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.
