![]() ![]() ![]() Though his books have predicted various developments - his breakthrough, Snow Crash, envisions a balkanized, gang-torn Los Angeles that seems closer every day. "That idea kept coming back to me because it still seemed fresh," he continued, "the idea that book-reading people were more and more diverging from the mainstream, that they're a separate culture invisible to media culture." The dreary weather in this city, where he lives with his doctor wife and two children, allows him to think, he said. Stephenson clearly relishes that kind of isolation: He's not unfriendly, but over dinner on a drizzly night in Seattle he pauses for thought in a way that makes even enthusiastic answers seem grudging and peers out of obsidian-dark eyes that could bore through steel. And one of their jobs would be to care for the clock." "I had the idea that there would be people who voluntarily stay inside those walls," said Stephenson, a fit 48-year-old who looks as though he should carry a broadsword, "as a way of getting away from the distractions of everyday life, of doing something in a serious way that took a long time. They give up, needless to say, almost all contact with the secular world as well as most of its worldly pleasures. His ambitious new novel, Anathem, imagines a world dominated by casinos, shopping malls and tire shops - except for the walled monasteries where the devout gather to contemplate big issues in the shadow of a clock that runs for thousands of years. ![]()
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