If you’re a nerd – meaning, if you enjoy going down rabbit holes without any apparent benefit for you except haven seen and learned new, and probably useless, stuff –, you might like this.

Premise

Imagine you took a vow to focus on one vocation, really focus, which means that you will live and work with your peers, but not interact with other people. Not read news, not be connected online, not watch TV – just focusing on your vocation, which is, say, astronomy. And only every 10 years the gates to your retreat will swing open and you’ll have a couple of days to catch up with what has happend in the world in the last decade.

Would you do it? To me, it sounds both wonderful and claustrophobic.

Either way, this is the world of Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, his 2008 sci-fi novel. Personally I believe this to be his best novel, with the most beautiful world-building and philosophical depth (plus martial arts and a nuke) he has ever written; despite numerous loose ends and setups without payoffs, but also because of its 1,000 page ultra-detailed world to immerse yourself in.

This world has stayed with me, and I enjoy going back to it, and this month – Blocktober 2024 – I’ll try to whitebox this world so that we can run around in it and perceive it in first-person. It’s going to be a walking simulator, with nothing to do except look into all the nooks and crannies I’ll manage to reconstruct from the text.

The Setting

On an alternate Earth, roughly (by my estimate) 3,600 years in our future, the scholars and theoreticians have been stuffed into monasteries, where they can’t wreak havoc on the world by inventing, say, quantum computers or do DNA manipulations. They are living in what are basically monasteries. Despite those having been built around our time (meaning, in a technological age about 500 years after a Renaissance), they seem to be gothic architecture – cathedrals.

The first part of the novel is set in and around one of those monasteries, the "concent" of "Saunt Edhar". Roughly 1,000 theoretical scientist-monks ("avout") seem to live there, next to a small or at most medium-sized town. The location seems to be the equivalent of the American continent, somewhere between, say, Spokane, Washington, USA, and Vancouver, Canada.

Existing Reconstructions

The text is full of descriptions and small relations that one can reconstruct this place. A number of people have attempted to draw maps of it – see the images attached to this post –, and all of them are slightly different:

So, first I will wade through those maps and through the original text and make some notes …

… and then we’ll see how far I’ve come! :)

Oh, wait – I’ve made some sketches a few years back myself, too!