In Quicksilver, the first volume of the "Baroque Cycle," Neal Stephenson launches his most ambitious work to date. The novel, divided into three books, opens in 1713 with the ageless Enoch Root seeking Daniel Waterhouse on the campus of what passes for MIT in eighteenth-century Massachusetts. Daniel, Enoch's message conveys, is key to resolving an explosive scientific battle of preeminence between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the development of calculus. As Daniel returns to London aboard the Minerva, readers are catapulted back half a century to recall his years at Cambridge with young Isaac. Daniel is a perfect historical witness. Privy to Robert Hooke's early drawings of microscope images and with associates among the English nobility, religious radicals, and the Royal Society, he also befriends Samuel Pepys, risks a cup of coffee, and enjoys a lecture on Belgian waffles and cleavage-all before the year 1700. In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.
The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. --Patrick O'Kelley
This colossal novel by the author of the equally plethoric Cryptonomicon (1999) begins the Baroque Cycle, a trilogy set in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the foundations were being laid for the science and mathematics that led to the cryptography in Cryptonomi con; and despite its heft, it is readable as well as highly impressive, not least for the feeling for history it displays--something that will, however, surprise only those who haven't read the earlier book. The three main characters, ancestors of some of Cryptonomicon 's protagonists, are formidable representatives of their times and places. Daniel Waterhouse possesses a gifted scientific mind and is trying to go beyond the limits of alchemy to achieve a new understanding of the world; through his eyes, we see such titans of Enlightenment science as Robert Hooke and Isaac Newton. Jack Shaftoe is a street urchin from London who rises to a powerful position in Europe's vagabond community. Eliza, raised in a Turkish harem from which she escapes, lives fairly successfully by her wits, which encompass the know-how for supplying the ingredients of gunpowder. These three have the largest roles, but the book's flavor is imparted in the opening scene, featuring a young and curious Benjamin Franklin. As rich in character sketches as it is in well-developed scenes, Quicksilver will have readers--especially the history buffs among them--happily turning all its many pages. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Stephenson’s new machine is a wonderment to behold. A-”
From the Back Cover
In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe -- in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.
About the Author
Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . .Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Quicksilver
The Baroque Cycle #1By Neal StephensonHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright ©2006 Neal Stephenson
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0060833165
Chapter One
Boston Common
October 12, 1713, 10:33:52 A.M.
Enoch rounds the corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the woman's head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner's purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow -- and, to a Puritan, tantalizing -- glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.
Boston's a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes. The road up the spoon-handle is barred by a wall, with the usual gallows outside it, and victims, or parts of them, strung up or nailed to the city gates. Enoch has just come that way, and reckoned he had seen the last of such things -- that thenceforth it would all be churches and taverns. But the dead men outside the gate were common robbers, killed for earthly crimes. What is happening now on the Common is of a more Sacramental nature.
The noose lies on the woman's gray head like a crown. The executioner pushes it down. Her head forces it open like an infant's dilating the birth canal. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her shoulders. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes to collapse. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts the knot while an official reads the death warrant. This is as bland as a lease. The crowd scratches and shuffles. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets. Down at the other end of the Common, a squadron of lobsterbacks drills and marches round the base of a hummock with a stone powder-house planted in its top. An Irish sergeant bellows -- bored but indignant -- in a voice that carries forever on the wind, like the smell of smoke.
He's not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch's blundered into one it would be bad form to leave. There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He judges it very far from the worst hanging he's ever seen -- no kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knots -- all in all, an unusually competent piece of work.
He hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things -- hangings included -- with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with færy-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.
As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton's temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell. It reminds everyone here that if they don't want to be dead in a few months' time, they have firewood to stack and chinks to caulk. The wind is noticed by a hoarse preacher at the base of the gallows, who takes it to be Satan himself, come to carry the witch's soul to hell, and who is not slow to share this opinion with his flock. The preacher is staring Enoch in the eye as he testifies.
Enoch feels the heightened, chafing self-consciousness that is the precursor to fear. What's to prevent them from trying and hanging him as a witch?
How must he look to these people? A man of indefinable age but evidently broad experience, with silver hair queued down to the small of his back, a copper-red beard, pale gray eyes, and skin weathered and marred like a blacksmith's ox-hide apron. Dressed in a long traveling-cloak, a walking-staff and an outmoded rapier strapped 'longside the saddle of a notably fine black horse. Two pistols in his waistband, prominent enough that Indians, highwaymen, and French raiders can clearly see them from ambuscades (he'd like to move them out of view, but reaching for them at this moment seems like a bad idea). Saddlebags (should they be searched) filled with instruments, flasks of quicksilver, and stranger matters -- some, as they'd learn, quite dangerous -- books in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin pocked with the occult symbols of Alchemists and Kabalists. Things could go badly for him in Boston.
But the crowd takes the preacher's ranting not as a call to arms but a signal to turn and disperse, muttering. The redcoats discharge their muskets with deep hissing booms, like handfuls of sand hurled against a kettledrum. Enoch dismounts into the midst of the colonists. He sweeps the robe round him, concealing the pistols, pulls the hood back from his head, and amounts to just another weary pilgrim. He does not meet any man's eye but scans their faces sidelong, and is surprised by a general lack of self-righteousness.
"God willing," one man says, "that'll be the last one."
"Do you mean, sir, the last witch?" Enoch asks.
"I mean, sir, the last hanging."
Flowing like water round the bases of the steep hills, they migrate across a burying ground on the south edge of the Common, already full of lost Englishmen, and follow the . . .
Continues...
Excerpted from Quicksilverby Neal Stephenson Copyright ©2006 by Neal Stephenson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. In the first of a proposed Baroque Cycle, we are immersed in seventeenth-century Europe and America--on the threshold of the Modern World. Alchemy is transmogrifying into chemistry, superstition into science. The Age of Reason dawns while crowned heads make war; court intrigue is the realpolitik of the day; Christendom is getting a face-lift. Pirates, spies, adventuresses, vagabonds, Jesuits, and other infidels abound, along with cabals, spies, juntas, conspiracies, waylayings, and ransomings! They're all crammed in here, along with plots and subplots that this reviewer, for one, cannot keep track of, and that principal narrator Prebble is largely indifferent to. When he does pay attention, he conveys some of the author's wit and sense of historical and scientific adventure. Otherwise, he is on an extremely well-tuned, mellifluous autopilot, so that the text neither suffers nor gains. Auxiliary narrator Nielsen, on the other hand, grates on the ear. Y.R. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
