There are machines that can do this way better
You know how sometimes it feels like your face is smashed up against the ceiling? Like there is a pocket of helium in your skull and you keep bouncing off the top? All you can see is all the other faces smashed up against the same ceiling and all you can feel is all the piles of the past faces filling up the space under you, till there is nothing left except to feel the pocket of helium in your skull push against the barrier?
The rest of this blog entry is going to contain spoilers for Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.
Usually I don’t buy books in hardcover, I prefer the paperback experience for the most part, but I was too excited to wait around past the hardcover cycle for this. I haven’t read everything Stephenson’s written up to this point, I still have The Diamond Age to get through, and the rest of The Baroque Cycle after the first book to read, but I’ve read enough to wonder what there is left to write about after you have written about the past and the present and the future.
I didn’t read any reviews or blurbs or interviews, I just ordered the book from amazon and opened up to the first page. I read the first sentence of the forward that said if you like surprises skip this, so I skipped the forward, and I was surprised, and I liked it.
For two seconds I almost groaned at realizing this was going to be a whole book full of made up science fiction words, and then I immediately stopped caring and loved it, because the ceiling opened up and my head stopped hurting and there was a whole long world where you had a bolt and a cord and a sphere and a giant clock and you could spend your whole life reenacting an ancient battle with some weeds in a back garden, drawing pictures of it on some leaves and shoving them in a nook in a stone wall that you knew was going to last forever until someone else a thousand lifetimes later could find it and say hey that’s cool, I can use this.
I was immediately envious of this life and world, while not perfect it seemed to flow correctly, taking into account the pockets of helium inside our skulls, opening up the ceilings wide enough for each little skull balloon to float up as far as it could.
If you like to think about things like the flow of information through time, isosceles triangles, cats that are both alive and dead, orbital mechanics, phonomancy, and what it means to be a finite biological organism exsisting in an infinte universe, this is a fun book to read.
Originally published at Unicorn Tea Party. You can comment here or there.