Anathem (Signed & Numbered Limited Edition) by Neal Stephenson

Anathem by Neal Stephenson

Signed & Numbered Limited Edition Hardcover

Limited to 400 Numbered Books, published by Subterranean Press

Hand Signed by Neal Stephenson

Anathem was first published to near universal acclaim in 2008, and went on to win the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the year. Viewed once again from a decade’s perspective, it’s not hard to understand why. Even by Stephenson’s exacting standards, it remains one of the most rigorous examples of creative world-building the SF field has seen in a good many years

The novel takes place primarily on the planet known Arbre, whose social structure and governing rules were established millennia before by a process called The Reconstitution. The protagonist and narrator is Fraa Erasmus, who is a member of the Avout, intellectuals who live in a cloistered setting, and are severely restricted both in the use of technology and the ability to communicate with the outside—or Saecular—world. When Fraa Erasmus’s mentor, Fraa Orolo, discovers—through the use of proscribed technology—that an alien spaceship is currently orbiting Arbre, everything changes.

First, Fraa Orolo is banished—in a rite known as Anathem—for violating technological restrictions. Later, as the alien threat becomes more imminent, Erasmus and others of the Avout set out after Fraa Orolo, searching for answers. This journey forms the heart of the novel, and it takes them from the wastelands of Arbre through assorted hazards to an encounter with the mysteries of quantum physics, in which multiple parallel realities co-exist. It will lead, in the end, to a second Reconstitution which will permanently alter the nature of life on Arbre. 

Challenging, expansive, and always thoroughly absorbing, Anathem shows us a novelist at the very top of his game. At once visionary and viscerally exciting, it offers the kind of complex pleasures that only science fiction—and only Neal Stephenson—can provide.