Stephenson’s latest opus runs 937 pages, including a glossary and three “calca”—geometrical proofs that figure in scenes from the story. A reader unfamiliar with Stephenson might well ask whether it’s worth it. After all, the book uses a fair amount of invented language, and asks the reader to follow some fairly complex philosophic and scientific issues. Nor is Stephenson necessarily known for slam-bang action—unless you consider the clash of ideas to fall under that description.

But if you like the idea of a good philosophical debate, wrapped in the guise of a far-future SF story, dig right in. Stephenson has created a world that owes something to Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, with scientific knowledge being preserved by a sort of monastic order separate from the society around it. Here, though, the preserving power is not religious, despite a high degree of discipline and ritual in the daily lives of the fraas and suurs (brothers and sisters). Religion is seen as an aberration of the secular society, which prefers supernatural explanations to scientific reasoning. Society outside the concent has achieved a fairly high technological level on its own, with videos, cell phones, and so forth—use of which is forbidden to the scholars.

The story is told by Fraa Erasmus, a young avout of the Concent of Saunt Edhar, one of the great centers of learning. At the story’s beginning, Saunt Edhar opens its doors for ten days to let its usually cloistered scholars mingle with the seculars and take in new blood from promising young outsiders. Now in his late teens, Raz (as his peers call him) takes the opportunity to visit his sister Cord, a mechanic. He observes how the outside world has changed over the decade he has spent inside. Back in the concent, in breaks from his assigned duties (notably winding the concent’s huge clock), Raz indulges in horseplay with his fellow fraas, and in dialogue with both his peers and the senior scholars.

A crisis comes at the end of the open door period. The Inquisitors, an international body that maintains diciplines in the various concents order astronomical observatories be sealed off until further notice. This unprecedented command prompts Raz to sneak into the observatory and place a recording disk in one of the instruments, hoping to find the forbidden data. Then Raz is confined to a small cell and ordered to memorize tedious and meaningless texts as punishment for talking to the Inquisitors without permission.

Shortly thereafter, Fraa Orolo, Raz’s mentor in astronomy, is banished from the concent for using forbidden secular technology to observe the skies in hopes of discovering what the Inquisitors are hiding. His exile convinces several younger fraas and suurs that the forbidden knowledge forebodes a crisis of civilization may be in the offing. This is not an idle speculation. Over several millennia of recorded history, outside civilization has collapsed several times, almost taking the concents along with it.

Sure enough, when Raz is freed from his punishment and finally recovers the recording disk, he finds evidence of something in a polar orbit around Earth—undoubtedly a space ship. But where is it from? And what are its intentions? The rest of the plot builds from that discovery as Raz and various other scholars tackle the problem.

Stephenson unfolds the tale very slowly, and it is densely packed with information. A fair amount of the intellectual history is a whimsically altered version of our own. For example, Occam’s Razor is reconfigured as Diax’s Rake, with a story that has clear echoes of Jesus’s whipping the moneychangers out of the temple.

While this is Raz’s coming of age story, the subsidiary characters and world building are very nicely done as well. Stephenson is clearly having fun with the language and the history of his created world, dropping little linguistic bombs every few pages—especially in straight-faced Dictionary definitions (see “bulshytt”) that serve as epigraphs to scenes. There are also quite a few thinly disguised allusions to the lingo of SF fandom—one school of scholars is even known as the Faanians (“faan” in SF slang refers to those who hang out at SF conventions but rarely read the literature).

In Anathem, Stephenson has turned from the arduous historical research of his Baroque Cycle to a science fictional world in which he can play more freely with many of the same ideas. A challenging read, but a highly rewarding one.

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John Scalzi has, in the course of five books, put himself in the front ranks of SF writers. While I heartily recommend everything he’s written, this novel gives a good example of the author’s strengths and style. But you could equally well start with Old Man’s War and work your way through the military series that begins with that book. It’s all good.

Scalzi is frequently compared to Heinlein, and it’s a fair cop, especially in the aforementioned series. Like Heinlein, he often begins a story by creating a credible bridge between the commonplace world we all inhabit and the science fictional futures he depicts, giving a reader who doesn’t live and breathe science fictional ideas an entry into the story.

In The Android’s Dream, Scalzi posits an alien species, the Nidu, whose language uses smells the way we use sounds. A human diplomat who hates the aliens concocts a device to convert intestinal gas into a deadly alien insult. He unfortunately manages to kill both himself and the Nidu ambassador in the process, turning a fart joke into an interstellar incident.

Scalzi then introduces Harry Creek, a veteran of a disastrous human defeat in a previous war against the Nidu. He’s been supporting himself as a freelance consultant to the State Department, specializing in delivering bad news to alien races. The Nidu incident has escalated, because the Nidu require a rare breed of sheep, the Electric Blue, for their ruler’s coronation ceremony. And unless Earth can deliver the sheep, the Nidu are going to declare war—which will probably mean the end of the Earth.

The State Department hires Creek to find an Electric Blue to pacify the Nidu. With the aid of an A.I. based on the personality of one of his old friends who died in the last Nidu war, Creek is soon on the track. Of course, things get complicated as various bad guys try to stop him from fulfilling his mission. Creek and a beautiful pet shop owner named Robin Baker—whose family tree is way more bizarre than she realizes—end up working together to solve the problem.

The universe in which all this takes place owes something to such previous models as Niven’s Known Space. But here humankind’s pretensions to dominance have to take second place to the reality that we’re a very backward species, in galactic terms. Even the Nidu, who previously beat us handily, are low on the pecking order. But with the aid of Robin, his A.I., and a healthy dose of luck, Creek pulls humanity’s biscuits out of the fire—just in the nick of time.

Scalzi spins a well-paced thriller plot with consistent ingenuity, plenty of action, and touch of outrageous humor at unexpected spots. And the allusion in the title to Phil Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? works on several plot levels.

Scalzi has moved in short order from “new guy in the field” to “must-read.” If by some chance you haven’t yet caught up with him, I recommend doing so without further delay.

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A scholarly attempt to create a taxonomy of fantasy runs the risk of missing everything that makes the genre worth reading. Rest assured—Mendelsohn isn’t slumming, or working up a scholarly publication merely for career advancement. It’s clear on almost every page that she was reading these books for her own enjoyment long before she got into the academic world of critical analysis and close reading. Her insights can give those of us who still read primarily for enjoyment a fuller understanding of just how things work in the worlds of fantasy.

Mendelsohn, who has previously done scholarly work on science fiction, divides fantasy into four broad categories: the portal quest (e.g., Narnia), the immersive (Peake’s Titus Groan), the intrusive (much of Poe and Lovecraft), and the liminal (Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons)—with a fifth category gathering up “the irregulars.” She aims to cover the entire genre—both in its commercial and its more literary variants, from children’s books to adult-oriented works, and including comic, dark, and all the other flavors of fantasy. Accordingly, she includes writers as different as Lewis Carroll, Stephen R. Donaldson, Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett, and China Miéville.

Mendelsohn recognizes that her categories are essentially tools for understanding the different approaches to the fantastic. She freely moves examples from one category to another when they make her points clearer. And she is quite willing to cite less familiar work, whether a late eighteenth-century gothic like The Castle of Otranto or an early modern piece like Lud-in-the-Mist, alongside Pratchett’s Discworld or Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser—or works better known in Britain than in the U.S.

Mendelsohn identifies common tropes —for example, the “club narrative,” a tale told in a social setting by a narrator who claims to have experienced its events—no matter how odd or improbable. Arthur C. Clarke’s “Tales from the White Hart” is one of many examples. Mendelsohn shows how the trope has links as far back as Chaucer and how its structure serves to channel the reader’s response to it.

Another common theme in fantasy is “thinning”—a sense that the modern world has somehow lost the richness and depth of an earlier culture of which it is a descendent. Middle-Earth, as we encounter it in the era of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, is a prime example; the characters are constantly aware that a long and complex history lies behind them, and the reader is given to understand that the events unfolding in the story are a poor reflection of the great days that went before. (Some readers of the Silmarillion may wish that Tolkien had left the story of those earlier days untold, so as not to ruin by explicitness the grandeur created by suggestion.)

Few will have read more than a fraction of the cited texts. This has the benefit of stirring up curiosity about the unfamiliar books mentioned—some of which are readily available. Others will require visits to a well-stocked library or a search of specialty booksellers.

And while many will find points of disagreement with Mendelsohn’s observations and analyses, the book will encourage readers to think about their reading —past, current, and future.

Serious fantasy readers—and those who’d like to expand their knowledge of the field—should search this one out.