Ooh this was a big one. Took me a whole bloody month to read, partly because I had to rearrange the furniture every time I wanted to open it.

The thing about this is that it's all about a world where scientific progress comes about through the efforts of ancient monastic enclaves who devote their lives to the study of scientific theory and philosophy, letting the outside world get on with believing whatever madcap delusions they can draw from passing cloud blocking out the sun or whatever. Oooh, clever inversion.

I knew monks. I grew up near a monastery. They weren't that much like these guys, but I don't think they were much like other monks, either, being a fairly wealthy and extroverted order who sent missionaries to Africa and Asia and came back with groovy beaded rattle things and dried snakeskins. Oh, there were more than a few saintly beatific brothers with benign expressions and faraway eyes who preached sermons about the ineffable thingness of wotsit (seriously, listening to them was like... well, even as a kid I actually kind of liked them, especially compared to the Bush-like eloquence of the parish priests, and anyway they were short.) Mostly, though, they were what college students would be like if they didn't drink or swear or have sex or do drugs, so I apreciate what Stephenson is getting at here. Also, the singing.

I also knew nuns, seeing as Anathem's monastries are coed. I went to a convent school, and there's nothing quite like seeing tiny, hunched, female figures in black putting the fear of almighty God in the hearts of strapping six foot farmer's sons. Sister Agnes, who taught us Irish, would stand beside us (we were sitting, she was standing, and the tallest wisp of grey hair that poked out of the front of her wimple came up to our shoulders despite the massive heels on her shoes) and stick her arm out from her elbow at a ninety degree angle, rotate her hips and repeatedly strike our arms and say 'Nil pheac deanta agat!' What did that mean? No idea. Never learnt a word of Irish. I assume it's Irish. The suurs in Anathem don't do any pheacing, so that aspect didn't ring true for me.

Anathem's a lot like The Baroque Cycle in that science and philsophy and technology are all discoursed on in various ways by the characters while the plot ticks along in the background, except it's all rephrased and reformulated because it's a different world, same physics (or is it?) Our hapless hero is summoned by the saecular power to help out with this problem they're having which may involve the end of the world, and all that. Epic stuff happens with the usual Stephensonian aplomb, some of it funny and witty, some of it not, all of it eminently readable and fun.

Ok, that was a lot about nuns and monks in the precedingreview. ON REREADING - this has aged remarkaby well. Somehow the conceit of a world divided between monastic enclaves devoted to rational thought and a secular world that will think any old thing seems more apposite than ever. It valorises the warrior-science-monks in a way that is perhaps not entirely helpful and more than a little wish-fulfillment, but in terms of metaphor it is effective. It's also pure Neal Stephenson - big chunks of people thinking out loud about stuff interspersed with, or driving, or responding to, dramatic world-shaking events, with a big epic set-piece finale. I have to say, that full-on assault on a broad range of ideas was sorely missing from the climate change book. Howsomever