Because it’s awfully hard to make a dynamic book trailer for a social satire that dramatizes the process of Socratic inquiry, here’s the “vaguely sci-fi action film” spin on Neal Stephenson‘s newest novel, Anathem:
Actually, as Annalee Newitz observes, “there is plenty of room for mayhem and weird martial arts in a book that is also about abstract topics like the limits of consciousness and science,” especially when it’s more than 900 pages long—although, trust me, it’s probably the fastest-reading philosophical novel you’ll ever encounter, and Stephenson moves the plot along so briskly that you’ll want to keep going, even when you reach your subway stop or should really think about getting to bed on a school night.
Still, having already read Anathem a few months back, seeing this trailer is a bit discombobulating: Stephenson’s prose does a great job of sketching out a cultural environment that is similar to contemporary American society but also different enough to seem truly alien, and seeing guys in football jerseys (even though that’s pretty much what they are in the book, too) risks dragging things down to a more mundane level. Though the scene with the monk in the Times Squarish setting was kinda cool, almost evocative of the 1998 New Zealand flick The Navigator—and that’s never a bad thing.