Anathem

Anathem is a 2008 in the United States by the publisher William Morrow and Company published novel by American writer Neal Stephenson. The novel was awarded the 2009 Locus Award for Best SF Novel of the Year. The German translation of Juliane Müller and Nikolaus Stingl Gräbener was published in 2010 in Manhattan.

Action

Anathem takes place on the planet Arbre, where the protagonist Erasmas lives in a monastery-like community of scientists, philosophers and mathematicians who will be selected to save the world from an impending disaster. Erasmas (short: Raz ) has lived for most of his life in a 3400 years old Community. The rest of the society, the secular world so called, Stephenson describes as "endless landscape of casinos and megastores did is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and Renaissances, world wars and climate change. " The planet Arbre has a story and culture, which corresponds approximately to the earth, where Stephenson, however, obscures this by numerous neologisms and significance of alienation.

Formation

The novel is written in the context of Stephenson's work in the Long Now Foundation The Clock of the Long Now project. Music from the World of Anathem, which contains eight experimental vocal pieces by David Stutz and get the project whose revenue: In this context, a CD entitled Iolet arose.

Stephenson created in the novel not only a new world, but also uses new words and meaning of alienation in order to create the impression of a foreign culture. To help readers find their way in this vocabulary, the book in the back part contains a brief glossary. In addition, each chapter begins with the definition of these words, which also refers to the relevant section usually. The book's title comes from the term anathema, a ritual that accompanied the exclusion of a person from a monastic community. He passes it on both the English word " anthem " (Hymn ) and the Greek word " anathema " ( excommunication ).

Many characters in the novel are correspondences of people from the history of philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences, for example Thelenes (Socrates ) or Protas (Plato ). Also, rules as Gardans scale ( Occam's Razor ) have their earthly counterparts. As earlier novels Stephenson, Anathem is influenced by scientific ideas and theories, including one finds numerous references to quantum mechanics, in particular the many-worlds interpretation, the de Broglie -Bohm theory, the phase space or the Hamiltonian mechanics.