The “Anachronist” is a branching novella written by Peter Levine. The protagonist is Anna, a young woman being burned at the stake in 1596 London. She has been trained in a certain magic art, the ability to remember scenes with photographic detail then retreat into those memories, or even into the memories of others. This form of magic is available to all of us: focussing attention on the fine details of a scene, applying “palace of memory” tricks to recall those details later, and the capacity to retreat into our own imagined spaces to escape a painful reality. Hang on to that idea of imagined spaces. More later.
Early in the introduction, my interest was piqued by the protagonist’s speculation about weather patterns and optical anatomy. This reminded me of the Baroque Cycle, a trilogy written by Neal Stephenson set in London about a half century later (1660s) and featuring a fictional Isaac Newton. Like the Baroque Cycle, the writing in “Anachronist” is dense, descriptive, thought provoking, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes grim. In one sense, “Anachronist” is much better than “the Baroque Cycle”. Neal Stephenson is skilled at constructing sentences and paragraphs, but his plot design can be rambling, making his books difficult to finish. The “Anachronist”, in contrast, is well plotted. The story begins with Anna, then through a series of stories about ostensibly unrelated characters, gradually weaves back into a whole cloth that explains why Anna has been condemned. If the reader stays with the story long enough, she might even escape.
“Anachronist” is decorated with beautiful graphic images of artwork from the 16th and 17th century, the artwork itself being the sometimes subject of the narrator’s visions and memories. I found myself studying these paintings, wishing they could be expanded to study in more detail, and clicking on them to bring up the citations so I could learn more.
The game is relatively non-interactive: long stretches of text, few branch points, fewer still real branch points. It is possible to skip short sections, but I worried by doing so I might miss an opportunity to increase my knowledge (one two stats being tracked throughout the game). It is also possible to interrupt the story at certain points, returning to the execution and achieve a non-optimal ending. This is far less interactivity than I hope for in a work of IF.
But “Anachronist” isn’t completely without interactivity. There are hidden links throughout which the reader might recognize as anachronistic to the story, or which a player can discover as I did madly clicking everything on the screen the way you would win at “Kings Quest” (Roberta Williams) an early graphic adventure. I hope nobody will judge my strategy as base; the anachronisms are subtle and not easy to recognize. By either strategy, actively searching these links enhances the reader’s focus, a worthy goal for any form of interactivity. Finding them improves the knowledge and entropy game stats, leading to a better outcome.
I’ve long been fascinated by this period of European history, ripe with scientific discovery and religious upheaval. Religious conflict is a central theme in the “Anachronist”. One of the viewpoint characters (Ajita) is an atheist from the Mughal empire (modern Pakistan and India) who escaped his own country for the promise of greater safety and freedom in Europe. That promise is never realized. Later in the story he finds himself trapped for weeks inside the chimney of an English manor house with a secret Priest, both hiding out from Puritan militia. Ajita observes, on multiple occasions, that Protestants and Catholics are at war over nothing more important than the nature of the communal biscuit; not how it’s made or even how it’s served, but its metaphysical properties.
“In my experience,” Ajita said, “it is mainly trivial points of theology that drive Christians to internecine violence. Perhaps an instinct to associate in tribes is native to our species; we naturally obey local chiefs and compete for territory. In modern times, when nations number in the millions, a sense of tribal security is lost among the anonymous crowds. Men invent arbitrary differences to distinguish their own small factions from outsiders. That is the only explanation I can offer for why men enjoy torturing and murdering each other over metaphysical subtleties, such as whether the Godhead demands faith, or deeds, or both.”
Speaking to the Protestant-Catholic division, the historical period described in “The Anachronist” was followed soon after by the bloody English Civil War, during which the Protestant dictator Oliver Cromwell came to power; The English Civil War was the only period of British History when England was without a monarch. The same divisions erupted again three hundred years later during The Troubles in Ireland, which was within my lifetime. I grew up far away from that in the USA, naively unaware of those divisions as a Protestant growing up in a predominantly Catholic suburb of Chicago. I even joined a Catholic Scout troop. Yet I have not heard as much internecine vitriol as I have in the past two years since Zuckerberg changed his business model from hosting a platform for friends to share stories, to a platform promoting AI generated hatebait. Just as in 16th and 17th century England, the only people who benefit from factional discord are the men (or women) who position themselves as authoritarian tribal chiefs.
Point of confession: while playing, I skipped almost entirely the book within a book, a scene where Ajita and other viewpoint characters have been imprisoned in a gaol. To pass time, Ajita recites the unabridged contents of a fifteen chapter book he’s been trying to publish. The text is badly formatted for screen reading, and the story (an imagined Sanskrit-inspired mythology) is entirely non-interactive. If I were Ajita’s cellmate during that recitation, I would be begging the Puritans to throw me on the fire.
Fortunately for me as reader, the contents of that book are referenced and summarized several more times during the main thread, such that I was able to surmise that this book is Ajita’s attempt to create his own allegorical religion.
But the Great King would ask another and more important question. Which of the stories is right? Not every combination of abstractions can be correct. The ultimate success would be writing a new allegory that had the virtue of being true.
Ajita represents the atheist archetype in “The Anachronist”, so it is ironic that he becomes so obsessed with documenting his own imagined universe through his illustrated book.
I stuck with the main story long enough to achieve a positive ending for Anna, about five or six hours of reading. For an impatient reader like me to stick with something that long is a credit to the author (Peter Levine) for their careful plotting, character development, and writing.