Our hero is set to an epic task, but it’s no Tolkienesque battle against orcs and sorcerers more of the battling is done with words than with swords or their moral equivalents. It’s a barbaric place that, to all appearances, is post-postapocalyptic, if not still dumbed-down and reeling from the great period of global warming that followed “the Terrible Events” of a thousand-odd years past.
Polyphony can afford only so much solace against the vulgar world beyond the walls. Saunt Edhar is a place devoted not just to learning, but also to singing, specifically of the “anathem,” a portmanteau of anthem and anathema. The narrator, a youngish acolyte, lives in a monastery-like fortress inhabited by intellectuals in retreat from a gross outer world littered by box stores, developments and discarded military hardware. Stephenson ( The System of the World, 2004, etc.), an old hand at dystopian visions, offers a world that will be familiar, and welcome, to readers of A Canticle for Leibowitz and Dune-and, for that matter, The Glass Bead Game. A sprawling disquisition on “the higher harmonics of the sloshing” and other “polycosmic theories” that occupy the residents of a distant-future world much like our own.
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