Baroque sci-fi: Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver quickens the mind instead of the pulse

By Joshua Ellis

If Neal Stephenson's new novel Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle (William Morrow, $27.95) had been written in the time and place where it's set -- Europe during the height of the Restoration -- it probably would've carried a subtitle something along the lines of: Being a Prequel (of Sorts) to the Novel Cryptonomicon, As Well As an Account of the Doings of Various Persons, Involved in the Events Which Led (Somewhat Indirectly) to the Creation of Modern Capitalism, and of the Digital Computer; and also a Primer on Natural Philosophy, Latterly Nam'd Science; and of Alckemy, Its Bastard Cousin.

Such a description fits perfectly with Quicksilver's status as the first book in what Stephenson calls "The Baroque Cycle." "Baroque" is certainly an apt description of the novel, as would be "picaresque," "sprawling" and "extremely fucking dense."

Cryptonomicon was a picaresque, sprawling and extremely fucking dense book about computers, cryptography, World War II and the interrelationship between modern digital communications, politics and commerce. Remarkably, it was also very funny and very readable. In fact, it was one of the best novels that came out during the fin de siecle years of the Internet boom.

Unfortunately, it got dumped in the science-fiction section of the bookstore, because Stephenson's most famous book up until that point was a hilarious cyberpunk, pop-culture freakout called Snow Crash. Putting Cryptonomicon next to the D&D novels and space operas is like putting Wuthering Heights in the romance section.

The same could be said of Quicksilver -- except that it's broadly a fictional novel about science; it's not science fiction in the traditional sense. Rather, it deals with the beginnings of modern science, in the persons of such luminaries as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Liebniz and the fictional Daniel Waterhouse -- ancestor of the mathematicians whose 20th-century saga was documented in Cryptonomicon.

Waterhouse is a natural philosopher, which means that he -- like his college roommate, Newton -- concerns himself primarily with the mysteries of the natural world. Unfortunately, as the son of a notable Protestant rebel and ally of Oliver Cromwell, he cannot help becoming embroiled in the great dramas of the age.

It's also the story of Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe (also the ancestor of several Cryptonomicon characters), a vagabond and adventurer whose maniacal careening around Europe leads him from a Vienna under the control of the Turk, to an Amsterdam poised to become the banking capital of the world -- if the Dutch can only keep the markets from being undercut by the various plots directed toward them by Louis the Sun King from his country court in Versailles.

Shaftoe and Waterhouse never meet, and both are minor characters in the vast dramas unfolding around them; but in some sense, they are archetypes of their age. Waterhouse is a bookish Puritan, his every act informed by the war between Catholic and Protestant that his England is filled with. Shaftoe is one of the nameless, faceless masses who lived their lives and died their deaths outside the scheming world of continental politics -- who only made their mark on history by becoming pirates, heretics or madmen. He's Everyman, and No Man, at the same time.

Quicksilver is equal parts sweeping historical epic, comedy of manners and a meditation on the beginnings of technology and information theory. In Cryptonomicon, cryptography is used to hide the missives of the generals who control World War II, and as a method of creating digital cash in the modern day. In Quicksilver, it is a tool of scheming courtiers and spies who scurry back and forth between Charles the II's England, William of Orange's Netherlands and Louis the XIV's France, trading information as they trade shares of the trading companies that laid the foundation of European America. It's the province of alchemists like Newton and Enoch Root, the mysterious figure whose handiwork seems to lie behind half of the events of the novel (and of Cryptonomicon).

At times, Quicksilver reads more like a thesis than what is ostensibly a book meant to entertain. It also occasionally seems like a forum for Stephenson to just sit back and amuse himself by behaving as weirdly in print as possible -- such as the hilarious and surreal scene where Shaftoe, his brain rapidly degenerating from a nasty case of syphilis, hallucinates a giant song-and-dance number performed by skeletons, gravediggers, priests, fishwives and peasant girls, chiding him for his carefree and irresponsible life, as he rides his Turkish cavalry horse into Paris. Or the bit where the text suddenly becomes a parody of overwrought Elizabethan theater for about a dozen pages or so. Despite these descents (or ascents, depending on your view) into postmodernism, Quicksilver is not composed in Stephenson's usual style of humorous hyperreality. Like its protagonists Waterhouse and Newton, it's mainly ponderous and learned.

Indeed, the casual reader will probably find Quicksilver damned near impenetrable, unless the reader has a casual interest in subjects like Restoration history, Newtonian physics and information theory. If your idea of serious fiction is Bridget Jones's Diary, this might not be the novel for you.