Readernaut

“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.”

Anathem is a philosophy primer masquerading as a speculative fiction novel — a damned good novel, mind you. While others have decried the heavy use of invented terminology, I found it to be invigorating; with so many parallels to our world, it provides a chance to look at our own rich philosophical history through fresh eyes. But lest I stray into too much bulshytt *, I'll close with this: if you enjoy philosophy and specfic, I'll consider you to have gone Hundred if you don't grab a copy from your nearest concent, megamall, or ebook jeejah.

( * A technical term, of course. What, you thought I was being vulgar?)

Really liking this more and more as I progress in it. Could it be that I will make it all the way to the end?

I decided to read the sample on my Kindle, and ... wow. Few books have ever sucked me in this quickly or completely.

Considering that I never made it past p200 in Quicksilver (and thus still have the entire Baroque Cycle sitting unread on my shelf), I'm amazed I made it to p65 already. Cryptonomicon it ain't, but maybe it'll pick up.

This sums up my current feelings about the book perfectly:

http://xkcd.com/483/ (hover over image for some context :)

Not really my cup of tea. I've put this down to work through a backlog of other books I've got at the moment; perhaps I'll check it out again sometime in the future.

I've never quite enjoyed any sci-fi books, with the only exception being Snowcrash. To be honest I don't really enjoy fiction books either! :)

Perhaps I'll try a few others in the future and see if my mind can be changed.

Anyone else find the space maneuvering reminiscent of Ender's Game?

Waiting to see how this turns out before I post any further annotations; I'm deep into spoiler territory now.

Arsibalt's explanation of "Sconic thought" is a decent enough summary of some of the problems explored by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason, regarding both the fact that we cannot directly access knowledge concerning the world outside our heads, and the fact that certain questions are, by their nature, unanswerable by human reason.

This also ties in once again to twentieth-century work related to the demarcation problem, which attempted to put all such metaphysical questions "out of bounds".