For Christmas, Lillian gave me a kindle, so I thought I'd try to read something on it. This wasn't a slam dunk, most of the things I like to read are books that have been around a few years and have accumulated enough good reviews for me to decide they're worth reading, and many of those aren't on the kindle. A significant number of the books I'm interested in are available second-hand for less than they cost on the kindle (even with shipping). Also, some technical or science books have diagrams or other color photos, and the form factor and display capabilities of the kindle are not well suited to them. Anyway, Anathem had enough good reviews that I figured it would be a good book for giving the kindle a try. Snow Crash still carries a lot of weight with me, especially the first 50 pages which are maybe the most enjoyable 50 pages of 90's science fiction. I'll forgive Neal Stephenson a lot for that.
As a reading experience, the kindle is passable, but not great. Some things are more difficult to do than they should be. For example, sometimes I want to review a passage I read half an hour before— the story refers to it, and I want to look again. The small size of the 'pages' on the kindle make paging cumbersome, and there's no obvious way to, say, jump back 20 pages or so. With books this process is much easier, you can jump back a lot or a little, as you need.
The pages are too small. In particular, they are too narrow. The kindle justifies the text, but doesn't have a hyphenation dictionary, and so often the spaces between words are jarringly wide. It's more like reading a newspaper than a book. While I suppose this is a tradeoff for battery life, I find it annoying. There isn't quite enough content on each page in any case— I'd rather have a screen that can display the same contents as a page of a trade paperback.
Anathem uses a fair number of terms in an invented language. 'Dictionary' entries punctuate the story, often indirectly foreshadowing events to come. Kindle has a built-in dictionary, which is pretty handy, since it makes it much easier to look up words on the spur of the moment. Unfortunately, the book's dictionary isn't part of it. It would have been pretty cool if the book's dictionary could have been used by the kindle, but such a special-purpose use was not envisioned by the creators of the kindle or of the digital book format it uses, and probably would not be worth the effort when translating into book form. On the other hand, just the smallest support for linking, as on any web page, would have made it easy to get the same functionality.
One thing that is nice about the kindle, though, is the element of instant gratification. Delivery over the air means you can get the book immediately. There's a certain enjoyment in that, silly and unfortunate as it is. Impulse purchases are, of course, bad for consumers, so the facilitation of this is actually not a good thing. That doesn't mean I can't enjoy it, but (as is always the case with me) I can't escape feeling a bit disappointed with myself, and like I've let myself be taken advantage of.
Despite all this, the kindle works for me. Reading Anathem on it was fine even with the poor formatting. The screen is readable in lots of lighting conditions. I like the faceplate images the kindle puts on the display when it goes into sleep mode. Search functionality (I need to learn more about this) is handy. You can keep several books in a small package thats portable and can go for days without power. I definitely see the appeal, and I've purchased another book to read.
Back to Anathem. The comparisons to A Canticle for Leibowitz are apropos, especially in the first quarter of Anathem. The monastic setting, with an initiate puzzling out the mysteries of the order in which he finds himself, is quite familiar. This goes on a long time (like all Stephenson's recent works, the book is a long one) and many reviewers find it slow going. I wasn't particularly bothered by this, though— in a sense, the relatively slow pace of the story worked well to convey the stately pace of the monastic life and the long historical time scale (thousands of years) that is the background of the story. Long, slow immersion in another world can be fun, and with science fiction, much of the enjoyment is putting together a coherent picture of the alternate reality from the brief glimpses offered to you as the characters go about their business.The action picks up when the principal characters are removed from the monastery and start encountering the outer world (which they normally have very little contact with). I'll avoid spoilers but suffice to say the long historical record is about to receive a major jolt.
Both settings (inside and outside the monastery) provide Stephenson an opportunity to present chunks of detailed information (in this case, about mathematics) in story form. Unlike Snow Crash, where I found the story suffered from the long intricate detour into the of the doings of various Sumerian gods, the astronomy, physics, and math concepts in Anathem are treated more lightly and woven into the story better. Part of the enjoyment of the story is identifying the relationships between our (western) scientific/philosophical history and those of the world of Anathem. So this works well, too.
But... I still ended up being a bit dissatisfied with the book. And I think it's because I'm too old. If I were in my early twenties (about the age I was when I read A Canticle for Leibowitz) this probably wouldn't have bothered me, at least not nearly as much.
First off, I'm not sure it would have carried the same resonance with me as Canticle does, because Canticle is ultimately dystopic— the scientific and technical knowledge preserved by the religious faith through the eras of darkness after civilization's collapse is ultimately restored to the world, first to great benefit, but ultimately leading to an even greater disaster and the complete collapse of civilization. In short, there's a moral story here, which is that perhaps we are not morally or culturally capable of managing the technology we are intellectually able to develop, that our best instincts still lead to unintended and unwanted consequences, and that ultimately we cannot help but destroy ourselves and our planet. Written in the early 60's, in the middle of the cold war and the nuclear race and at the tail and of a long era of 'gee whiz' science fiction, Canticle is a pretty serious story. Like all genre fiction, it's easy to dismiss, and the moral message is unsubtle and blunt, but the moral concerns are true and stir some unease.
Anathem has nothing so serious to say. The implication at the end is that the word continues pretty much as it has before, and in fact the corrections and insights brought about by the dramatic events will be of limited duration, at least on the historical time scale that is the backdrop of the novel. Nothing to shock you into serious reflection here.
But that's ok, really. I don't need a moral, and I'm naturally dystopic enough so that I don't need more of it. So if this was it, I'd still be happy with the book.
The big problem for me— and again, this is due to my age— is the lack of adult personalities and relationships.
This book seems to be written for, well, intellectually precocious but socially lagging teens. (Yeah, I know, it's science fiction). The monastic life is basically undergraduate life at a small college, and the young (19-year-old) protagonists are essentially the key driving actors in what is nominally an adult world. In this way it feels like the new Star Trek, where cadets, friends and rivals in the academy, end up taking all the command positions in a starship— I mean, sorry, but kids are not going to take control of a starship. Similarly for Anathem, the chances that a small group of students all the same age, who all know each other, from the same monastery (just one of a number around the world), are going to all be major players in a world-sized drama are, well, nil. Even characters introduced later in the story turn out to be related— the 'spy' they uncover and get to help them turns out to be the husband of the (one) woman who rebels and dies delivering information to them. Um, my willing suspension of disbelief goes only so far, and it breaks under the stress.
Furthermore, the relationships between the characters are frustratingly simple. There's a crush, a first kiss, going steady. Sorry but it's been too long for me to relate to this. Granted the story involves students in a monastery, but the romantic relationships are ridiculously immature even for that age. Rivalries are minimal and play virtually no part in the plot. There's no real jealousy, competitiveness, frustration, schadenfreude (love that word), or personal struggle and growth. Even in science fiction there ought to be something resembling real personalities and real relationships. But instead, you get what basically are stock teen characters. There's the bright guy, the determined-and-pretty-in-her-own-way girl, the guy who's more physical (martial arts), the guy who's not remarkable in any particular way but is just well-rounded enough and has enough street smarts to somehow be the leader and central protagonist (read: stand-in for the reader)... Aieee! It makes my brain hurt just describing these characters.
And it's too bad. As science fiction— a story whose plot line is driven by science and speculation based on science— it's great, but as engaging adult fiction it just doesn't work for me. Perhaps the tropes of science fiction are just too difficult for me to digest when it's a group of characters instead of the usual protagonist, love interest, and enemy or rival. I suspect, though, that the book was just written for a much younger audience. At least it doesn't have his Shaftoe character (who just isn't amusing to me and gets on my nerves, it's why I couldn't read Stephenson's Quicksilver trilogy). But it doesn't have either a real adult protagonist or an interesting genre parody of one. And I guess these days I need one. Even a reasonable 25-30 year old I could relate to. But not these teens. Pity.
