Nineteen-year-old Erasmas is an avout (monk) living in a concent (monastery) that holds science and reason as the pinnacle of thought, yet rejects all the technology its discoveries make possible. This mathic world, which Stephenson models after the ancient Pythagorean order of Greece, is made up of four groups: unarians, tenners, hundreders, and thousanders, who leave the concent once during their respective cycles: a few years, 10 years, 100 years, 1,000 years. The doors of the concent are controlled by a millennial clock, a massive machine that acts as a focal point for ritual and liturgy.
Outside the concent live the saeculars, a society that's a mix of religious fundamentalism, consumerism, and an obsession with gadgets, such as jeejahs (cellphones) and speelycaptors (video cameras). Threaded through the novel are history lessons on the complex relationship between the avout and the saeculars, a history marked by antagonism and violence.
The main thrust of the plot involves Erasmas and his friends having to navigate the world outside their concent to help uncover the truth behind a visitation by a huge starship. To keep the plot moving, Stephenson employs daring last-minute escapes, all-out martial arts rumbles, and the appearance of too many characters. But all of this sometimes feels like a ruse. What he really wants is a vehicle to explore the science and philosophy that fuel the narrative. Often the characters feel like nothing more than echo chambers for his ideas, although Stephenson establishes early on that in the mathic world this is how people talk to one another.
Unlike his other novels, "Anathem" takes place on another planet, named Arbre, which is similar to ours. And like the best science fiction, it makes some insightful and often hilarious critiques of our own society.
