A generous chunk of the third act is set in space; by far the most dynamic and wonderful bits of the book. This is not your man-the-guns (pew-pew) space battle, nor is it about the chilling isolation and dread foisted upon by light-lag and the endless void; although that factors in somewhat. It’s the engineer’s space adventure, with nifty mechano space suits, space scaffolding, construction kits and camouflage, and with orbit transfers right out of a handbook of celestial mechanics. It drives home aspects of the strangeness of space that few works touch on because they are the least romantic and the hardest to describe: Maneuvering.

SPOILERS END.

The end of the book contains one final twist, a denouement of a plot thread that rears its head often through the book: The Payoff, if you’ve been paying attention to the numerous diversions from before. It’s a grand tale in that the world of Arbre is irreconcilably different by the end. I would call it a thinking man’s coming-of-age, first contact story that has some social commentary, epistemology and rationalism thrown in, but that would be a colossal undersell. It’s a big-picture novel that sweats the details. It’s imaginative, funny and has a plethora of a-ha moments. It’s masterful. Go read it.

Anathem uses a couple of old storytelling tricks. One: Erasmus, the protagonist, is always a bit out of place, an underachiever, very nearly (and then actually) an outcast. To someone looking in from outside Anathem’s segregated society, Erasmas is a perfect lens, an easy pair of eyes to peer through. Two: About one-third of the way through the story moves out of the monastic environs (the “concent”), and the tone of the novel switches from exposition to discovery. The reader and Erasmas possess the same knowledge at this point, and are perfectly in sync from then on.

The narrative is the usual (for Stephenson) genre-hopping skein, veering from philosophical discourses to arctic escapades. None of it is spectacular, but you can’t fault it for not being clever or gritty.

The “universals” of knowledge continue to pop up, now at higher levels of abstraction: The traveling salesman problem becomes the lazy peregrin, long since solved in Finite Time on Arbre on quantum computers (Saunt Grod’s machines). The adrakhonic theorem of right angled triangles (guess) rears its head in the plot proper.

The most surprising bits of theorizing are in fact on the nature of consciousness, which is one of the struts propping up Anathem’s central mystery. Stephenson spins a yarn about the brain using quantum effects to construct models of physical reality, which is a lot to swallow but does work if you don’t pay too much attention. (A lot of philosophy feels this way.) Another strut is the existence of the polycosmi, alternate realities forking at the resolution of each quantum event. It’s a bit too much to take in at once, but some elegant phase space (“Hemn space”) justifications make it palatable. (Readers of Penrose’s The Emperor’s New Mind will feel right at home here, inasmuch as it is possible to feel at home with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.)

The mystery is pretty much resolved at this point; plot threads joining up slowly. Without dipping into spoiler material, it’s hard to see how this will end, though.

The promise of a novel is a sojourn in an alternate world, one that differs from reality in at least some describable (if minor) and interesting way.

Now imagine a bizarro post-enlightenment Earth that discovered the sciences in a long sequence of events only subtly different from our own experiences; at times sharing everything with our collective history except the names. This world is past its technological age, and a stable segregation exists in society, Morlocks and Eloi style. The sequestered philosophers and scientists eschew technology and weather economic and structural collapses of civilization outside their cloisters, venturing outside only once in centuries or millenia, and bent on uncovering the secrets of the universe through the socratic method.

Arbre is that world, and Anathem is the promise: a giant what-if, a delicately constructed musing on what could have been of us, and on what we will possibly face in the coming centuries. It’s easily the most erudite opus of speculation I’ve ever dived into, and I’ve only just dived in.

This strange setting highlights the universals of knowledge and discovery: If we rebuilt civilization, what ideas from today would we rediscover in nearly identical form? Occam’s Razor becomes Haldan’s Steelyard, phase spaces and Poincaré maps become Hemn configurations, action principles remain action principles (The more abstract ideas retain their earth-names to avoid overwhelming the reader.)

Anathem delights in wordplay. In keeping with the overall feel (everything’s a little off), places and things have evocative names: a math is a collection of scholars, a concent is a collection of math, an aut is a ceremonial act; Anathem is an invocation (anthem) and an aut of excision (anathema). It’s just the right amount of strange to let the reader know that the rules are different here.

The most surprising thing about Anathem, coming from Stephenson’s previous novels, is the normalcy of its story. True, it’s peppered with the usual amusing and instructive asides ¹, and even with appendices explaining mathematical concepts and theorems. Most of the novel so far, though, is an account of the monastic life of the protagonist and his friends–of the structure of the institution and the politicking within. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say it reads like Harry Potter with underpinnings of math and philosophy instead of magic ². Stephenson is always intriguing, but Anathem, with its fast developing central mystery, is exciting.

Many elements of the world remain unclear at this point:

• Why do the centenarian and millenarian maths exist? If they sequestered themselves with some grand purpose in mind, it’s not clear why.

• Who are the various orders vying for power? What is the sæcular power?

Bar a quibble or two (dialogue is often overly expository, but I don’t see it working any other way), reading Anathem is a superlative experience, a philosophical flight of fancy piggybacking on a personal story. As the tale moves out of the monastery, I’m going to relish seeing where it goes.

I discovered today that GTK has an option to enable common Emacs editing keys in text fields everywhere on your system. This is amazing–it means no browser extensions or hacks are needed to type over four lines without cursing.

The setting is buried at ‘desktop/gnome/interface/gtk-key-theme’ in the gconf-editor; change its value to “Emacs”, or paste this in a terminal:

gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk_key_theme Emacs --type string

Most common navigation and editing keys work just as they do in terminal emulators: C-{n,p,f,b}, M-{f,b,d}, C-{a,e}, C-k and C-y, C-{w,h,d}.

The CUA keys C-x, C-c and C-v continue to cut, copy and paste respectively.

I know this, because I used to do this often as a teenager. In other cases, it’s not a list at all, but prose of some kind, like a log of a discussion, an essay, or (ahem) a blog post. Perhaps it’s about something else entirely, like the benefits of eating the kind of food you already do. The reaction is the same.

When you read the word “teenager”, you probably dismissed this activity as something kids do, searching for a group of their own. Something that perhaps even you did, before you knew better. If you are a teenager, you’re trying to remember if you’ve done something like this lately. Part of you is wondering how the opening lines were intended–figuring out where you stand on this issue, or even whether you have a stand.

There are several problems with this kind of thinking, and several factors at work here. The first problem is that we lose information when we do this, collapsing our rather high dimensional personalities onto smaller ones, like projecting a vector onto another. Over time, we start seeing ourselves as the projection, and eliminating (or ignoring) any components that don’t align. The second problem is that you and I believe we no longer do this, even though we used to at some point. And there is a third problem, the thrust of this essay, mentioned towards the end.

One factor causing this is confirmation bias. Even a slightly held opinion is progressively magnified by reading and agreeing with something that echoes the opinion. Anything that opposes the opinion is quietly disregarded. You know of this; we do it all the time.

The second factor is the tribe. We love to congregate into tribes of like-minded individuals. This is what online communities are. Some of them are places you go to for information, but mostly they’re cliques, breathing life into Enrico Fermi’s quip:

Never underestimate the joy people derive from hearing something they already know.

Everyone wants to be told something they know, and one way to do this is to call yourself a geek and associate with others who do the same.

My thesis is more general, but let’s talk some more about the example here, that of being a geek.

One problem with the term geek is that it is something you are. It’s a descriptor: You’re not so much a geeky person anymore as you are a geek. Here’s a little context, from the brilliantly rambling In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, except that it’s been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it’s the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we’ve evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that’s no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.

When Stephenson writes about the distinction between the Morlocks and the Eloi–geeks and laymen, he is careful not to use the latter terms. It may just be authorial style, or it may be that there is more to this than meets the eye:

The boundary between these two classes is more porous than I’ve made it sound. I’m always running into regular dudes–construction workers, auto mechanics, taxi drivers, galoots in general–who were largely aliterate until something made it necessary for them to become readers and start actually thinking about things. Perhaps they had to come to grips with alcoholism, perhaps they got sent to jail, or came down with a disease, or suffered a crisis in religious faith, or simply got bored. Such people can get up to speed on particular subjects quite rapidly.

Geeks are not a tribe. The difference is like that between time and space averages: A large group doing mentally stimulating, creative and (or) highly logical tasks in some of their time produces output similar to a splinter of them doing it all the time. Even if the composition of this splinter is ever-changing.

The second aspect–not so much a problem–of the term is that it is entirely American. This works for a significant chunk of the Internet, but not for the rest. The term embodies a set of assumptions that I don’t agree with, or even understand. For instance, people often apologize for being geeky, which always strikes me as disingenuous. I think the true reason for this, if one exists, is mired in the last few decades of American history. Maybe it is sociological; maybe they do not know why they do it, except that many others do.

You’re buying into these cultural assumptions when you adopt the term; even more so when you apply it to yourself.

The opening example could have been a variety of things, like “How to tell if you’re a programmer”, or a Banker, or an Australian, or something more esoteric, like RTS gamer. I chose “geek” because someone asked me recently why I rarely use that word, and I thought the answer is best told in a larger context. (On the other hand, the opening example was a serious explanation of a facetious turn of phrase, and maybe I’m just overthinking it.)

You might think I’m making a case for individuality here. But that’s not it, not exactly. Anyone who is geeky in the sense of the word discussed here is also likely to be strongly individualistic. I’m talking of an orthogonal problem, where we assert our individuality by assigning labels to ourselves.

Labels are dangerous things. The more closely you associate yourself with something, the more muddled your thinking becomes in that subject. An easy way to see this is to think of something you call yourself that ends in an -ian, an -er or an -ist. A school, a town, a religion, a country. How do you react when you sense an attack on any of these labels? How long does it take before debate goes out the window and you’re responding to the attack in kind?

That’s not to say that you can’t feel strongly about something. Ideas and institutions are well worth preserving, but the deeper they live in your psyche, the more atavistic and irrational your response when they are threatened. In his hilarious talk at TED (which you’ve no doubt seen), Sir Ken Robinson quotes a fine example:

I have an interest in education–actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don’t you? I find this very interesting. If you’re at a dinner party, and you say you work in education–actually, you’re not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. You’re not asked. And you’re never asked back, curiously. That’s strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, “What do you do?” and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They’re like, “Oh my God,” you know, “Why me? My one night out all week.” But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it’s one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things.

This, then, is the third problem with the kind of thinking in the opening sentences, and with the label of “geek”, although–of course–this is also a problem with most labels you assign in constructing your identity.

Keeping our stack of labels small and consciously avoiding confirmation biases all the time is a tall order, and of course I haven’t a clue as to how it’s done. But I think it’s one of those ideas worth preserving.

It’s surprising how heavily the experience of consuming something can be skewed by the expectations you carry going into it. For all its acclaim and weight, for its status as a beacon of cyberpunk fiction, Snow Crash is run-of-the-mill wacky dytopian satire, visiting and ricocheting off several cyberpunk tropes too fast to allow any kind of coherence to develop.

But maybe that’s the point.

There isn’t much to the story. Here, let me sum it up in one sentence for you:
(Spoiler, obv. It’s safe to read from the image.)

Megalomaniac media mogul creates cult using a brain virus to take over the world but is foiled by enterprising hacker, spunky kid and rival conglomerates.

All right, there’s a little more to it. The explanation is that the “brain virus” exploits a flaw in the deepest constructs of the human brain, activating a failsafe that overrides all conscious thought (“snow crashes” the brain) and makes it susceptible to carefully administered low-level input, typically in the form of Glossolalia.

Enter a wobbly connection of this virus to the description of ancient Sumer, and its liberation from it by the hacker-priest Enki, who managed to reverse-engineer and lock out these lower levels of functioning of the human brain.

Propping up the above description is the concept of a “metavirus“, an entity that affects any sufficiently advanced system capable of computation by exploiting systemic flaws. A virus that can create and tailor viruses, floating freely across the cosmos. Again, a nebulous and sketchy idea. It was, to say the least, disappointing to not see a mention of Gödel’s undecidability theorem (hypothetically) applied to the human mind. That’s one hell of a hook. Or, perhaps, the concept of a meme, an old idea which described perfectly what Stephenson repeatedly swept under the umbrella term of virus.

It was intriguing, but it lacked any kind of hook, one foot in something known. The main plot was too hypothetical to provide any kind of food for thought. And boy, am I looking for food for thought on these things.

It reminds me of Slouching Towards Bedlam, a fantastic horror themed piece of interactive fiction set in a mental asylum, with steampunk robots and an ominous sense of unspeakable horror. ¹

Then there’s the concept the book is best known for. It’s hard for my generation to imagine what Stephenson’s Metaverse meant to the world back in 1992. When Second Life was launched, its creators envisioned it as their metaverse. They even borrowed the name “avatar” for virutal selves. Barring the advanced user interfaces, we’re there, pretty much. ²
It was the single most memorable idea in the book, the one thing you’ll never forget.

Everything except the substance of the thin main plot gets a mention on the back of the book. Mixed in there are large servings of virtual reality, Sumerian myth, neurolinguistics and swashbuckling. Hiro Protagonist gets only about half the attention his name demands. It makes sense. The book is about the wacky world of emasculated governments and of corporations and triads gone out of control. About the Metaverse, the alternate plane of existence that is in constant flux where hackers are demigods. About the bizarre tech, like quadriped dog-cyborg radioactive isotope driven watchmen rat things that dream perpetually of steak and frisbees, live in freon coolers and dash at supersonic speeds. About satire set in a free-for-all slugfest, an anarchy.

In the acknowledgments, Neal Stephenson mentions that this book was originally constructed as a graphic novel. That explains all the weirdness, really. It would have been a cracker of a graphic novel. I went into it expecting a wacky cyberpunk adventure with historical segues and insightful asides, a la Cryptonomicon. It turned out to be a long piece of amusing (sometimes hilarious) satire with a single gripping conceit and several half-baked ones. It packs a hefty punch; not the knuckle-popping crack of a worn, bandaged fist, but the fwump of a bright red glove-in-the-springbox.

pleonastic (as opposed to terse)

acolyte

pusillanimous

inveigle

derailleur

spoor (trail of the hunted)

ersatz (in place of)

impieties

cavort

quotidian (think quota)

invidious

appellation

foible (flaw)

anodyne

rictus (think maw)

mewling

13. Run six miles in under an hour.

Should have written: Six miles in under an hour, with minimal fatigue.
58 minutes, ~40 seconds

I need a new #13 now.