Rants about Anathem
I really enjoy anathem. I enjoy the premise of organisations devoted to pure thinking. I enjoy a book which plays with practical implications of weird philosophy. I enjoy the general hopeful attitude. But every time I read it I also find MORE AND MORE which makes me incredibly cheesed off:
The characters constantly *say* that there are all these differences in civil society in how men and women are treated that don't exist inside the walls. But everything that *happens* represents gender stereotypes much more like the ones we suffer with:
* All of the thinkers who discover something are male
* All the thinkers who are famous for promulgating other people's thought are female
* All four main characters are men, as are all the characters who do anything else of importance.
* A big segment of plot is "is Erasmus good enough at theoretics to hack it as a pure scientist". No-one even asks that of Ala and Tulia, who have been doing solid work on this that no-one else respects, they just give up their aspirations automatically for other people's sake
* "women have emotions like this, men have emotions like this"
* Why is Trestanas referred to as "evil" when other senior avout aren't?
On the other hand, when you actually *look*, the stories of Ala and Tulia are interesting. Ala struggling for respect in "organising people" at the price of being seen as bossy and cut off from friends. Tulia fed up of being treated like an endless well of "she's pretty and good at emotional labour". We just only see their journeys filtered through Erasmus's stereotypes.
The civilisations around the concents rise and fall. But apparently no-one tries to avoid the "happy placid" chemnical genengineered into everything? Despite the ridiculous profusion of conspiracy theorists and fad-dieters?
I also dislike the connection between "depressed" and "intelligent/creative": there does seem to be a sort of dissatisfaction which is more common in more intelligent/ambitious people, but the idea that contentment and creativity are opposed does a lot of harm.
The whole premise with "there are parallel worlds which affect each other in an unspecified way and our brains think by seeing into parallel worlds where counterfactual events happened". That's not how brains work: thinking about complicated counterfactuals shows clear similarity to other actions which we share in common with clearly-state-machine-ish insects. That's not how universes work: I don't know what triangles are, but they're not that.
I do find that a fascinating premise. I enjoyed reading about it. But I went from "I'm not getting this" to "ok, it's an interesting 'what if this completely false thing were true' premise".
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1046525.html using OpenID.
comments so far.
The characters constantly *say* that there are all these differences in civil society in how men and women are treated that don't exist inside the walls. But everything that *happens* represents gender stereotypes much more like the ones we suffer with:
* All of the thinkers who discover something are male
* All the thinkers who are famous for promulgating other people's thought are female
* All four main characters are men, as are all the characters who do anything else of importance.
* A big segment of plot is "is Erasmus good enough at theoretics to hack it as a pure scientist". No-one even asks that of Ala and Tulia, who have been doing solid work on this that no-one else respects, they just give up their aspirations automatically for other people's sake
* "women have emotions like this, men have emotions like this"
* Why is Trestanas referred to as "evil" when other senior avout aren't?
On the other hand, when you actually *look*, the stories of Ala and Tulia are interesting. Ala struggling for respect in "organising people" at the price of being seen as bossy and cut off from friends. Tulia fed up of being treated like an endless well of "she's pretty and good at emotional labour". We just only see their journeys filtered through Erasmus's stereotypes.
The civilisations around the concents rise and fall. But apparently no-one tries to avoid the "happy placid" chemnical genengineered into everything? Despite the ridiculous profusion of conspiracy theorists and fad-dieters?
I also dislike the connection between "depressed" and "intelligent/creative": there does seem to be a sort of dissatisfaction which is more common in more intelligent/ambitious people, but the idea that contentment and creativity are opposed does a lot of harm.
The whole premise with "there are parallel worlds which affect each other in an unspecified way and our brains think by seeing into parallel worlds where counterfactual events happened". That's not how brains work: thinking about complicated counterfactuals shows clear similarity to other actions which we share in common with clearly-state-machine-ish insects. That's not how universes work: I don't know what triangles are, but they're not that.
I do find that a fascinating premise. I enjoyed reading about it. But I went from "I'm not getting this" to "ok, it's an interesting 'what if this completely false thing were true' premise".
You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1046525.html using OpenID.
comments so far.