Neal Stephenson's new novel, Anathem, is mind-bogglingly ambitious. Although now that I think about it, to call any book by Stephenson mind-bogglingly ambitious is redundant. Though it's not as flat-out funny as Cryptonomicon, the intellectual pyrotechnics of Anathem are on a comparable level. And it's situated more squarely in the sf world than anything he's written since The Diamond Age—indeed, in some ways it's Stephenson's most traditional sf novel yet, verging on outright space opera. At the same time, an argument could be made—indeed, is implicit in the narrative—that it's not really science fiction at all.