The Baroque Cycle
Breaking the habit of a longtime, I am surprised to find myself reading Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver. What's surprising about this is that it is over 900 pages long (aargh!) and the first volume of a trilogy (double aargh!) of which each volume is similarly long (triple aargh!); when I have come to prefer exquisitely small and beautiful one-off, stand-alone masterpieces like Salley Vickers'.
Nevertheless, there's something about Neal Stephenson's work that makes me want to make an exception. It somehow feels like a cross-genre work. It reads like science fiction or fantasy, yet it has a historical setting. Perhaps you could call it historical science fiction, since some of its central characters are the founder members of the Royal Society: John Wilkins, Robert Hooke, John Locke, Isaac Newton; and part of the action revolves around the controversy over whether differential calculus was invented (discovered?) by Newton or Leibniz. But it's also about all the religious and political intrigues of the Restoration, the latter years of the Stuarts, the Glorious Revolution and the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne. It leaves you thinking over deep questions of philosophy and theology, while you're still laughing at the picaresque events, and chuckling over the knowing anachronisms. (I think they're anachronisms - but here's where I'm afraid of showing too much ignorance of the period.)
So, if I stick it out, this lot will keep me busy till way after Christmas, I should think. As a non-historian, and just on the level of the story, I think this is a great yarn. I'd be really interested to hear what a proper historian makes of these books.
The other volumes of the Baroque Cycle are:
The Confusion
The System of the World
Nevertheless, there's something about Neal Stephenson's work that makes me want to make an exception. It somehow feels like a cross-genre work. It reads like science fiction or fantasy, yet it has a historical setting. Perhaps you could call it historical science fiction, since some of its central characters are the founder members of the Royal Society: John Wilkins, Robert Hooke, John Locke, Isaac Newton; and part of the action revolves around the controversy over whether differential calculus was invented (discovered?) by Newton or Leibniz. But it's also about all the religious and political intrigues of the Restoration, the latter years of the Stuarts, the Glorious Revolution and the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne. It leaves you thinking over deep questions of philosophy and theology, while you're still laughing at the picaresque events, and chuckling over the knowing anachronisms. (I think they're anachronisms - but here's where I'm afraid of showing too much ignorance of the period.)
So, if I stick it out, this lot will keep me busy till way after Christmas, I should think. As a non-historian, and just on the level of the story, I think this is a great yarn. I'd be really interested to hear what a proper historian makes of these books.
The other volumes of the Baroque Cycle are:
The Confusion
The System of the World
posted by Tony at 11/23/2004 07:57:00 pm
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