Since childhood, Erasmus has lived behind the walls of a 3,400-year-old monastery. There, he and his cohorts are sealed off from the illiterate, irrational, and unpredictable secular world, until the day that a higher power decides it is only these cloistered scholars who have the abilities to avert an impending catastrophe.

A #1 New York Times Bestseller, Anathem is perhaps the most brilliant literary invention to date from the incomparable Neal Stephenson, who rocked the world with Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and The Baroque Cycle. Now he imagines an alternate universe where scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians live in seclusion behind ancient monastery walls until they are called back into the world to deal with a crisis of astronomical proportions.

Anathem won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and the reviews for have been dazzling: "Brilliant" (South Florida Sun-Sentinel), "Daring" (Boston Globe), "Immensely entertaining" (New York Times Book Review), "A tour de force" (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), while Time magazine proclaims, "The great novel of ideas...has morphed into science fiction, and Neal Stephenson is its foremost practitioner."