“NEAL STEPHENSON has been publishing important novels every few years (like clockwork – appropriate, given his use of clock imagery) for over 20 years. In 1992, he wrote Snow Crash, one of the two great cyberpunk novels, before he helped bury the genre with The Diamond Age, which won a Hugo award in 1995. He has written seven novels since then; all have been big sellers and have earned acclaim from critics. If there is a single word critics use to describe Stephenson, that word is big. He writes big books (The Diamond Age was his last novel that clocked in at fewer than seven hundred pages). In them, he engages with big ideas. The action in his novels spans big spaces and big stretches of time. We hear a lot about how big his ideas are, but we get little substantive engagement with these ideas, especially outside of science fiction circles.”
“This is a shame. Stephenson’s writing and ideas deserve a more considered critique, both for their own sake and as part of literary history. Moreover, Stephenson is the rare writer who provides something like a key to help decipher how his fiction reflects his ideas. This key is embedded six hundred pages deep within Anathem, his greatest work to date.”
“In Anathem, the world one day finds itself orbited by an alien mothership of inscrutable origin and motives. After a variety of misadventures and numerous scientific and philosophical expositions, we find out that these aliens are not visitors from other planets, but from a confederation of alternate earths who have mastered dimensional travel. This is not the dimensional travel of Sliders or Rick and Morty — dimensions aren’t channels one can change at will. The physics savant in Anathem who explains dimension-travel insists that dimensions are not in physical proximity; rather, they exist in Platonic proximity. He refers to the dimensions as “narratives,” (“It sounded like literary criticism!” exclaims a listener) and he suggests that all such narratives descend from an original reality (i.e., Plato’s world of ideal forms) and branch out from there. Moreover, due to some quirk of quantum physics, travel between narratives is only possible from narratives further from the ur-reality to closer ones — that is to say, from lower realities to higher. Not long after, we find out that one of the narratives that make up this confederation of Platonic dimensional travelers is a familiar one: our dimension, our narrative. We also discover that our narrative is precisely two Platonic notches lower than the world we have, by this point, spent seven hundred pages exploring in Anathem.”
“As a lens for examining Stephenson’s other work, the Platonic game Anathem invites us to play serves a larger critical purpose. It moves us away from a shallow celebration of Stephenson’s intellectual grandiosity and allows us to examine his characters, his humor, and his commentary (explicit and otherwise) on real life. What Stephenson has to say about the small things is worth considering, especially in the context of his larger vision and given his place as one of the great science fiction writers of his time.”
“There are a few ways to chronologically divide Stephenson’s career. We could use a chronology based on the usual lineaments of his critical reception — bigness and ideas. From this angle, we’d wind up with four periods: juvenilia (his 1980s work, The Big U and Zodiac); cyberpunk (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age); historical fiction (Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle, composed of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); and recent doorstops (Anathem, Reamde, and Seveneves). This system is straightforward, but it is also troublesome because of the chronological juxtaposition between Stephenson’s greatest triumph, Anathem, and his next and worst work, Reamde, a grossly inflated airport thriller. In all, this chronology relies on shifts in Stephenson’s discussion of cans — what technology can do and how technological possibility changes over time.”
“It’s also possible to divide Stephenson’s work into stages related to his discussion of oughts: how people ought to behave and think. Stephenson’s oughts cover a wide range of moral and intellectual prescriptions — from one’s relationship to the almighty to the physical posture one should adopt while working at a computer. Looking at his work this way produces chronological stages not unlike the stages of life. His first emphasis is on youth, and his early fiction focuses on tales of young people getting it done. This describes Zodiac and Snow Crash. There are comparatively few explicit oughts here. His second emphasis is on reproduction: Stephenson introduces the theme of child-rearing and familial (and cultural) continuity in The Diamond Age. This focus recurs in his subsequent work, but in The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon the theme is new and pronounced; it has the exuberance of new parenthood. This is also the point where his work takes on a notable conservative cast. When reproduction enters the picture, we ought to stop messing around and hit objective morality home, hard. His third emphasis might be called reflection: Stephenson retroactively casts ideas, themes, and even characters and objects from his earlier works backwards into the foundations of the modern world in his eclectic, fascinating, and somewhat overlong Baroque Cycle. Among other things, the Baroque Cycle is the story of men seeking out eternal life through eternal truth. Anathem shares a similar focus. This is a classic progression undertaken by serious moralists: from the specific, contingent moralizing of a given time and place to a broader speculation about where morality comes from. If ideas and morality are embedded in objective reality — an idea that undergirds Stephenson’s later work — then how does temporal change work? In his period of reflection, Stephenson suggests that we ought to step back and consider the larger contexts in which morality is embedded. Fourth, and most recently, Stephenson turns toward an emphasis on decline and regeneration. The action in Reamde and Seveneves, for example, is continually spurred, frustrated, and ultimately concluded by efforts to overcome what Stephenson sees as our societal limits and shortcomings. Whichever context we find and whichever shape our morals take, we need to meet them with serious intent. Even if the specifics remain necessarily mysterious, taking higher purposes seriously is the ur-ought, in Stephenson’s later work.”
“Politics is essentially compromise with the subjective — people’s desires and feelings — and in Stephenson’s vision this ranges between being a necessary evil and an unnecessary, gratuitous evil. Politics is prescription contingent on time and circumstance. As such, it interacts uncomfortably with a morality that refers to timeless universals. This has been a problem that has caught up political thinkers since Aristotle. Stephenson departs from traditional conservatives by refusing to punt the question of change back to reference to some ur-text or sacred tradition. His characters draw their moral precepts from a wide variety of sources – religion, tradition, individual experience. But regardless of his influences, Stephenson still has many prescriptions, and he’d like them to stick.”
“Stephenson’s oughts, in short, are both distinctly worldly but directed toward (and by?) imperatives, which transcend our lived existence on this planet.”
“The moral sensibility is related to Kant’s categorical imperative, Flannery O’Connor’s “Church of Christ Without Christ,” and at times, neoconservative social nostrums. If universal meaning is found in a circuit between the personal and the transcendent, then the merely worldly (or social, or political, or communitarian, or…) is just dross. In political writing, this sort of moralizing can be used to erase inconvenient social concerns (à la David Brooks). In literary writing, it can be used to advance a banal literature of jejune personal improvement. Stephenson flirts with both in his more pedestrian moments but ultimately has bigger concerns.”