Speely In To This Before The Next Apert
If you have “attention surplus disorder,” watch one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, discuss his new novel, Anathem, and his earlier work in this YouTube video of a Google Talk he gave in September.
From the YouTube video description:
“Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside “saecular” world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Three times during history’s darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside—the Extramuros—for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.”
Anathem is about an alternate world where bookish kids are brought in from the distracted outside similar to our Earth (although Neal says an outer space setting occurs somewhere) and “collected” into scholarly monasteries. It is not possible to exit except during an “apert,” which happens once every ten or a hundred years depending on the monastery. Neal promises that passages that look like digressions in the novel usually relate to the plot later on. Stephenson also defends his books’ endings against complaints by the critics.
In this appearance at Google’s headquarters, Stephenson also brought up an article from the July Atlantic Monthly titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid.”
When someone probably thinking about Galt’s Gulch asked about it, Stephenson said he never read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged because its cultish enthusiasts during his college years tried too hard to make him read it.
Neal digressed from a question about Wikipedia and said that networks of geeks engaged in active online discussions are doing so at a higher level than traditional academics.
