Neal Stephenson’s Anathem due
Atlantic Books will be publishing the new Neal Stephenson, Anathem (Amazon UK
Synopsis from Amazon:
“Since childhood, Raz has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery, a sanctuary for scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, unpredictable “saecular” world, an endless landscape of casinos and megastores that is plagued by recurring cycles of booms and busts, dark ages and renaissances, world wars and climate change. Until the day that a higher power, driven by fear, decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe. And, one by one, Raz and his friends, mentors, and teachers are summoned forth without warning into the unknown.”
Just for a Stephenson fix from Cryptonomicon, an essay on cable laying published in Wired magazine.
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I’m pretty sure the new novel isn’t related to the Enoch Root universe, and I hope it isn’t; I think that aspect’s been pretty much done to death for now.
It’ll be nice to see Stephenson step out of the world he’s covered for 4 successive books — each of them clocking in at about 900+ pages — and give us something new.
It would be good to see something new but I vaguely remember that just before Cryptonomicon coming out, he’d mentioned that the series would be a triptych and he admitted in Locus that the Baroque Cycle was going to be one book but grew… (and how). The synopsis sounds like the an extension of the Star Court and oppression themes in Quicksilver as well.