Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1) by Neal Stephenson
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Book Reviews of Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)
Book Review: Stephenson has become one of my favorite authors
Summary: 5 Stars
It's very hard to write an adequate review of this book right now, since (a) I don't want to give anything away, and (b) there are some things I _can't_ give away because it's part of a series that hasn't all been published yet.
I wanted to grab this book when it was first published (late last year) but I was in my final year of law school and way too busy to start a nine-hundred-page novel. Maybe it will tell you something that the _very first thing I did_ after taking my state bar exam last week was to buy a hardcover copy.
Stephenson impressed the heck out of me with _Cryptonomicon_. You too? Then you'll like this one. _Quicksilver_ and the rest of the Baroque Cycle continue to explore the same themes (information theory, computer technology, the tendency of hackers to try to figure out how things work) but everything (so far) takes place a couple of centuries ago, as modern science is a-bornin'. As we met (a fictional version of) Alan Turing in _Cryptonomicon_, here we meet (fictional versions of) Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, and Robert Hooke, among others. (And as before, long-lived redbeard Enoch Root is in the thick of things. Has somebody been reading Heinlein?)
Stephenson is one helluva fine writer. Everything you liked about _Cryptonomicon_ is here as well: his dry and detached irony, his technical 'digressions' (they're not), his highly-wrought and preternaturally apt metaphors, his deft handling of a sprawling plot that in other hands would simply have been unmanageable. The ideas still come fast and furious, at a rate of roughly one entire Dan Brown novel every two pages.
(And yes, kids, this _is_ science fiction. No, it's not set in the future, and there are no spaceships or ray guns or aliens. But it's fiction, and the subject is science.)
Beyond that, I can't tell you much without giving away actual contents. Suffice it to say that Stephenson is an extremely ambitious writer and his ambitions succeed.
My _next_ official act will be to purchase a hardcover edition of _The Confusion_. Then I'll sit around gnawing my fingernails until October -- not just for my bar exam results, but also for _The System of the World_. I can't wait to see how this all comes out.
Book Review: It's... different
Summary: 5 Stars
I'd wager that most people familiar with Mr. Stephenson's work are expecting something along the lines of Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon, something that is certainly not delivered here. In contrast to the breakneck pace of the two books mentioned, Quicksilver seems positively glacial. However, it possesses a deep and intruiging storyline with well-developed characters for those patient enough to keep reading through the slower portions of the book.Most obvious is the setting: while most of Stephenson's previous work is set in the fairly near future, Quicksilver is set around the turn of the century - the 18th century. Still, the themes remain the same: his heroes are working to develop new technologies and sciences that have the potential to revolutionize the world. Here we meet historic characters like Issac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, who mix with Stephenson's quirky, inventive characters and work to develop the budding field of Natural Philosophy (you probably know it as science).
While there are certainly similarities between this and Stephenson's earlier work, the differences are major and may turn off fans of said earlier work. Aside from the glacial pacing mentioned earlier, the cast of supporting characters is large and can become very confusing - the various political stances of the characters can become important to the plot, but tend to be difficult to keep in your mind. Taking notes while you read might not be a bad idea; a "Dramatis Personae" in the back of the book is helpful to jog your memory, but is sparse on details and contains some spoilers.
All in all, I reccommend this book, but not without some reservations. It may not be the book for those who lack patience and would rather read a good page-turner, but for those with the willingness to stick it out and read through almost a thousand slow pages will find an historical epic worthy of the time invested. Personally, I am eagerly awaiting the sequel, but many readers will certainly find the book too slow for their tastes. If you enjoyed Stephenson's previous work, don't just buy this and expect it to be more of the same; instead, consider if historical epics are your cup of tea.
Book Review: Only half way through, and already it's a favorite
Summary: 5 Stars
At this point I'm only about half way through Quicksilver, so this isn't a complete review, but after reading some of the reviews below, I just gotta throw in my two cents. First, let me say that until I picked this book up, I had never heard of Neal Stevenson. Second, I thought it was going to be more fantasy than historical, in the Neil Gaiman mode, only bigger. Third, it's absolutely brilliant, fabulous stuff. It's exhausting reading, physically it weighs a ton, and after a while it's hard to concentrate on the words, and you have to read every word-- a feast of a book, the best contemporary novel I've read in close to ten years, since Corelli's Mandolin, another feast of a book, and The Bone People a decade before that--Stevenson knows his history, his math, his psychology, and how to structure something huge. I don't know where he's taking me, but I'll follow him anywhere now. I just wish I didn't have to do other things, like go to work and sleep.
After 400+ pages, I keep waiting for it to flag, for a sequence to be less than terrifically written, for his sentences to become less than sparkling, for Stevenson to become didactic and showy for the sake of show. No such luck. I keep underlining sentences I want to remember; his description of London Bridge is the best architectural/sociological writing I've ever read; he makes boring stuff--calculus, shipping, mining, commerce--wonderfully interesting; he gets us inside his soldiers, we learn how guns work and why; what gunpowder does. He uses language like no one I know, keeping a historical distance from his characters while using modern idioms and attitudes to illuminate the 17th century. He doesn't turn them into 21st century hipsters, but he gives them language that, while not quite authentically 18th century (that would be a little too much, I think), illuminates their psyches in ways we can understand easily.
In an age of minimalist fiction, where less is considered more (and only minimalism is prize-worthy), it's a wonderful treat to read someone who doesn't give a damn about what's stylish, and who just throws everything he's got onto the page. What a feast!
Book Review: A new meaning to Picaresque
Summary: 5 Stars
This book (to which we are promised two follow-ups by the author in the same vein) lends new meaning to the term picaresque in describing a novel.-Commonly meant to mean one of meandering or no plot in which one adventure follows another with no seeming coherence, morality, etc.---Having just read what is considered one of the great 18th Century picaresques, Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, I must say that this book puts the earlier one to shame, making it seem a rather pat work with stock characters, a predictable ending and comparatively little nuance. For this is not only a picaresque of swashbuckling adventure: It is one of politics, money, intrigues, religion, alchemy, mathematics and much else. I had, in fact, to cudgel my mind in some places to remember the conic section formulae and how number systems without the base of ten worked (especially the binary system). - Those with financial backgrounds will no doubt cudgel their brains over the rise and fall of V.O.C. stock. Those with a philosophical turn of mind will find themselves tackling anew the free will vs. predestination argument and follow it as what we now call science redefines predestination as determinism as well as the old mind-body problem, and others of others persuasions will find much else.
But this is far from a plodding, meandering, didactic book. Stephenson has written a tale, or several tales loosely and (sometimes) mysteriously interconnected in a style which I can only describe as having a bounce to it. One feels bounced from one page to another much as the characters and ideas are. It's not exactly a page-turner in the sense that good mystery genre fiction is, where you turn the pages to find where the next twist will lead all the while making educated guesses at the solution. But one feels rather bounced into the world of (mostly) 17th Century science, philosophy, politics, money, society etc. and finds oneself enwrapped and bouncing along in it, much as the characters do.
I hope I shan't have to wait too long from the bounce of the last page of this first book to land me on the first page of the second one!
Book Review: A masterpiece of historical fiction
Summary: 5 Stars
Stephenson succeeds in crafting a description of one of European history's watershed eras that encompases vast geograhies and philosphies in an equally vast number of pages. For that, unlike many other reviewers, I do not fault him. We readers are guided on a tour of the intellectual landscape in England from the time of the English Civil War through to the Glorious Revolution. Stephenson entangles us in the religious/political mayhem that ran rampant during that time. From Versailles, to Venice to the hodge-podge of flyspeck Germanic sub-principalities, we gain a feeling for the incestuous interconnectedness of the royal and noble families that were accustomed to being the only Powers That Mattered at the time. Juxtaposed against them, we are introduced to the coterie of geniuses who flourished at the time and whose scientific and philosophical endeavors reshaped the way people came to view the world. Stephenson's voluminous description of the time, and his creation of a set of fictitious peers and contemporaries of its great thinkers allows him to explore and play with the ideas that were radically new in European culture at the time, which we contemporary readers have inherited as truths we take for granted. He does not go to pains to demonstrate how radically new some of the political theories he explores were in their historical context, and unsophisticated modern readers might have the urge to think "Well, duh... everybody knows and thinks that way... its normal." This book takes us through the struggles that unseated kings and smashed the concept of divine right, as well as through the empiricist revolution that retired the antiquated aristotelian modes of understanding the world and their alchemical/mystical offspring.
This is not an adventure story, though there are a few adventureous tales woven into it. This is a novel of ideas, and as such, it does a spectacular job, just like each of Stephenson's earlier books.