Rex’s reviews of anything (but mostly books)

It was during middle school that most of us learned of the historical period some call the “Dark Ages,” a centuries-long era in which the chief repository of knowledge was the early Christian church. More than anything else, we heard tales of monks in their cloistered halls laboring over hand-written copies of the few extant books while the barbarian hordes circled the landscapes. Whether or not it’s true, it certainly makes for a good story: a few seeds of knowledge saved so that humankind might one day be reborn; a Renaissance, if you will. Of course, like most that we learned in school, that’s an over-simplification at best, an outright fiction at worst. Still a good story, though, all those tonsured monks going blind as they spent their lives painfully copying the few extant books one page at a time, complete with marvelous embellishments and fanciful illustrations…

Things are different on Arbre. The planet certainly has had its periods of “intellectual darkness” – at least three of them; but Arbran repositories of knowledge were not religious institutions. Quite the opposite, in fact: communities of mathematicians, scientists, and scientist-philosopher – most of whom reject the concept of religion out of hand – have been responsible for keeping the flame of knowledge lit for almost 4000 Arbran years. Cloistered within the walls of their “maths,” the brothers and sisters live, love, eat, think, and argue amongst themselves; opening their gates to the outside only once a year, decade, century, or millennium. One among thousands of fraas and suurs (brothers and sisters), eighteen-year-old Fraa Erasmus – “Raz” to his friends – is but a simple student of geometry and agriculture; the apprentice of old Orolo, a student of astronomy and viticulture (he’s far better at the former than the latter, it is said). All that changes when Orolo is “thrown back” to the secular world in the rite of Anathem, a permanent expulsion from the mathic world reserved for the most severe violations of The Discipline.

But what did Orolo do to earn his fate? Raz thinks he knows – and this knowledge may prove his undoing as well. That’s the least of his worries, however, for Arbre is about to be visited by an alien craft; and this first contact could well be the planet’s last.

Thrust from the comfortable surroundings of his math into the seething, seedy world of the secular masses; Erasmus and his friends find themselves unprepared for the role of leadership. Yet this is precisely the role for which they have been called: theirs is a desperate, last-ditch effort to save Arbre from whoever’s out there orbiting the planet – but first, Raz has an errand to run… Read the rest of this entry »

When you’ve been given the name Hiro Protagonist, you’re typecast from the day your birth certificate was completed. Luckily for our hero Hiro, however, he meets the challenge quite nicely: he’s both a world-class swordsman (wielding the katana his father left him) and a world-class hacker. On that last point, he’s one of the original founders of the virtual-reality world known as the Metaverse – which means he can get into its most famous Virtual Nightclub, the Black Sun, any time he wants. In real life, Hiro’s found that freelance hacking jobs are sparse and swordplay doesn’t pay at all, so he’s employed as a deliveryman for the Mafia. A pizza deliveryman…

A partnership of convenience is formed when Y. T., Lolita-esque blonde skateboarding “Kourier,” saves Hiro’s bacon by delivering his last-ever pizza (last ever ’cause his car was at that time sitting at the bottom of a swimming pool). They’ll partner 50:50 to deal in information, the only real currency in an age where trillion-dollar bills (“Meeses”) are most useful when shredded for kitty litter, and most worldwide franchises print “local” money that’s far more stable than the poor ol’ greenback.

Hiro may have uncovered an information mother lode when he witnesses one of his oldest friends succumb to a new designer drug called Snow Crash: poor Da5id’s brain undergoes its own form of crash upon first exposure; a juicy tidbit of information that the newbie partnership can surely sell somewhere. Problem being that there’s a war going on out there, and Hiro and Y. T. have been swept up in its middle. Players like the Mafia, Reverend Wayne’s Church of the Pearly Gates, and Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong are going at it tooth and nail out there; mainly on some gigantic Sargasso of a floating Asian refugee camp that’s spent the last decade drifting clockwise on the North Pacific Gyre. At its center? the “yacht” – a converted aircraft carrier – belonging to the richest man in the world (too much, L. Bob Rife believes, just ain’t enough). Hiro’s suddenly found himself with a damsel in distress, a world on the line, and a nuke-toting Aleut warrior to dodge both in RL and VR. That, and the very real possibility that he’ll undergo a Snow Crash of his own.

Mmm-hmmm: things are about to get busy. Read the rest of this entry »