Time Magazine Article About Anathem (2012)

—An army of Western citizen-soldiers marches into Mesopotamia. Their mission: to replace a cruel dictator with a friendly leader. The dictator’s conscript army scatters like chaff before the heavier armor and superb discipline of the Westerners. But the new leader turns out to be a slippery con man. A quick victory turns into a long stay. Soldiers and commanders fall victim to sneak attacks. The folks at home are dismayingly quick to forget about their faraway army. Their journey home turns into an ordeal, the soldiers harried by an elusive foe skilled at asymmetrical warfare. They finally come home to a country they hardly recognize, whose people are uneasy with hardened combat veterans in their midst, and whose political leadership is worried about how they will upset the balance of power.

That’s Anabasis, written 2500 years ago by Xenophon.

—The greatest military power in the world sends its army into a populous Middle Eastern country. The stated purpose: to overthrow its capricious, torture-prone dictator and return the land to its former state of peace and prosperity. The ulterior motive: to seize control of its resources, which will pay for the invasion once the people are given the modern Western-style government they yearn for. Sharp resistance from the dictator’s elite troops soon crumbles before the invaders’ overwhelming firepower and mobility. The dictator flees into hiding in the desert, where he long evades his pursuers. The invaders march into his capital and are astounded by the wealth and luxury of his palaces. But they don’t get the welcome they were expecting. Religious leaders exhort the common people to fight them. Faceless jihadists abduct stragglers and decapitate them or hold them for ransom. The foreigners build fortified zones in the major cities. The expected swag never materializes. Food and provisions must be imported from home at great cost. No expense is spared to bring the long-suffering troops the comforts of home. This lavish operation, however, is soon riddled with corruption. Faced with other demands on military resources, Napoleon Bonaparte decides to leave Egypt in August 1799.

—On August 1st, 2007, the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapses during rush hour . . .

“Hey, wait a sec!” you might be saying, “I thought this was another diatribe about the war in Iraq . . . how does a rusty bridge figure into it?”

The answer: I’m interested in a larger topic: the attention span of our society. Bear with me.

Literate people used to spend a lot of time reading books, but during the Internet years those have begun to seem more and more like a distinct minority: a large and relatively well-off minority, to be sure, but one that simply doesn’t register in the electronic media, as vampires are invisible in mirrors. They are out there somewhere, the book-readers in their millions, and they are talking to each other. Books, though, and the thoughts that go through the heads of their readers, are too long and complex to work on the screen—be it a talk show, a PowerPoint presentation, or a web page. Bookish people sense this. They don’t object to it. They don’t favor electronic media anyway. So why should they make a fuss if those media Photoshop them out of the national scene? They know how to find each other and to have the long conversations that nourish their bookish souls.

A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, Anathem, based on that premise.

It’s paradoxical, I suppose, to write a long book about how no one reads long books any more: an ambiguity I’ll have a hard time explaining on talk shows.

If bookishness were just a niche pastime, like stamp collecting or waveboarding, none of this would really matter. But it’s more than that. It is the collective memory and the accumulated wisdom of our species.

The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid–Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them. When all things bookish are edited out of public discourse, strange things happen, or seem to. When our societal attention span becomes shorter than the lifetime of a steel bridge over a river, what appears to be a solid strip of highway can suddenly fall out from under us. Like a portent from the medieval world.