Anathem, Neal Stephenson's latest thousand-page nerdapalooza, is a good book. And I'm all for giving readers more ways to connect with authors and their works. Yay Internet! So when an email came in offering "a press release about an online marketing campaign for NY Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson," I did what one of Stephenson's characters would do: Sit and marvel at how many verbal tokens someone strung together to try to get me to write a story. Okay, I'll bite: Here's an article about a press release about an online marketing campaign for NY Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson. Jeez, Neal, I'm glad you only publish once every four years.

What do science-fiction/science-history meganovel writer Neal Stephenson and Internet crank Nick Carr have in common? They both postulate that our society's glut of video and network access trains people not to sit down and learn how to think for themselves — why figure anything out if you can just Google up an answer? (Case in point: The stock-research guy who Googled a 2002 story about United's bankruptcy and wrote it up as if it were news.) Stephenson's Anathem, which takes place in a world where grownups actually do math, is available in bookstores Tuesday. You can read my Wall Street Journal review, or — heh — just watch this video.Click to viewI didn't know they make trailers for books now. "The World of Anathem" is by Seattle videographer Brady Hall, who I'm told makes a decent living from the genre.

As the token Wired mag contributor in a room full of polymaths on Saturday, I had to endure a recounting of the goofs — sorry, I mean the errata — in Wired's article about "King of Sci-Fi" Neal Stephenson and his new book, Anathem. The article, by Hackers author Steven Levy, is actually a pretty good writeup of the shy but strong-minded Stephenson and his big-think projects with people like Nathan Myhrvold, Alvy Ray Smith and Danny Hillis. But if there's one place you don't want to make a typo, it's in front of a hundred thousand rabidly detail-obsessed Stephenson fans. They'll never shut up now. Rather than hear it again, I sat down with a friend of Stephenson's who helped with the book (it ships on September 9, but advance copies are floating around) and assembled this definitive list of counterfactuals in the article:

I'm a hundred pages into Anathem (accent on first syllable), Neal Stephenson's forthcoming thousand-page novel about Fraa Erasmus, a young man who lives in a millennia-old monastery devoted not to religion, but to science, math and philosophy. They have no Web 2.0. It's convincing enough that I already want to stuff your Twitter feed up your nose. Why? (I promise: No spoilers and nothing not already leaked in the promo materials.)By banishing computers from their lives, Erasmus's reclusive colleagues are able to nourish what he calls "attention surplus disorder," the ability to focus on and think about one thing for a long time. Erasmus's order passes its trains of thought from generation to generation — a Church of the Long Now. By contrast, the video and telecom-addled civilization that bustles outside their walls is full of shallow and incorrect knowledge. People who've never taken time to study anything feel they know everything. Constantly distracted by their jangling electronic gizmos, they can't comprehend the powerful ideas and complex systems wrought by thousands of years of civilization. Their smart machines make them dumb. Inevitably, they look to the cloistered nerds to save them. I've pledged not to do a review until September 9th, but I'll tell you Stephenson's worldview is contagious from page one. It's been following me around in the real world — I haven't hated normal people this much since I was an MIT freshman. You say you're a "geek?" Let's see you unplug your iPhone for a month. Surely you have something more interesting to do.