You see, Anathem was nearly a perfect book for me. It was a novel about kick-ass scientist monks who discover evidence of a possible unidentified spaceship in the orbit, and spend most of the story talking about math, philosophy and doing proofs, up until they launch themselves into space to perform an epic, realistic zero-G commando strike on the alien vessel. Diamond Age is about… Well, it is mostly about a little girl who finds an interactive game/book that tells her stories about princesses and magical fairies.

Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson

Of course, the book is not bad. As always, Stephenson as a lot of interesting ideas. It is just not Anathem. It is not in the same league. At least in my opinion. This might be actually entirely subjective assessment. Diamond Age is definitely more accessible to a general reader. Anathem was often dry, and the philosophical and scientific dialogs would go on for pages. But that’s precisely why I loved it. I found the concepts presented in the book endlessly fascinating. Perhaps it was because a lot of the stuff was new to me.

Diamond Age hits much closer to home, so when Stephenson took a 100 page tangent to explain Turing machines via a fable about how Princess Nell conquered a castle full of clockwork knight-golems I was getting slightly bored. When Vinge or Stross write about my field, they name name drop or mention important theories and forge ahead. Stephenson likes to explain things in detail, which worked great when he was talking about human mind being a crazy quantum engine, parallel universe theories or physics of zero-G navigation. But when he talks about the shit I have spent years studding, and makes it into a cute fairy tale, I’m not really into it.

Not to mention that Anathem had a completely unique, and inspired setting which I absolutely adored. Diamond Age is much less inventive near-future Cyberpunk which suffers from the fact that Stephenson obviously did a lot of research, and knows the theory but often is clueless about how these theories work in the real world. There were passages in there that made me cringe, because in Stephenson’s world all software seems to be bug-free and always works perfectly and thus in his world there are unbreakable encryption schemes, and 100% anonymous networks. In practice, most encryption schemes get broken not because of lack of mathematical complexity, but because of software implementation flaws.

For example the primary internet-replacement in his world seems to be some sort of Tor like, onion routed, heavily encrypted, distributed clusterfuck. At least that’s what I got from his descriptions. Of course at some point in the novel one character, decides she wants to find out the identity of someone she was interacting with anonymously over said network. Everyone she asks for help tells her it is impossible. Which, I guess is ok, since we are reading a SF novel after all, but I just don’t buy it. I mean, read up about Tor and how people go about attacking it – they don’t to crack onion routing itself, which is theoretically sound and secure. They use implementation flaws, compromise exit nodes and/or key servers, use social engineering tricks and javascript exploits to trick people into hitting their site directly rather than via the Tor proxies and etc.

There are a lot of oversimplifications in this book. If you have a CS degree or two, read security blogs and subscribe to places like /r/netsec, /r/sysadmin and /r/crypto you might be a tad bit annoyed at some of the stuff he writes about. Then again, Diamond Age also has nano-machines, and molecular assembler machines – and I have no problem with those. I can suspend my disbelief without batting an eyelid when he describes completely impossible, imaginary technologies. Problem is when he tries to talk about cryptography, cryptoanalisis, and networking, he no longer uses abstract techno-babble and pseudo-science but actual technical jargon which immediately triggers my bullshit meeter (which has a hair trigger because… Internet). Then again, the book was written in 1995, and a lot has happened in these fields since then – so maybe I’m too harsh on Stephenson.

The “Princess Nell” stories are arguably the weakest part of the book. It is a cool idea – a lot of plot exposition or character development is done within these allegorical fables produced by the educational AI almanac owned by the protagonist. So when the girl is bullied and needs to learn about self defense, the book tells her a story about a mouse who runs a martial arts Dojo, which is also attended by a friendly dinosaur. It’s all really cute, but it was completely lost on me. I’d much rather read a philosophical battle of wits between two scientist-monks than infantile story about little princes and her talking duck friend getting an object lesson in cryptography by visiting an enchanted library.

There were things in the book that I did like. For example, the Drummers idea is pretty interesting – a gestalt society that shares subconscious thought via networked nano-machines that live and replicate in their bodies. Individually, they function as normal but the parasitic nano-machines lower their inhibitions and stimulate their sex drive since they usually are passed from person to person via exchange of fluids. Put bunch of drummers in close proximity, and their nano starts talking to each other, plugging them into an ad-hoc massively distributed processing cluster. If you know how to write programs to use the Drummer network, you can infect yourself, have sex with one of them, and hopefully your program will percolate through the collective. That said, getting output out of that supercomputer can be tricky.

Granted, thinking about implementation of such a massively distributed cluster, routing data through it and even work scheduling in an unreliable environment where most of your processing nodes can drop out at any second is enough to break my immersion. But if you don’t think too much about it, it is a cool idea.

I also liked Stephenson vision of global, digital tribes replacing traditional nation-state governments. As the globalization, and networking obliterated geographically defined states, people started banding together based on common interests, goals, moral convictions or tradition. But Neo-Victorians? Really?

You are telling me that there are people out there who would choose to dress up in Victorian clothing, speak with posh British accents just because they could? Oh wait, this is the internet. Of course there are people like that out there. Never mind.

Overall, it is not a bad book. It has a few cool ideas, but at times Stephenson’s grasp of cryptology, cryptoanalysis and cryptoanarhism seems either lacking or outdated (which is justified considering publication date). The story is decent, but I found the magical adventures of Princess Nell to be tiresome. If I didn’t read Anathem first, I would probably give it a much more favorable review. But I have seen what Stephenson can do, and this is definitely not his best work. Still, you could do much, much worse. The book is definitely worth reading, but dies not live up to the hype.

Anathem - book cover

The story takes place in an alternate universe, on a planet Abre where life and human civilization evolved in a way much like ours. The main difference is their history and culture. One of such differences is establishment of the “mathic system”. On Abre there are no universities, and most of the population is borderline illiterate. Children receive minimum amount of schooling that will allow them to read klingrams (a simple pictographic alphabet) and train for a trade profession. Those who want to pursue education in arts and sciences however must seek it in monastery like institutions known as maths. When one joins a math one must forswear and his property, and all contact with the outside world for the duration of the stay, with exceptions for special holidays known as Aperts. Math dwellers known as Avout live as austere monks completely segregated from the outside world. Each math is completely self sufficient and independent from the secular world. In fact, they are treated almost as their own sovereign states – with their own laws and ways of policing their members.

Avout recruit new members and exchange knowledge only during Aperts which are celebrated at different intervals depending on the type of a math. For example Unarian maths celebrate it anually, Decenarian ones every ten years and so on. The highest and most prestigious of maths are the Millenarian maths which open their gates only once in a thousand years. Because of this seclusion a Math can often see a city grow beyond it’s gates, thrive, and then depopulate, become abandoned and overgrown with vegetation – all happening between Aperts.

Unarian maths often function as our universities. It is common for people to join them for a few terms to gain classical education and then return to secular lifes. Most other math types however attract those who have decided to devote their whole lives to scientific research and pursuit of knowledge. Anathem follows the misadventures of a group of young members of a Decenarian Math who stumble upon a discovery which will change not only the Mathic world but the whole Abre forever. Saying more on this would probably be spoilish, so I will stop here.

Stephenson’s book combines some action, some suspense and even a bit of romance with a very large helping of science and philosophy. The characters spend most of their time discussing their work, or talking about philosophy, metaphysics, theology and more – usually in the form of an academic dialogues in which the participants are trying to logically deconstruct each others arguments. All of which are based on real and existing works of philosophers – mainly Edmund Husserl and Kurt Gödel. In the foreword Stephenson actually mentions he has considered annotating his novel with copious amount of footnotes but then decided against it because he thought that it would break immersion for the readers. So he cleverly disguises these ideas by attributing them to Avout saunts – which are a bit like a mix between saints (but without religious undertones) and Nobel prize winners (as in distinguished and brilliant thinkers whose contributions shook the Mathic world). Some of the stuff Stephenson brings up is really heavy, and it will stay with you for days. You know how sometimes you read a book and it does something to your mind? It causes some gears to switch tracks, and makes you look at things in a new way? This is one of these books. It blew my mind. Maybe not as much as VALIS did (I always tell people that VALIS is not a mind fuck, it is a brutal gang rape of the mind) but the experience was much more structured and enjoyable.

Even if you don’t find the meta-philosophical discussions fascinating (I do, I think they were the best part of the book), they do a great deal to establish and ground Stephenson’s characters. You really have a feeling that they are really the kind of people who would join a Math if it existed. Analytical, pragmatic, educated – always approaching real life problems as puzzles that can be figured out and fixed by applying the right theoretical principles.

For one, the Mathic system as described by Stephenson really appeals to me. While I’m not keen on hard physical labor and the austere life style, the idea of living among people who all decided to devote themselves to the pursuit of knowledge sounds incredibly appealing. This is precisely why I loved academic life so much – because I could spend most of my day hanging out with people who were much smarter than me, having interesting intellectual debates and limit the amount of interaction with stupid, knowledge-hating plebeians down to the minimum. But of course a great number of people go to college just to party and after 4 years get a piece of paper that says they have learned something even if they didn’t. Mathic system seems to promise a much more pure academic experience.

I guess what I’m saying is that I would join a Math if one existed. Well, maybe. The whole thing about not being able to see your family for X amount of years kinda sucks. Otherwise though, it would be grand. Would you become an Avout if you could?

Stephenson also coined my new favorite word: panjadrums. In Anathem, this is how Avout refer to the clueless, under-educated and overwhelmingly ignorant secular politicians, rulers and/or decision makers. It is mostly a derogatory term and I’m stealing it, planning to use it to describe all real world politicians and decision makers from now on.

Go read this book. It is definitely one of the best novels I have read in a while.