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Neal Stephenson
Sci-fi author Neal Stephenson has a way of melding a dozen disparate interesting topics into each of his novels, and Anathem is no exception... but above all else I would say Anathem's theme is time and how humans place themselves in it. What is worth taking longer than a human lifetime -- and in some cases much, much longer -- to complete or to maintain? The characters of Anathem live an ascetic life of devotion and discipline, winding their massive clock and copying their books by hand as the centuries grind by. The outside world ebbs and flows through dark ages and renaissances and back again. But as the story opens something new is brewing, something momentous enough to upend their world.
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Out here in the real world, an epic clock like those in Anathem is being planned right now -- by the Long Now Foundation. The idea here being, can we change our sense of "now" to be much, much longer, and be better able to meet the challenges humanity struggles with when only equipped with painfully short-term thinking? Anathem captures the spirit of the Long Now more vividly through fiction than any nonfiction explanation could, but this collection of essays by Long Now proponent Steward Brand is a sort of definitive description of the idea.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
Another of Anathem's (many) themes is the tension between science and technology, with a powerful method and body of knowledge in the one and a sort of bag a magic tricks in the other. Anathem's main characters live isolated from nearly all technology, with not much at their disposal beyond pen and paper, despite their deep accumulated knowledge of everything from quantum mechanics to biochemistry. The outside world places no restrictions on technology and its denizens have every flashy gizmo and gadget, but no wisdom to guide them or appreciation for what underlies these things. These two extremes emphasize that technologies are choices, and they come with no guarantee of understanding or perspective. Neil Postman touches on some similar concepts in Technopoly. He pushes back against the unquestioning acceptance of any arbitrary technology and implores us to consider them as the choices they really are.