stormbringer, I can’t imagine doing it otherwise).

Elric is (or should be) the patron saint of wanna-be goth boys everywhere. He’s albino: pale, white-haired, weak. He dresses in black all the time (mostly armor, but it’s not fashionable to wear plate to a club). He is educated. He speaks and acts with a languid, ghostful grace. He sold his soul to the Arioch, the Duke of Hell, and drinks the souls of men with his cursed sword, Stormbringer.

Pretty much everything most young goth males wish they were.

Elric is the template for all anti-heroes that follow. I remember reading the original Deities & Demigods, which had Elric in it, and he was listed as being “Chaotic Evil.” I remember thinking, “how can a hero be chaotic evil?” Well. Elric can be. He is absolutely evil – he plays purely to his own desires. He’s amoral, but not in an apathetic way; he has a sociopathic, self-centered amorality. Further, while he appears to have a “personal code” of sorts, he cheerfully breaks it whenever and however he wants.

Plus, he destroys the nation he is emperor of because he’s pissed at his cousin.

Oh. And he kills the woman he loves while doing so.

In fact, Elric kills pretty much everyone he ever cares about. Ever.

Obviously, there is a tie between the sword and the One Ring from Tolkein’s mythology: both cursed artifacts of unimaginable power that develop a symbiotic relationship with their bearers. But, as written, the One Ring is kind of a non-entity and a deus ex machina: it’s a plot device. Stormbringer, however, is an essential character in the saga. Stormbringer has a personality and its own desires (mostly to kill people, preferably Elric’s pals), and the conflict between the two characters is well-handled.

The major complaint I have, honestly, is the weaving of Moorcock’s “Eternal Champion” mythology in with the rest of the epic. It feels out of place: Elric may be an important figure, but he is in no way, shape or form a “champion” (quite the opposite, actually: he destroys the universe). The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (book two) is the weakest of the saga because of this, actually.

Reading the first book, I was struck with how cinematic the entire story is, and I wonder why there hasn’t been an attempt to make it into a movie. In fact, thinking about it, I feel bad about how poor the marketing of the saga actually is. It’s hard to find the books for sale, actually. There’s a roleplaying game – but it’s put out by Chaosium, who are notoriously bad marketers (c.f., Cthulhu, which is another under-exposed series of works).

Also, the sheer darkness of the Elric saga probably turns off most movie producers. I mean, your main character butchers everyone else. How is that gonna sell?

I wish I’d read these so much earlier.

1) This is a brutal book. It’s more violent and dark than all of the others put together. Like, the “evil knob goes up to eleven” type brutal. So I don’t know that I’d recommend it for anyone younger than, say, fourteen or fifteen.

2) It does wrap up, and it does answer all the questions. With a little red bow.

If you are reading this, then I assume you’ve either read the book or don’t care. So don’t bitch at me if you read something here you didn’t know.

First: HAH! I totally knew that Dumbledore and Snape had planned the death thing. I had that pegged; the event was too out of character for everything we’d known about either them: either a) Snape was secretly evil all along and Dumbledore was a total dumbass about it (and we’d been told Dumbledore wasn’t a dumbass) or b) Dumbledore let Snape kill him as part of some master plan.

Option B, then. It further humanized Snape and solidified him as one of the most complex characters.

I like that Dumbledore was shown to have flaws and to have made mistakes. That he, too, was a bit of an asshat growing up, and that he had made mistakes to learn from. His history was well played out from beginning to end, and we saw several sides of the same story and that worked well. It’s one of Rowling’s strengths: making her heroes feel real by creating non-heroic flaws and her villains feel real by giving them heroic motives (Narcissa Malfoy’s concern for her son).

I kind of felt that Hedwig getting blasted into feathers on page 20 or whatever felt like we were simply ditching a character that we didn’t want to write for – that would just be a dead weight. The problem with Hedwig is that the bird was important in books 1 & 2 and then kind of waylaid. Forgotten. Like Quidditch in book five and six (it comes up again in book seven, but more because of its historical importance).

Lots and lots and lots of death. Many handled well (Snape, in particular), but the worst deaths are done “off screen” or tucked away in a fast-moving paragraph. Mad-Eye. Lupin. Tonks. By the end, I was unsurprised to see anyone being stacked on the funeral pyre, which is “realistic” in a war, I suppose, and I’m not saying I have a problem with it, but the way some of the deaths were written made them feel like death-for-the-sake-of-showing-that-it’s-serious.

My only real problem with the series in general is that Rowling tends to introduce certain concepts in the book when she needs them while others are introduced early in the series, discarded, and then picked up again. I much prefer the second type.

For example, take the “Deathly Hallows” themselves. It would have been much better if they had been mentioned in earlier books somehow – so that we know they exist and don’t appear as a deus ex machina. Sure, the invisibility cloak was introduced in book one, but until book seven, we had no idea that it was an Artifact of God-Level Power.

Or the concept of Horcruxes might have been nice to read about earlier than when they became Plot Essential. Something innately important to the finale and would be known by a lot of wizards – like the fact that wands can be “taken” – might be nice to have been brought up earlier. Or that Sneetches are bonded to the first person to touch them.

So that stuff feels kind of tacked on. Retconned in to fill plot holes.

Other things, like Polyjuice potion, introduced in book 2 and then only mentioned from time to time – these are really well included. This is part of the world; the characters would think about them and use them. The Hufflepuff cup; the Ravenclaw diadem, the Gryffindor sword. Yes! Use these things: you’ve told me about them before; this is a high fantasy. It’s okay to have your Jesus character use or require them.

I wanted to someone to punch out Rita Skeeter. Or at least hear about someone doing it. It was most unsatisfying that she didn’t get her clock cleaned.

I don’t want to sound like I disliked the book – I didn’t. I liked it a lot, and I felt it was a solid ending to the series. I really like that it was closed in such a way that there won’t be further books. A couple people I talked to hated the epilogue, but I liked it.

There’s probably more I’ll think about later, after I’ve digested.