4 ms·
Hah. I actually just had this conversation earlier today with a friend (who I know is interested in this stuff): Me: Have you read Anathem? A decent chunk of th
by dnr 11y ago
Hah. I actually just had this conversation earlier today with a friend (who I know is interested in this stuff):
Me: Have you read Anathem? A decent chunk of the book and the plot is all about orbital mechanics.
Him: No, but have you read Seveneves? There's a ton of orbital mechanics in that book.
Me: Huh. Well I guess we found his pet subject.
(Btw, I didn't really mind the orbital stuff in Anathem, but I found the repetitive explanations of the many-worlds idea, adding just one tiny new tidbit each time, a little annoying by the end.)
- jessaustin 11y agoMany-worlds usually annoys me on the grounds of parsimony, but the Socratic dialog on the mountain worked well enough for me to tie the whole book together. (I can remember the broad strokes seven years after reading it, for one thing.) The role of many-worlds was a surprise, but a reasonable one. I didn't feel there was any authorial cheating.
- dnr 11y ago[If anyone else is reading this: warning, spoilers!] It would have been more satisfying to me if the dialog on the mountain was actually important in the context of the story at all. It was enlightening to the reader, but when Erasmus got to the convox and started talking with people, it turned out that many of them already had basically the same ideas, so he didn't really contribute anything. Actually, it's hard to think of a point where any idea or action of Erasmus actually changed the outcome of something. He was at the center of everything, but only as a witness. Although I guess the book kind of hints that perhaps nothing that any character except Jad did had any effect on anything, since Jad rewrote it all...