Only a few months ago, another epic bubbled up from his basement. Anathem, Stephenson's ninth novel, is set for release on September 9. The Nealosphere, of course, is over the top with anticipation. This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely.

Oh, and Stephenson manages to do it all in only 960 pages.

From the archive:

Anathem is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

From further back:

Each of these works is so large, so grand, so packed with detail, that the marketplace is unable to accommodate it all at one time. And so a story is broken into pieces, with the releases spaced apart in time, that the audience might take advantage of the intermission to savor the tasty bits of the first course while waiting in eager anticipation of the next.