Anathem and Axiom’s End: Parallel Pacing

11 min readDec 21, 2020

[EDIT: This is a ramble about an interesting phenomenon I observed in two pieces of literature. I think it is interesting, but it doesn’t lead to any specific “point” so much as just outlining something I noticed.]

A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended Anathem by Neal Stephenson to me. It is a very strange book, but I eventually got hooked on it and read it all in approximately seventy-two hours, after multiple failed attempts to get through Provener (the book is not properly divided into chapters, it is divided into sections denoted by a dictionary entry and then “parts” denoted by a specific title. It is over nine-hundred pages long). The entire book is set on a secondary world with its own philosophy and math and science, a hypothetical few thousand years “ahead” of ours, but not in any linear fashion, as the society of Arbre has collapsed multiple times through different means, and some of the technology is comparable to that of the 21st century while some of it… isn’t.

The whole “dictionary” bit is very interesting, because the entire book is told from the perspective of a really annoying character who is kind-of-doing-his-PhD but not really, in a futuristic university-church… place(they’re called concents). Because of this, not only does every character we meet on/from a concent speak in the same way that PhD students and professors speak (lots and lots of jargon and short-hand terms for complicated concepts) but… Because this is a different world with different languages and different terminology, it’s all new jargon you might be able to parse if you know some Greek and Latin roots but must often reverse-engineer from context until such a time as it crops up in one of the “chapter heading” dictionary entries.

The whole thing is an exercise in turning the familiar unfamiliar, which means that the entire book is written partially under the assumption that you are familiar with philosophy and (to a lesser extent) computer science, while at the same time using so many different words for the aforementioned concepts that you end up forming different opinions about them than you might already have, given the radically different contexts in which they are being presented to you.

I love Anathem. I have described it to people in the past, and those that knew me immediately said things like “this is the most you book I have ever heard of”.

Anathem has a special place in my heart, and I deeply cherish it. I am even the proud writer of one Anathem fanfic work-in-progress! (It’s set in the year 3498 of the Reconstitution, involving a Procian unarian studying at the Concent of Saunt Lora, because I believe the Procians were deeply underappreciated in a book full of Halikaarnians and do you see what this book does to your brain?)

There are two stories in Anathem.

The first story is the list of things-that-happen in the book, and it is paced incredibly slow, with a wide variety of detours and logistical annoyances and other features that cause it to feel simultaneously more real and also more poorly paced, in the way that real life can often be very poorly paced, because it doesn’t have an editor to get rid of the boring parts of it.

The second story is the list of platonic dialogues that characters in the book engage in, while they are dealing with the philosophical questions that the first story brings up, and having various existential crises about the implications of the plot, and just… being nerds together.

The first story is very slow. The “plot” doesn’t even really get going for the first hundred or so pages, and we spend a pretty huge chunk of the book essentially getting nothing done. Having to redefine things like personal devices and cars because Stephenson can’t be satisfied with renaming all of basic philosophy and must also rename random common objects is also a drag on the plot, and did I mention it’s almost a full thousand pages long?

The second story is incredibly quick. Jumping from the Turing test and the question of the Chinese room to quantum computing and one of the most bizarre interpretations of the multiverse I have ever seen in a work of fiction. Discussing notions of the existence of God, falsifiability, definitions, how language works and what it can do, what “reality” is, what “history” is, quantum immortality, etc. It’s like he had a list of “notable philosophical questions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries” and just kept crossing things out, determined to tackle at least 50 of them directly and 50 more indirectly.

Lindsay Ellis, a writer and video-essayist on the internet whose work I have been watching since I was twelve (holy shit!), published a book of science fiction in 2020, with the sequel coming out late 2021.

It’s a bizarrely normal book. It starts out as “Cory Doctorow’s Arrival meets E.T. during the Bush administration”, with what I think is a very innovatively annoying protagonist in that she is the first female character I have ever read who is annoying in the same way that everyman male characters tend to be annoying. I’ve never seen a female everyman capture that so perfectly and I do genuinely think it’s an achievement. It ends at “to be continued” amounts of tension that may or may not be sexual in nature (and what does that even mean, in that situation?). It is roughly 2/5ths the size of Anathem, and I read it in a day.

I feel largely neutral-to-positive towards this book. I think I might be mildly disappointed in it, just because I have this bizarre parasocial relationship with Lindsay Ellis due to having watched so much of her work since I was so young. My expectations were probably a little unfair, and I would call it fairly competent debut sci-fi novel that isn’t particularly notable otherwise.

I think this book will be enjoyed by people who loved Twilight and then grew up a little, but still have an emotional yearning for a strange unfathomable creature that is vastly more powerful than them being emotionally beholden to them in ways he can’t properly communicate. People who are a little in love with the idea of being exceptional, not because of some skillset they possess, but because they have tamed the beast, or because they have seen humanity in a beast that others overlooked. She says it better than I do.

I think it will be largely disliked by people who want political intrigue and alien worldbuilding as the main attraction. Which is closer to what I like, but I think if the dynamic between Cora and Ampersand was a little more explicit, and Ampersand a little more physically humanoid and cognitively alien, I might have been more into it myself. I certainly don’t have an aversion to romance, as seen by my propensity to devour Mary Robinette Kowal’s work.

The worldbuilding is certainly interesting, though it felt very bloated for some reason. I’m not sure if this is because of how the terms were introduced, but I had a harder time keeping up with the distinctions between terms with Axiom’s End than I had with Anathem and I think that’s probably a bad thing, because there are an order of magnitude more made-up words in Anathem than in Axiom’s End.

To use Lindsay Ellis’ own words, I think Axiom’s End is the kind of book that someone who reads cerebral sci-fi while having a bit of a submissive spirit and an asexual-but-hyper-romantic streak may call “my trash”.

It scratches a very particular emotional itch, and it does it very well. There are other things in the book that I think could have been better, but it succeeds at what it is trying to do.

There are two stories in Axiom’s End.

The first story is the list of things-that-happen in the book, and it is really well-paced. The plot starts out right away, and it does not really slow down. I didn’t take several tries to get into it, I just picked it up and then only put it down when I was being interrupted. It had a lot of slow moments but it never felt slow. The characters reacted in a manner that I think normal humans would react to things (even though people kept mistreating Lu for no reason, which bothered me because she’s the only truly competent person we actually meet). There’s a lot of telling, but it’s satisfyingly tropey as this reviewer put it. It’s honestly so good that it feels a little like the book would be better if it was just the first story.

The second story has the speed of a turtle atop a carriage being pulled by snails. I would routinely have realizations about the implication of some statement or set of circumstances, and then read on page after after page after page, only for the protagonist to FINALLY REALIZE THAT OBVIOUS THING THAT WE HAD ALL THE INFORMATION TO UNDERSTAND THREE WHOLE CHAPTERS AGO. COME ON CORA ARE YOU SERIOUSLY —

So let’s run down the list of things these two books have in common:

They both feature a

mildly annoying protagonist
whose perspective is missing key pieces of information for most of the story, and even up until the end tbh
who is sufficiently self-obsessed for it to become a little bit of a problem, but who is also reasonable and very human.

(To be completely fair, Erasmas is definitely more annoying than Cora, even though he is also more competent. I think it’s the fact that he keeps getting distracted by hot girls when there’s science to think about that bothers me.)

They both feature

fantastical first-contact scenarios
in which the protagonist becomes a key member of the team involved in handling the situation,
while the presence of political forces with unclear or clear-but-annoying-and-stupid motivations creates hurdles for them to overcome.
in which they are not seen as particularly credible or competent by most people around them.

They both feature

two parallel structures,
one of which is about the events of the story,
the other of which is about the philosophical implications of the events of the story and how discussing them with other characters shifts their perspectives.

Both of these books also involve

hypercompetent family members being dragged out of the story for no reason even though the story was much better when they were in it, only for them to come back in the denouement and for things to be pretty much fine.
speculations about the aforementioned hypercompetent family member’s romantic life that don’t really end up mattering all that much.
the aliens having internal problems that cause a lot of the conflict but the protagonist is kept from understanding for most of the book.
struggles with communication.
lip-service being paid to linguistics without really exploring it very much beyond “the smart character in the position to study the protagonist’s culture found a way to bridge the language barrier, ish”.
corrupt government bullshit.
a bunch of smart competent people powerlessly freaking out.
people putting way too much faith in game theory.
people with technical expertise who are segregated away from the people involved in making all of the important decisions.
a very smart nerd who thinks he’s doing good while at the same time being super fucking shady who is a father figure to the protagonist.
aaand who gets venerated by a relevant subculture in the story.
[there are more things, I might add to this list later.]

…But those are less fundamental to the structure of the story.

Despite all of those similarities, Anathem feels like a book where the actual characters and story were designed by an artificial intelligence with the social skills of an autistic 10-year-old, but the themes and philosophy were part of a PhD student’s dissertation.

Meanwhile, Axiom’s End feels like the plot and characters were written by an emotionally competent adult, but the themes and philosophy were part of an AP highschool philosophy class that the writer was kind of phoning in but didn’t want to get a bad grade on.

It’s not bad. I am not unhappy that I read Axiom’s End. But it’s also not… Thorough. Not interested, perhaps. Many times it seemed to me that the discussions about whether “truth is a human right” (one of the most overt and directly-addressed themes) were there because they had to be there. Because it would be unrealistic for people not to think about that, given the circumstances, for people not to have opinions on their own situation. It seemed that they were not there because the author was actually interested in those questions and in what different answers would imply the next step over, or the next step over after that.

But all of that happens because of this relative pacing between the two stories. If Axiom’s End had its platonic-dialogues section be “faster”, or at least “denser”, this wouldn’t be the case. Conversely, if Anathem was “slower” or “less dense” when it came to the question of ideas and their exploration, I might have thrown the book in a trash fire, because holy shit that would have been annoying. It’s the one redeeming quality of Anathem that it has so many neat ideas in it. It’s a very good redeeming quality, and the reason I love the book so much, but still.

These two books are on opposite ends of a spectrum in terms of which of their two “stories” they prioritize in their pacing.

This is interesting to me in part because almost every good (read: appealing, to a philosophy nerd like me) piece of speculative fiction does the story-plus-platonic-dialogue thing. It has to. If it doesn’t have to, either it’s written by a writer who is absurdly good at the “showing” aspect of writing, or it’s premise just isn’t that interesting. Because if it was interesting, it would be worth philosophizing about. Anathem and Axiom’s End prioritize the “platonic dialogue” part of their books differently, with Anathem placing it at the tippy top, while Axiom’s End places it pretty far down and to the left, to the point where a lot of the philosophical “arguing” is not even in dialogue form. It’s in monologue form, as a series of blog posts and emails written by the one other competent character in the story. The one that’s widely agreed to be an asshole.

Curiously, I think both Anathem and Axiom’s End are good books, Anathem obviously fitting my taste much more closely. But I keep wondering about what this implies for the structure of storytelling, and about how I could evaluate stories in the future. Maybe I shouldn’t call the platonic dialogues “the second story”. Maybe I should call them “pillars” or “layers” or something. I’ll think on the nomenclature for future analyses.

…Anyway, I just thought that was interesting. I haven’t seen anyone bring up the parallels between Anathem and Axiom’s End, probably because their audiences don’t overlap very much. So… I am doing that.

Anathem and Axiom’s End: Parallel Pacing

Written by Eager Question