Bitchin'

Considering I have only read around 25 pages, these comments should be taken with massive qualifiers.

I wonder at the “speculative” fiction claim. Isn’t all fiction speculative? Is there some kind of pejorative connotations associated with sci-fi or fantasy (both of which I see this text being), which the author does not want to be associated with?  

I also question books when they come with a condescending introductory explanation for those readers who are not accustomed/willing/capable of “puzzling out works on your own.”  Does the writer, from the start, assume his readers are ignorant and lazy?  Or perhaps he is so enmeshed in his speculative world that he thinks “Earth readers” (? who else?) cannot fathom the arcane language of Orth? Is there a purpose behind the other world’s language taking such a prominent position in the telling of the story? I hope so, since so much space in the text is devoted to using the discourse of this world. Perhaps he is intentionally using the screen of language to hide behind to instill in the reader a sense of ignorance, or levels of knowing, or inability to see or know as well as others, which seems to be one of the themes emerging from the first few pages what with all the places to hide and move and screens through which they are all looking and seeing each other. 

I know I am impatient and arrogant, but I am not sure I am willing to move through the mechanics of this book in order to see the movements of the clockwork so that I will know “how to read it” (p.20); so I can understand the “spotty recapitulation of our history, reminding us how we’d come to know all that we knew.” (p. 20)

Ok, enough bitching, back to Anathem, perhaps the millennium gate will open and allow me into this text.