Neal Stephenson, award-winning author of Diamond Age, Snowcrash, and The Baroque Cycle, has produced another landmark addition to the genre of science- and speculative-fiction. Anathem is a hefty addition to Stephenson’s own oeuvre of inventive and cerebral titles.

Once again, Stephenson proves himself a polymath with his simply presented, yet thought-provoking explorations of topics from a broad range of academic disciplines.

By drawing the reader down avenues of scientific and metaphysical thought woven throughout a coming-of-age-during-the-turning-of-the-age storyline, Stephenson fulfills the basic demand of good literature: he stimulates internal debate about what defines the human experience and asks questions about what we truly know about the world around us and the nature of reality.

A caveat: its first several hundred pages are not a beach read. (Unless your beach is an academic retreat, and you’re furnished with a podium to prop up its 900 pages while you work on your tan.)

The prose is clear, crisp and as well-organized and methodically structured as the mind of its protagonist Erasmus, through whose eyes we experience Arbre, the world Stephenson has created for Anathem.

Erasmus himself is at first uninspiring and forgettable in that he is mostly a conduit for information.

But he flourishes late in the novel and acquires a personality once he has been uprooted from comfortable surroundings and forced to reconcile his worldview with a changing reality. The friends and adversaries surrounding him are more immediately memorable.

Anathem explores its themes of time, learning and discovery through diverse characters both eloquent and pedantic, benevolent and selfish, resulting in an appealing and varied cast wrapped up in an entertaining storyline.

Among the colorful individuals are a friend obsessed with martial arts and military strategy, an enigmatic sage who hints at an astonishing lifespan, and a member of a technocratic lower caste who is taboo to behold.

Stephenson’s world-building is as impressive as his display of knowledge on such subjects as philosophy, history, religion, sociology and quantum physics.

Created words litter the pages, inspired by Latin and Greek roots to play on subconscious associations of meaning in the mind of the English reader.

Throughout, Stephenson succeeds in gently reminding us that this is not Earth.

It’s Arbre, a world similar enough to our own to draw many parallels, yet rich with its own 7,000-year history (which Stephenson outlines in a preface, with admirable brevity).

He deftly avoids pontificating or falling back on stereotypes and never takes his tale too seriously.

Make no mistake, Anathem begins in the mind, hooking the intellect before it engages the emotions.

The narrative rewards the patient reader with an increase in action during the second half, a turnabout which underscores a contrast between the life of the pastoral philosopher in his ivory tower, and the harried activity of the “Saecular” world — the world outside the walls of the “math,” a sheltered reservoir in which Erasmus dwells, of learning and learned individuals.

The Saecular and mathic spheres collide well into Anathem’s pages to deal with an otherworldly crisis, providing grounds for Stephenson to force the reader to recognize the nuances of the relationship between knowledge and usefulness.

As governments are asking questions regarding public education failures, its ideal form and its goals, it is a timely vein to plumb in speculative fiction and one which Stephenson exposes well.

Anathem makes no excuse as it crawls to the heart and the gut, and, at the last, Stephenson ups the ante in the last quarter of the novel, drawing the reader into a climax with the scale, stakes and adventure of a space opera.

Ultimately, Stephenson succeeds in presenting a novel which provides both entertainment and mental stimulus; a good read to get your brain in gear for fall after the summer slump.

Anathem arrives in bookstores Sept. 9.