I was pleasantly surprised to see Anathem automatically show up on my Kindle just minutes after midnight tonight. Anathem is Neal Stephenson's newest book. He is the author of many well known Sci-Fi/Tech books such as Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.
Is anyone else planning to read this? Do you like any of Stephenson's previous works?
EDIT: I've decided to add a short introduction written by Liviu_5 regarding the "steep curve" of this novel.
Quote:
The steep curve is more about figuring what's what on Arbre than infodump per se. There are a lot of new terms - Mr. Stephenson preferred analogy is with Dune's lexicon - and the essential difference between Arbre and Earth is that the "intellectuals/theoreticians" are the avout, while the politicians, business people, lawyers, physicians, engineers, IT guys and such are the saecular people and of course the rednecks - slines - are too part of the saecular.
Of course the saeculars that go in business, politics, trades like engineering, medicine, law spend years as unarian avouts which is sort like going to college/grad school except that you stay inside for the whole year with only ten days Apert to visit home, without computers, TV, cellphones - but with sex and alcohol so that's not so bad after all .
And for example the 6 main young avout characters, "fids", 4 boys and 2 girls, Raz - narrator, Jesry, Lio, Arsibalt, Tulia and Ala reflect that diversity, with Raz and Lio coming from "sline" background, Jesry from rich business upper class, Arsibalt from religious upper class, while Tulia was a newborn foundling. And as expected Jesry is the handsome, smart, smooth boy, Arisbalt the fat nerdy one, Lio the tough karate kid, while Raz the more naive but intrepid and lucky narrator, with Tulia the smartest of all and Ala the bossy, leader girl.
Similarly in the extramuros/saecular world we have Cord the cool, tough girl that's Raz sister and an artisan - mechanic/engineer - that made her way out of her sline/trailer/redneck background and then several other characters of diverse background from religious types to redneck wilderness guide to ultra-rich old money - but those appear later and I do not want to spoil the book...
The official site - link below - has a lot of stuff including the trailer which is superb, and stuff from the book but only the timeline and dictionary, no proper excerpt.
As a bonus Cryptonomicon is available to be read for free online though not downloadble.
http://nealstephenson.com/anathem/
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