The end has him acting as amanuensis again, in a very different context. Book Ends: We are introduced to Erasmas as he is serving as 'amanuensis' (recorder, or maybe witness) for a conversation between Fraa Orolo and an artisan from outside.Bizarre Alien Biology: The aliens can marginally breathe Arbran air and cannot digest the food, because they are from other universes where the atoms are shaped a little differently, making them all chemically incompatible with one another.However, given the way the Thousanders are able to observe and manipulate different Narratives, for them it might have been a Xanatos Gambit. Batman Gambit: Fraa Lodoghir suggests that all the events of the book occurred because the Thousanders wanted to end the subjugation of the mathic world by the sæcular, and so, right before the Third Sack, they used their Incanting praxis to call alien beings from various parallel universes to come to Arbre and create the existential crisis that enabled this to happen.All There in the Manual: The glossary and the appendices.After the End: The calendar sets the year 0 at the Reconstitution, which occurred shortly after the Terrible Events, a near-extinction level nuclear/nanotechnological war.Aerith and Bob: Erasmas, Orolo, Arsibalt, and Jules Verne, who is descended from our Earth.

Applied and weaponized Platonic epistemology. Like Cryptonomicon, the book isn't really about the plot just as Cryptonomicon was really about cryptology and The Baroque Cycle was really about modern economics, Anathem is really about Platonic epistemology. Like many of Neal Stephenson's other books he Shows His Work with several appendices of Socratic dialogues and at least a cursory understanding of geometry and platonic philosophy being helpful. And the book gets into how can those two groups work together.' And they're surrounded by a bigger civilization that mostly doesn’t care about them. note Or, as Stevenson himself described the book, it's ' universe where all of the Blue-state, book reading people have been herded into monastic compounds, and they hang out together and be nerds. When members of one of these maths make a surprising discovery, it's up to them to re-enter the 'sæcular world' and use their skills to investigate and deal with the potentially global ramifications. Anathem is a novel by Neal Stephenson about a world where monastic orders called 'maths' isolate themselves from the rest of the world to study science, mathematics, and philosophy.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson