Reddit reviews Anathem

I can, thanks to Neil Stephenson.

Yep, sounds like Anathem.

Gregory Benford might be to your liking, Eater hits a lot of those old hard SF buttons in particular. The Hyperion Cantos may also do the trick. C.S. Friedman's In Conquest Born and This Alien Shore are favorites that have that classic sci-fi feeling.

I would also give Stephenson another shot.. it's really good stuff, but yeah Snow Crash is a little over-the-top (very much so for the first chapter or two, but it does settle down a good bit). I mean, the main character is named Hiro Protagonist... there's obviously going to be a certain level of tongue-in-cheek, self-aware ridiculousness going on, but it's quite amazing how well he foresaw much of the modern computing world. Cryptonomicon is awesome and is one of those rare books that somehow feels like science fiction even though there's nothing out of the ordinary in it. Anathem and Zodiac are also quite good and more traditional in tone and style.

Try the short story A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury for the concept of parallel universes (or at least the Many-worlds interpretation of parallel universes).

The books that I'd recommend are:

• Transition by Iain M. Banks
  
  
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
  
  
• The Eternal Champion Series by Michael Moorcock
  
  
• The Dark Tower series by Stephen King
  
  Another series that's been recommended to me that I haven't read is the Merchant Princes series.

The thing is, nobody generally cares about all of your 24 hours. I mean, you're sleeping for a third of them, most likely. And even then, even your waking hours are probably not all of equal importance, even to you, in retrospect. I suspect that if I asked you what you did last Thursday, you could probably remember a few of those hours, but even your own memory is highly edited around the salient and important points. And if I asked you about those hours in a month, unless there was some seriously significant stuff happening then, you probably won't recall them. And in a year? Forget it.

Neal Stephenson has a wonderful conceit in his (wonderful) novel _Anathem_ where once a year, one group of people write down everything that they think has been important that year in a chronicle. Once every ten years, someone else goes over those and distills down what they think is still important. Once every hundred years, someone else goes over all of the ten-year chronicles and weeds out everything that in retrospect has been less important. And every thousand years, someone else does the same thing to that data set. It's a wonderful play on the notion that when one is concentrated on the present, everything seems important, but when one takes a longer view of time, some things that seemed important at the time seem less important, and some things that seemed unimportant at the time seem vital.

(All of this is to acknowledge, of course, that "importance" is a subjective thing, and historians themselves have over the years made strong arguments that many of the items of history neglected as unimportant are, in fact, important.)

In any case, history is not chronicle. It is not meant to be a perfect record of things. It is not a recording of the past for past's sake, either — it is not antiquarianism. History is about finding order and synthesis in the past, about understanding causes and effects, and about making a broad sense of what happened. It is a synthetic discipline; it is a craft, not a rote recording of data. No historian tries for that level of comprehensiveness, and indeed, it would be undermining to the whole enterprise to aspire to it. Because the story of, say, World War I, is not to be found in a minute-by-minute understanding of the individual lives of those involved — it is found in a proper appreciation of where the broad and the specific meet up, a balance between the global and the personal, the kind of weaving of narrative and causes that the best historians can pull off. No historian I know makes pretentions for epistemological completeness, even in their "microhistories."

That being said, I have an article I've been working on which literally follows a certain event minute-by-minute, but even then, there are huge gaps and uncertainties, but it is in those gaps and uncertainties that history becomes interpretive, speculative, debatable, and, well, fun.

Anathem

Wasn't there a Family Guy episode where Stewie visits an alternate reality?

I'd also like to mention Anathem by Neal Stephenson? Sorry, I know it isn't a movie or show.

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• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks [surface]. Began December 3rd.
  
  
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell [cloud atlas]. Began November 3rd.
  
  
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson [anathem]. Began October 1st.
  
  
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• How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever by Jack Horner
  
• In the Courts of the Crimson Kings by SM Stirling
  
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
  
• Surface Detail by Iain M Banks
  
• The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest by Stieg Larsson
  
  This isn't representative of the last five books I've read though, since I try to read books from the public library and my university's library. Also, I bought a cookbook and a book on algorithms after the Stieg Larsson book, but I figured we weren't including those kinds of books.

For those who enjoy this understanding of the multiverse, read this book.

Relatedly, and I'm pretty sure someone else mentioned it in this thread, but have you read Anathem?

I'm not an ME, but these are some of my (more computery-ish) favorites that might have general engineering appeal:

The Difference Engine - proto-steampunk!

Gödel, Escher, Bach - essays on logicians' wet dreams.

Anathem - mathy and fantastic.

House of Leaves - you'll either love it or it will just piss you off...

Also, anything by Phillip K Dick or Kurt Vonnegut. And Feynman's (first) autobiography is definitely a must.

I read The Thousand Orcs by Salvatore a few years back and thought it was alright. But my favorite series by far is ASOIAF. I would also recommend The Forever War and Anathem.

If you haven't yet, you really need to read Anathem. Seriously.

• Plato (Arguments of the Philosophers) by J. c. b. Gosling.
  
  
• A Dictionary of Philosophy by Antony Flew.
  
  
• Everyday Life in Early America by David Freeman Hawke.
  
  
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson. (Currently Reading)
  
  
• Historical Introduction to Philosophy by Albert B. Hakim
  
  
  Guess my major.

Agree with robot_army_mutiny on Dick.
Mcmannis is a short story writer so any book you pick up will have some gems.
For Stephenson I like his newer work. Anathem is a good, intellectual read.
Also grab Nueromancer by Williams Gibson and any of the Wooster and Jeeves series by PG Wodehouse. The first is the father of cyberpunk and the second is a British humorist that Adams cites as a big influence.

I forgot, I have also started Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Read by Stephen Fry), and it is well done as well.
I remembered a couple more that I liked:

Unbroken - good (true) story about WWII pilot who was captured by the Japanese

Water for Elephants - Good book (fiction) about a circus in the depression era

Anathem - I really like Neal Stephenson, and this was a good book, but it was very long, and I'm sure I would have had a much harder time if I had to read it, instead of just listen to it

Eye of the World (Wheel of Time Book 1) - Good book, but very long and if it weren't for the different voices by the narrator, I would have gotten lost pretty easily.

Hope this helps, and hope you find some good ones!

Fallen Dragon by Hamilton.

Anathem


Two great books, fallen dragon is more on the speculative Scifi end of the spectrum... dealing with explotation of migrant settlers on far off planets, Anathem is social Scifi, and is about a society that has a very foreign structure to anything here on earth. It's a tough book to get started (or was for me) but stick with it.. it's true artwork.