Only a few months ago, another epic bubbled up from his basement. Anathem, Stephenson's ninth novel, is set for release on September 9. The Nealosphere, of course, is over the top with anticipation. This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely.

Oh, and Stephenson manages to do it all in only 960 pages.

From the archive:

Anathem is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

From further back:

Each of these works is so large, so grand, so packed with detail, that the marketplace is unable to accommodate it all at one time. And so a story is broken into pieces, with the releases spaced apart in time, that the audience might take advantage of the intermission to savor the tasty bits of the first course while waiting in eager anticipation of the next.

Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He's the King of the Worlds

A motion picture essay which takes a revealing and shocking look at modern life and its imbalances. The first film in a trilogy which was followed by Powaqatsi.

Koyaanisqatsi

Who doesn't love a tasty skewer of roasted author, now and then?

Despite its thrilling material, “Kingmakers” gets off to a slow start. Although Meyer and Brysac are strong on the texture and detail of historical events, they simply do not appear to be very interested in the early part of their story about British imperialism. The first few chapters are a patchwork of glamorous and entertaining anecdotes without much to hold them together. The authors stray into lengthy digressions, some of which — like a five-page diversion into the filming of “Lawrence of Arabia” — tend to have the same effect on the flow of their story as Lawrence’s bombs had on the Ottoman railways.

These weak chapters show up the worst of Meyer and Brysac’s writing style, which is sometimes pretentious to the point of incomprehensibility and becomes more so when they seem to lack interest in their subject matter. The thesaurus takes a battering: Meyer and Brysac will not have half of something if they can have a moiety; they will not give a gift if they can give a lagniappe; they will not quote a saying if they can quote an apothegm.

Sometimes it’s almost impossible to make out what they mean, as when Gladstone is said to have “habitually lofted oratorical rockets into the unassailable empyrean,” when all the poor man actually did was to answer a few questions. Or when the British agent St. John Philby is said “to glare at the world through his owlish shrubbery.” What is owlish shrubbery? A shrubbery full of owls? A shrubbery shaped like an owl? A prop from Monty Python? As to what glaring through such a thing might signify, this reviewer is at a loss to imagine.

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The book is subtly subtitled “A Novel of December 8th” to signal its attention to the Japanese point of view. On the basis of that detail, you might expect a high level of fastidiousness from “Pearl Harbor.”

And you would be spectacularly wrong. Because you would find phrases like “to withdraw backward was impossible,” sounds like “wretching noises” to accompany vomiting, or constructions like “incredulous as it seemed, America had not reacted.” Although the book has two authors, it could have used a third assigned to cleanup patrol.

From the archive:

And yes, it's also true that whenever Gingrich utters the word "frankly," the words that follow almost always involve rank deception. And frankly, he says "frankly" a lot.

Meddle East

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The Open Salon home page functions like a real-time magazine cover. We spotlight the best content, but you can also see what other members are reading, rating and commenting on. A new issue goes up every evening; we update the cover every morning. In the near future, we'll begin featuring the best Open Salon content on the cover of Salon.com. We'll also be unveiling ways for you to earn money for your great work on Open Salon, which includes a built-in peer-to-peer payment system called Tippem.

Open Salon

See how many of the 100 most common words in the English language you can guess in 5 minutes...

The 100 Most Common English Words

What makes you depressed?

Seeing stupid people happy.

Q&A: Slavoj Zizek, professor and writer

Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Dear Existential,

It pains me to see so many people being pseudo-intellectual in the wrong way. It desecrates the memory of the great poseurs of the past. And it is all the more frustrating because your error is so simple and yet so fundamental.

You have failed to keep pace with the current code of intellectual one-upsmanship. You have failed to appreciate that over the past few years, there has been a tectonic shift in the basis of good taste.

Lord of the Memes

The radio pundit has a bad time doing TV.

Found Objects: Laura Ingraham

Fallingwater has always been my preferred work from one of my favourite architects: Frank Lloyd Wright. I remember seeing and admiring this building in some history book from school since I was a child. There was a photo of its outside with that characteristic point of view: the fall in the foreground and the deep forest surrounding the house. At 13 or 14 years old it seemed to me a very modern construction, almost futuristic; later it surprised me to find out that it dates from the Thirties of the Twenty Century.

With this animation project I have tried to understand —and to explain at the same time— how this house was built, showing its internal structure and offering points of view not so well-known or disclosed. I hope you enjoy it.

Fallingwater

On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York's twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. James Marsh’s documentary brings Petit’s extraordinary adventure to life through the testimony of Philippe himself, and some of the co-conspirators who helped him create the unique and magnificent spectacle that became known as “the artistic crime of the century.”

Man On Wire