I have just finished reading Neil Stephenson's Anathem. It's a hard novel to digest, but it is indeed a disappointment. I would rank it even below the political potboiler Interface, Stephenson's worst in my humble opinion (I never read his earlier novels Zodiac and The Big U, but I guess it's fair to assume Snow Crash as the effective start of N. S.'s career as a singular writer). I think the word that best defines Anathem is sparse. It's quite a heavy tome, as are every of Stephenson's novels since Cryptonomicon, but while that and three-part Baroque Cycle had plots so dense the books felt as made of lead, Anathem's narrative felt like the stuff of one hundred pages at most. As a consequence, it's quite a dull read sometimes, and a narrow contest between that dullness and Stephenson's trademark brilliant observations and set pieces — far less than the usual dose here.

I'll proceed my review, now with Major Spoilers! So you better skip reading if you intend to read Anathem, although I would advise you to read something else. If Neal Stephenson's work is five star on average, why should you read the three star book?

The things that annoy me about Anathem can be summarized in simple words: Aliens. Multiple Universes. Fucking multiple endings! The novel takes place in a planet called Arbre, which is actually Earth, but existing in Universe 1.2. It's set roughly 3700 years after the Terrible Events, a kind of World War III, and a decision was made to segregate Science from the rest of the 'Saecular' society. Therefore, scholars (the 'Avout') live in seculsion in 'Maths', which are monestaries/university campuses whose gates only open for a few days every 1/10/100/1000 years, depending on the math's rank, and for those scholars the use of a number of scientific instruments — including computers — is forbidden. Scientific and technological progress has therefore slowed down to a crawl, and the Arbran landscape is very much like Earth's nowadays, sustainability achieved by genetic engineering that allows far better agriculture — Stephenson nods at agroforestry —, allows fuel and paper (!) to literally grow on trees, and dopamine to be part of the common Saecular diet.

As usual in Stephenson's novels, it might take you a couple of hundred pages to get to understand the worldview. There's a special vocabulary with delightful words like 'bullshytt', but you get the hang of that pretty quickly (and there's a glossary at the end as well as scattered about). The story then, is the account of one Fraa Erasmas, a young scholar at a Decenarian (which opens once every ten years) math, who finds himself travelling across the world in a quest to understand what is that Giant Spaceship hovering over Arbre. The problem is: by the time you get to the end of the classical first act (Giant Spaceship appears, attacks us!), you read more than half the novel. I still don't understand what was in those pages. There are long, long descriptions of the life inside the Maths, and some hints at the Saecular world as well, but no insights, nothing remarkable.

The rest feels rushed. Anathem is quite different from every other Stephenson novel — not just the whole thing with 'aliens' and spacecraft, but a very important style shift: Anathem follows just one character — Fraa Erasmas —, who is pretty much clueless about everything, in opposition with the other Stephensonian worlds, in which multiple characters and multiple agendas weave storylines that collide in spectacular fashion. Anathem lacks that colliding, so we're stuck with a bunch of uncharismatic characters — Neil Stephenson wrote far better reluctant hero characters than Erasmas in the past, and the rest feel like a medley of characters from Stephenson's other books. Thankfully, my mid-book fears that this would bog down to a messianic tale were unfounded.

But, unfortunately, not my other mid-book prediction — the 'aliens' come from Earth! Moneyafeek! Not. The whole Messal chapter, which had the potential for high spy drama, instead had that reek of Star Trek episodes: "Kirk, Spock and Lieutenant Sanchez go somewhere, who dies?" Thankfully, the whole story is more subtle than just having a spaceship full of Frenchmen, but then... a transdimensional (was that on the latest Indiana Jones?) craft that picks up people from different iterations of Earth — or kills them with surface impactors and X-ray lasers (Stephenson seemed to have borrowed the weaponary from Peter F. Hamilton)? Anyway, that turns out to be the reason behind all the neverending dialogue about multiple cosmii and the Arbran equivalent of Schröedinger's Cat. I'm not sold on that. In the final pages, the novel descends into chaos — it turns out Arbre's Universe splits whenever anything at all happens, and we get to read the mutiple possible endings to Fraa Erasmas account — ranging from the utter anihilation of everything to a Fucking Wedding!

Perhaps it isn't as terrible as I made it sound. But the thing is, writing a novel about Platonic philosophy is perhaps too ambitious, and the whole thing about treating the Platonic Ideal to the fullest extent — as a actual Universe that exists, where you may go with a spaceship but then won't be able to breathe its oxigen... it's way out there, on par with Philip K. Dick's level of fucked-upness, and I guess that's a compliment. But I guess that while reading Anathem I became a 'Procian' myself.

Three out of five.

Update: there's something else that annoyed me to no end, which I had forgot to expose — so another spoiler follows: the whole thing about 'Newmatter' and matter from 'foreign' cosmii made me think of that very nasty word in sci-fi circles: midichlorians. That everything is justified by the fact that the whole Narrative (the novel's own choice of words) skips universes discarding bad outcomes and somehow everything works so all's well in the best of the possible worlds is utterly unsatisfying. It might be indeed a lecture about the Anthropic Principle.···

As you, the eight or nine people who visit this website may have noticed, my entire online empire was struck out of existence for a week, all because of the diligent efforts of an hacker that mass-defaced everything that was hosted at my webhosting company — thousands of sites in total (all the more depressing — the unpersonal hacking I mean — nobody really cares about my sites).

Anyway. The hosting company (which I suspect may actually be just one dude with a reseller account somewhere — this is the kind of crap portuguese laws allows) were the ones that definitely lost their face, not telling anything, not replying e-mails, just pretending it's business as usual even though they lost thousands of pages and many people's hard labour.

Just so you know: I'm switching allright!  ···

Google Chrome. Everybody is talking about it, and no wonder: your web browser is the single most important piece of software in your computer, it is the lens through which you experience whatever you do on the internet. In a sense — and this what Google's betting, real hard — nowadays your web browser is your OS. Think about it. Using web applications, 95% of the things you did with that Pentium you had ten years ago can now be done in your browser. Plus a whole lot more. So, the same way it was — and still is — a (sadly very common) act of gross mismanagement for many offices to spend €1000 in hugely powerful computers and then buying Microsoft Office licenses to write some letters when very usable €300 Linux PCs and OpenOffice have been around for years, now you should slowly begin to wonder if an OS — let alone Windows — is something you need — again, let alone pay for.

So. My first impression of Chrome is: impressive. It's incredibly usable for a very early 0.2 release. In fact, I used it all day today, and even though I'm very much on the brink of starting to miss my Firefox extensions, I don't think I'll ever look at Firefox 3.0 as The Browser again: for starters, Chrome is the fastest shit ever. In my Quad-core Black Tower of Power, at least. I did a small test: I pressed the Firefox keyboard shortcut, then double-clicked in the Chrome desktop icon. My homepage was fully loaded in Chrome by the time the Firefox window made its appearance. I closed both programs, and then tried again. Same result. And no, I haven't got that many extensions installed in Firefox. In my three-year old laptop, Chrome didn't display the same Usain Bolt-like superiority, but was still pretty quick. Then I quite like the lean look, and the way the hybrid URL/search box works. For now, I'm pretty happy in trading the use of some of my Firefox extensions for that. I'll see how I feel about it tomorrow.

Therefore I can really imagine Chrome being a success. At version 0.2, it compares pretty well against Firefox 3.0. I haven't tried Opera in, what?, six major versions, and I'll just say I dislike Safari (although, I do like the way Safari renders type) and really, really — big news — dislike Internet Explorer 7. Even though I should (in my capacity as intermittent webdesigner), I'm not bothered to take a look at IE8. I just read somewhere it's heavier than the entire Windows XP and became nauseous. I'll use it whenever Microsoft force-feeds it down my Windows' throat.

Anyway, the important thing is: when you can buy €250 mini-laptops designed for web browsing, when there are motherboards that come with Linux and Firefox in a chip that dispenses the need for an OS if all you want to do is browse the web, then you got, say, fifty percent of home computer users and an even larger share of corporate users not really needing an OS (add consoles and media center thingies into the mix, and a whole lot more home users don't need an OS). This leaves the need of an OS for people who work with heavy data, who need a lot of CPU cycles — such as those working in multimedia — where Windows users might even be a minority — it certainly feels like that! And leaves the giant Microsoft in a unconfortable, irrelevant place.

Of course, much of the situation is Microsoft's own fault. Just take a look at Vista, that Megafortress of Bloat. Here's a shocking revelation of the kind of shit Vista offers me daily: Google Chrome starts up faster than Windows Explorer. All because I installed a thingy called QTTabBar that adds tabbed browsing to Windows Explorer (a feature so unquestionable basic and handy Microsoft chose to spend their resources in designing big shiny icons instead). Like most simple Windows apps nowadays, it relies in something called Net Framework, which, as you may notice when the update is force-fed on your computer, is a several Terabytes download (it certainly felt that way). The result is that my 2.5GHz Quad-core with 4GB of RAM takes almost as much time opening an improved Windows Explorer with tabs as it would loading it off a Spectrum cassette tape. You could blame the app's developer, of course, but then you take a look at the size and contents of Vista's C:\Windows folder and you realize it's all spaghetti cables held with tape, and pity whoever takes programming as a hobby.

There are obvious virtues to local processing and local storage when you consider the whole concept of cloud computing (then again, I can lose all my data in a fire, but at least it was my fire). Besides the fact local storage is more affordable than bandwidth, there are the issues of control. Chrome is done by a giant corporation, not that much evil, but neverthless with a less-than-stellar record of censorship and pandering to dictatorships, etecetera. But as ACB pointed out, Chrome is open-source (certainly the riskier part of Google's plan — although I doubt Microsoft could ever do Chrome without ruining it), so you can trust its code to be sooner or later audited by unbiased people. But the thing is, OSes do seem a model in decline. Vista is a spectacular failure — it takes one full gigabyte after boot up (compared to my XP laptop's 200 megs), and why is that? An OS should be a thing that manages windows and files, and my 512KB Amiga used to do just that — What the fuck, Microsoft? Then there's Apple Leopard, which has some problems of its own. And Linux, one big happy zoo — Ubuntu is good but more designers are still required.

The consequence: Most people running branded Chromes and Firefoxes off flashable (updateable) chips in the motherboards of their mini-laptops and HDTVs, saving a few private files and their settings to their thumbdrive 'digital souls' but otherwise content to let their docs hang in the Google Docs or Zoho cloud, their media in YouTube and Flickr. Apple OSes will keep the specialized design and multimedia market, because their stuff looks shiny and pretty and the glow-in-the-dark apple sillouette is like the Mercedes Benz tri-pointed star for people who dislike status symbols — in automobiles, that is. Some brand of Linux will be the hobbyist's choice (much like nowdays, if you think about it). And then Microsoft, same as ever — the Katamari Damacy of Bloat — but now because keeping backwards compatibility while growing into the next cycle is their only chance at survival — milking that corporate cow that has somehow managed to bring COBOL well into the 21st century.

A note: A couple of days before Chrome itself, Google released a comic-book presentation of their new browser. I actually found myself absorbed in the eloquent explanations of the functioning of browsers and computers, including a few things I had trouble grasping before. Well done.···