a wonderfully weird and ambitious book...

short plot description: we find ourselves on the planet Arbre where after some terrible events in the past scientists have retreated from society and live in monastery-like settlements with minimum contact to the outside. The story is told from the viewpoint of Erasmas, a young student, when events force him and several other members of his settlement to go outside...

my thoughts: a brilliantly constructed book about Big Ideas with some commentary on popular culture but with some flaws. The world-building is the best part, really beautiful, cleverly done, very detailled but not boring (which is quite a feat since about the first 100 pages are more or less one long info dump). The plot is breathtaking in scope and well executed. The characters felt mostly flat and one-dimensional to me, not very believable.
Minor gripes: parts of the book felt like I've read them before (Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose" and works by Arthur C. Clarke and Aldous Huxley come to mind) and some plot parts felt tacked on (e.g. the romantic subplots).
But all in all I enjoyed the book very much, the idea of a radical separation between theoritical and practical science is intriguing.

my advice: give this one a try if you are not afraid of doing some thinking while reading, you will not be disappointed.