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[Update: 2008-10-24] Forgot to update, but I finished the book, and it was every bit as good as I hoped it would be. I had my doubts at the beginning - the concept was interesting but didn't grab me right away. But if you've read the first bits and gotten bored, know that it ends up in a totally different place that makes it totally worth slogging through the first part, which is different in a good way when you look back on it.

I loved Stephenson's riffs on the Ita's "super-jeejah" and the telescope recorder pad thing (it'd be awesome to be able to pull off that kind of user interface), and the caste-difference between the avout and the Ita resonated with my experience.

As a Christian I was a little less comfortable with his portrayal of religion. I can see where he's coming from - my own ancestors were driven out of Europe by religious extremists, and I see potential for that in today's America and in Christianity in the global south. I'm glad that Stephenson is more even-handed - there are some religious characters who are protrayed in a favorable light - but by the end of the book most of these "turn out good after all" by basically giving up their religious views.

Most adventure books start with their characters safe in their daily routines until they notice something a little out of the ordinary, which turns out to be a Big Problem, and soon they're hanging on for dear life wondering where the beast is taking them. Anathem captures this in an especially realistic way.

The protagonist in the Algebraist, Fassin Taak, lives in a galaxy-wide civilization called the Mercatoria, which was nearly destroyed by AIs long ago, and which is currently under attack by a bunch of terrorists (the Beyonders). A lot of what we do hear is filtered through the Mercatoria - people describe the beyonders in the Mercatoria's terms because that's what they've been allowed to find out. As the novel progresses, we sift through the propaganda and get a different picture.

Turns out that the Mercatoria which seemed pretty normal and good to most of the people who live there, is in reality the hegemonizing oppressive ruler of the galaxy. The Beyonders live in habitats out between the stars because they've been driven away from the central worlds and that's where they can survive. The glimpses we get suggest that everything we've heard is a load of FUD, and they're actually pretty honorable and cool people. I wish we'd gotten more than a few tantalizing glimpses, but maybe that's what makes them so cool.

The Beyonders really struck a huge resonant chord with me. Not their violent actions (though their violence has limits, unlike other groups in the book), but how they have to hide away just so they can live a life free from control. They make me think of the citizens of Zion deep under the sewers of Machine City, the crew of Serenity, who fought on the losing side of a war against the oppressive, conformist Alliance, the ferals of Kim Stanley Robinson's Antarctica. Or real world Jews, Mennonites and other underground Christian groups (but without the violence), and lots of other groups who just want to be free and do their own thing.

Oh, and free/open-source software people. To be sure, being a GNU/Linux partisan is a lot safer than following some radical religious or political idea, but it definitely takes sacrifice and work to stay free in the face of slick, seductive proprietary software (I'm not immune - my PowerBook boots OS X as well as Ubuntu and I use Ableton Live for music). Open source people have to carve out their own community and make their own space in the cracks of the harsh business landscape.

So anyway. To Linux, the official OS of the diaspora and the underground. It's probably installed on The Serenity and software libre most probably runs the Beyonders' mesh network.