Neal Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle"

[f4f3]

Last night I retired to bed with the last 100 pages of "The System of the World", the last volume in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which consists of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and the aforementioned TSOTW. It's linked, by theme and character, to Cryptonomicon, which was written first and is set partly in the 1930's and 40's and partly in a near future which is probably now a recent past.

Whether you count it as three or four volumes, it is in all ways a substantial piece of work. Each book comes in comfortably over 800 pages, and all are of burglar stunning weight.

I loved all of them, probably more than I've loved any sequence of books since, oh, I don't know. Very few sequences stand alongside it in terms of characterisation, adventure, intellectual promiscuity and just pure fun. I admit, I found Quicksilver hard to get into. I actually gave up 50 or so pages in, and it wasn't until I'd read Cryptonomicon that I came back to it. I'm glad I did, and I recommend the whole thing unreservedly to anyone who doesn't mind having their lives eaten for a few weeks, and who might have a passing interest in money, love, natural philosophy and politics. And travel writing, royalty, religion and metallurgy. And edged weapons, military tactics and Verailles. And architecture, alchemy and London. Christopher Wren, Leibniz, Newton, The Sun King, the House of Hanover, Whigs, Tories, the founding of The Bank of England, the plague and the Great Fire, Pepys, kindney stones, the Royal Society. Pirates, mudlarks, slavery, pamphleteers. And all the other stuff, too.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Cryptonomicon is a good place to start, since it features Turing, Bletchley Park, the invention of computers and a lot of WWII action (Pearl Harbour, the Blitz etc.). It also features data havens, cryptography, West Coast psycho-babble v Enlightenment thinking (he comes down very strongly on the side of rationalism - at one point his character, when asked why his opinion should count for more than anyone else's on a subject, says,
"My opinion on the internet counts more than yours because you are a deconstructionist academic and I am one of the top six world experts in information transfer protocols." This fails, unfortunately, to impress his girlfriend.