@ Luke Maciak:

Kingdom is overthrown by an emeny banished generations ago, the king manages to send his children into hiding before dying.

The story is about how the children try to win back the kingdom years later.

The World seemed, to me like an interesting variant of a standard fantasy setting.

:)

@ Luke Maciak:
Well, I am not familiar with any of these two. But Stephenson is a linguist and writes in beautiful English. His words are either coming from the English language, but twisted in weird ways, or from Latin or Greek. Simply said, these words look perfectly normal, they are either used with a completely different meaning and etymology (usually conveniently provided by the narrator) or are different words which sound completely English but don’t actually exist. But the author is clever enough to chose words that may well have existed, provided the evolution of language had been different… which is only one of the numerous “what if” which are all over the book.

The best example is the title: Anathem. It normally means exclusion, of course, but not in the book. In the book, he twisted it to mean a chant (which the word could actually mean) by twisting it with the word Anthem which has the same Greek root. And of course he makes it a ceremony of being sent out of a convent. Which convents are called “Maths”. Because monks (called “fras” in the book) are actually not religious persons but scientists and/or philosophers. And so on, and so on…

@ Hexren:

What is it about though? I know I could google it, but it is always interesting to hear a recommendation from someone who liked a book. Not to mention that it is much less likely to run into a blatant spoiler this way. :)

@ Alphast:

When you say he invented his own language is it like A Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker type thing?

I tried to read the former a long time ago, but I remember that the faux Russian vocab was tripping up all sorts of internal reference errors for someone with a Slavic heritage. Riddley Walker on the other hand reads like Youtube comments. No, seriously – go check out the few pages available on Amazon. It is like reading “The Internet”.

But yeah, it sounds interesting. I will definitely check it out, as long as it is readable. I don’t mind books that have extensive jargon or invented languages. :)

I can’t believe I didn’t already recommend Anathem, by Neal Stephenson, in one of my previous comments. If I did, please forgive me, and if you haven’t bought the book, please run and buy it. It is science fiction, yes, although it is not that relevant. Let’s say that the action takes place in an alternative universe on a planet looking a lot like Earth, but that’s where similarities stop. The use of language, ideas, philosophical and political original creations is baffling in this book. And yet, the author hints all the time at the fact that this is only a fable conveying a message. I said a lot of action, and I meant it: people who read only the first three chapters might be forgiven to think I am totally gone nuts, because nothing at all seems to happen in these first chapters. But after that, the story begins to take on pace and keep on accelerating until… well, I’ll let you read that.

One word of warning though: it is not easy to read at all. The fact that the author pretty much invented an apart “language” and several philosophy sets just for the book (and the sake of the argument) make this 800+ pages novel a very hard one to follow. But it’s plain awesomeness. And the jargon he invented is so good that I caught myself use some of his word creations in English conversations… ;-) Pure pleasure.

Just read ‘Acacia: Book One: The War With the Mein’ by David Anthony Durham quite liked it. It isn’t sf though but fantasy.