I was pretty stoked to read this because it came highly recommended from a friend, and it was a Neal Stephenson novel, author of Diamond Age, one of my all-time favorite stand-alone sci-fi books. Anathem was just not to my liking. I kept waiting for the story to pick up and leave the monastery, but by the time it did, the book was nearly done. I wanted more than the mundane drudgery of the monastic life in the alternate universe.
An interesting premise, with a world that is very well constructed sets the stage for a fascinating tale, but I still didn’t want to continue with the series. It’s a Swiss Family Robinson, but with a crash landing on a planet and with no rescue. What the author did an amazing job with was the slow deconstruction of society. When the crashed crew goes from four to two and then grows to 500, what aspects of the culture are preserved? What taboos are removed? And what new ones put in place? Strip away luxury, knowledge, and history and what make us human? It’s an interesting exploration, but I was glad to be done with it.
Formulaic plots, flimsy characters with zero growth, and dozen books in the series are all great reasons to pass on this entirely. There are interesting parts of the series and perhaps under a different author I would have enjoyed this as a space opera worth a couple of re-reads. But, it’s not. And I won’t waste another word on it.
At this point in the series, the pattern to the plots become all too obvious. The travel between the worlds was interesting, as was the continual struggle for survival by the protagonist. But when the actions of the two main characters becomes completely predictable, it’s too much to bear. I didn’t finish the book, nor the series. It’s astounding to me that the series has twelve books in it—TWELVE! When three books in a row have zero character growth and nearly identical plot structures, it’s time to move on.
The premise here is awesome: a computer virus that goes sentient and grows so fast that it spawns entire ecosystems that fracture and fight each other. This was my favorite of the series, by far. My only wish was that it was longer and developed the characters further, including the AIs. There was so much here worth exploring and digging into that I almost wish Neal Stephenson wrote this book.