I 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.

Set on a planet called Arbe (pronounced "arb"), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment—sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avaunt, or "auts,"

• 1. The planet's name is spelled Arbre.
• 2. They're the avout, not avaunt. It comes from the Latin a- + vovere, to vow. The avout are, literally, those who've vowed to follow the fictional Cartasian discipline.
• 3. No, no, no, an aut in the book is a rite performed by the avout. Why am I huffy about this? Because Stephenson provides a 20-page glossary at the back of the book.

Their society—the "mathic" world—is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries.

• 4. Earth already has a 622 year old clock that still runs in the cathedral at Salisbury, England. The science-fiction clocks on planet Arbre are designed to last for millennia, like Danny Hillis's planned 10,000 Year Clock. Many of the clocks in Anathem are several thousand years old.

[Stephenson's] early books, a satire about big universities and an eco-thriller, were well received but not huge sellers. In search of big sales and big bucks, he collaborated with an uncle on a couple of political potboilers. "We heard that Tom Clancy had made something like $17 million the previous year and thought if we could snag 1 percent of that, we'd still be OK." They didn't come close, and in 1991, Stephenson says, his career "was moving along at low rpms." Then he wrote Snow Crash ...

• 5. Those political thrillers, Interface and The Cobweb, postdate Snow Crash by several years — 1992, 1994 and 1996, respectively.

But hey, nobody's perfect. Anathem itself has at least one glaring mistake: Midway through, the main character describes a group of people as being treated like "movie stars." As Stephenson's previous 491 pages have made abundantly clear, the word "movie" can't possibly be in the narrator's vocabulary — on planet Arbre, they'd be speely stars. Take that, correctards!

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.