'Quicksilver': The Original Information Age

[Dave Monroe]

The New York Times
Saturday, October 5, 2003
'Quicksilver': The Original Information Age
By POLLY SHULMAN
QUICKSILVER
Volume One of the Baroque Cycle.
By Neal Stephenson.
927 pp. New York: William Morrow. $27.95.

''I love reading novels,'' Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
exclaims in Neal Stephenson's new novel. ''You can
understand them without thinking too much.'' Would
Leibniz change his tune if he had to read
''Quicksilver,'' rather than act as a character in it?
To the co-inventor of the calculus (or co-discoverer,
if you take a more Platonic view), making sense of 927
pages of fictional complexity devised by a single
mischievous intelligence should be child's play. But
ordinary readers may find themselves longing -- as I
did -- for a hypertext version, with clickable links
to characters' earlier appearances, family trees,
timelines, bibliographies and mathematical diagrams. 

The dizzying effects of too much information are
nothing new to aficionados of cyberpunk, the variety
of science fiction closely identified with Stephenson
(and vice versa).... 

But ''Quicksilver'' isn't cyberpunk. Of course, it
could turn out to be the daydream of a massively
parallel, artificially intelligent supercomputer, or a
complex formula used to encrypt a complex formula used
to encrypt a complex formula used to encrypt itself,
or something. I wouldn't put that sort of thing past
Stephenson, and ''Quicksilver'' is just the first book
in a projected trilogy; the night is still young. But
barring any future tricky stuff, a better term for its
genre would be history-of-science fiction. In
''Quicksilver,'' far from inventing a future,
Stephenson borrows his setting from the past, the late
17th and early 18th centuries in Europe and
Northeastern America. 

Stephenson isn't the first writer in the genre to
visit the past, of course. [...] But unlike ''The Time
Machine'' and ''The Difference Engine'' -- and ''Snow
Crash'' and ''The Diamond Age'' -- ''Quicksilver''
does not rely on fictional technology to drive its
story. Instead, it feeds its engine with philosophy,
court intrigue, economics, and the wars, plagues and
natural disasters of the era. In many ways,
Stephenson's new novel has more in common with the
historical fiction of Dorothy Dunnett than the science
fiction of Gibson or Sterling. 

The book opens in 1713 in Boston, where a spooky
European named Enoch Root has gone to find Daniel
Waterhouse, the only man alive who might be able to
reconcile Leibniz and his rival, Isaac Newton.
''Cryptonomicon'' readers will find all those names
familiar, not just the last two: ''Quicksilver''
serves as a prequel to the earlier novel, with the
same families interacting in both books....

Book 1 of ''Quicksilver'' narrates Daniel's early days
in England as the son of a prominent Puritan during
and after the Cromwell period. Daniel is a scientist,
a member of the newly formed Royal Society, a
university buddy of Isaac Newton's and a protege of
the ecclesiast and philosopher John Wilkins -- the man
who wrote a book called the ''Cryptonomicon,'' which
functions as principal McGuffin in the novel of the
same name. [...]. He's a man torn apart in a time of
dualities, which Stephenson takes as his themes for
this section of the book: reason versus faith, freedom
versus destiny, matter versus math. Another theme, of
course, is the cyberpunk's delight -- information and
how it moves through minds like a fire, or a plague,
or quicksilver. 

Book 2 drops Daniel and moves ahead a decade or two to
take up the story of a con artist named Jack Shaftoe
and Eliza, the woman he loves. Jack starts his
childhood as a Dickensian mudlark, then moves up in
the world when he finds he can earn a good living from
the families of men condemned to hang, yanking on the
prisoners' legs during their executions so that they
die more quickly. As an adult he becomes a soldier,
choosing his battles according to his prospects for
loot. At the siege of Vienna -- where a coalition of
European Christians is fighting to defend the city
against the Turks -- he captures an ostrich and a
virgin concubine, Eliza. [...] The quest to sell the
ostrich's plumes takes the pair to the great cultural
and mercantile centers of Europe -- Paris, Versailles,
Amsterdam, Leipzig -- where Eliza develops her genius
for economics and political intrigue. Book 3 combines
the two threads of the story, bringing Daniel's
concerns and Eliza's together. 

Stephenson clearly did a great deal of research for
this book, and he seems reluctant to let a crumb of it
go to waste. Everyone who's anyone in
late-17th-century or early-18th-century Europe and
North America shows up in the story: the list includes
Newton and Leibniz, of course, but also John Locke,
Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, Christiaan Huygens,
Blackbeard, a raft of royalty and even the 7-year-old
Ben Franklin (who talks like a man in his 40's).
Stephenson bundles much of his research into
conversations, packing his characters' mouths with
favorite details, such as the derivation of the words
''guinea,'' ''dollar'' and ''sabotage.'' Much of the
dialogue is painfully clunky. His characters tend to
inform one another of facts they probably already knew
but readers don't, and every few pages somebody spouts
a philosophical treatise. 

Given the apparent depth of Stephenson's research, it
seems clear that the anachronisms with which he seeds
the novel are deliberate. Some are playful, as when a
guard throws Daniel a letter with the words, ''You've
got mail,'' or when the 17th-century Venetians succumb
to ''Canal Rage'' .... 

Other anachronisms are more consequential. For
example, Leibniz has invented a digital computer, with
the ultimate goal of translating ''all human knowledge
into a new philosophical language, consisting of
numbers. To write it down in a vast Encyclopedia that
will be a sort of machine, not only for finding old
knowledge but for making new, by carrying out certain
logical operations on those numbers -- and to employ
all of this in a great project of bringing religious
conflict to an end, and raising Vagabonds up out of
squalor and liberating their potential energy --
whatever that means.'' 

Stephenson clearly never intended ''Quicksilver'' to
be one of those meticulously accurate historical
novels that capture ways of thought of times gone by.
Instead, it explores the philosophical concerns of
today -- or at least, the philosophical concerns of
Stephenson. At its best, the novel does this through
thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot
twists.... 

But the novel is so swollen and overloaded that these
delightful Stephensonian offerings are hard to follow
-- and even hard to identify. And ''Quicksilver''
suffers from a problem common in parts of trilogies:
it feels unresolved. Will it turn out to be the first
third of a carefully constructed meta-novel, or a
messy chunk of a bigger mess? Is it complex, or merely
random? Only the next couple of thousand pages will
say for sure. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/books/review/05SCHULMT.html

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