Rating: 
Summary: Massive Scope
Review: Daniel Waterhouse is summoned to return to Europe from Massachusetts to resolve a dispute between prominent mathematicians Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. During his voyage, which is interrupted by pirates, he works on a chronicle of his past, which is set against a rich tapestry of religious, political and scientific revolutions. Daniel evolves from a young Puritan roommate of Isaac Newton to courtier and natural philosopher of the Royal Society.While Daniel follows the great scientific minds of the era, Jack Shaftoe, vagabond extraordinaire, careens through colorful misadventures all over Europe. He rescues the bright and beautiful Turkish slave Eliza from the siege of Vienna. Together, they travel across Europe to Amsterdam, home to the budding financial markets. Eliza's quest for fortune and revenge on her enslaver lead her deep into political plots and catapult her to Paris where she captures the attention of the King. Jack moves on in his adventures and attracts a different kind of attention altogether. As the fortunes of kings and countries rise and fall, the paths of our intrepid characters twist and cross over the vast scope of history. Do not expect this to be similar to Stephenson's cyber-punk novels. Quicksilver is not science fiction in the classic sense - do not expect aliens, futuristic technology or time-travel. Quicksilver is historical fiction that takes place in the 17th and 18th centuries. Large portions of the book cover the birth of modern science and math. Other broad subject areas encompass European political intrigue, war and the development of financial markets. But this is no dry, tame history - this is alive and kicking. Having read Stephenson's book Cryptonomicon adds an extra dimension of interest to reading Quicksilver, since the main characters are ancestors of the characters in Cryptonomicon. The one exception is Enoch Root who appears in both books and is apparently ageless. Quicksilver does not have a neat resolution, and contains a large amount of set up material - it is very obviously the first book in the trilogy. It is also massive, and with two more massive books to follow, you need to be prepared to devote a serious amount of time to this series. Nobody can deny that Stephenson is wordy, but for such a long book, there weren't too many places where I found my attention wandering. Stephenson keeps things moving along even during some fairly detailed explanations of science or politics. He also plays around with different styles of writing, such as writing a chapter as if it was a period play. It gives a feel for the times as well as varying the pace. The three lead characters balance each other out nicely. Daniel can be a very passive character, which contrasts with Eliza's plotting and scheming. Just when the going gets too heavy, Jack provides physical action and comic relief. The main trio interact with an enormous cast of characters and one of the things I like best about Stephenson's writing is that he takes time to make even his secondary characters interesting.
Rating: 
Summary: Left me looking for the next 900 pages . . .
Review: I saved this book for several months because (a) it appeared to be dauntingly long and knowing Stephenson's capacity for complexity I knew that I'd to concentrate on the plot, and (b) because Stephenson's language has a scrumptious desert-like quality that is a pleasure to read ffor the sake of the words themselves. I was not disappointed (and can't entirely fathom why others were) on either score. I am looking forward to the next 1,800 pages. I enjoyed having a peek (albeit it fictional one) into the minds of the men who shaped the people we are today. I enoyed the historical context of the novel. I enjoyed Stephenson's way with words (and were this a high-school essay, I would support that with appropriate excerpts). I am enjoying the wonderment of what the finished piece will look like when all of the threads are woven together. I am curious to know how they will connect with our Waterhouses and Shaftoes of today (e.g. Crytonomicon). (But perhaps I am putting on Stephenson some predictability that I ought not-- oh, I hope so because I do love a surprise.) Now, it's not Snow Crash which was loaded with action-- so if you're expecting gun-toting pizza delivery people-- forget it. This book takes place in the 17th century when it was not practical to tote a musket or a flintlock around while delivery cheese-laden dough circles. But if you enjoy the intelligence and wit of a (obviously warped) mind that can conceive of gun-toting pizza delivery people on suped up skate boards, and appreciate that self-same mind applied to the brave new world that Newton, Hooke and Liebniz brought forth, then you will enjoy this work.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreadful and unreadable
Review: . . . and this from a big Neal Stephenson fan AND a fan of history AND a fan of historical fiction. I just couldn't get past the first 300 pages, and I think I get a gold star for getting that far. I have never seen exposition handled so clumsily; it's as if previous Neal Stephenson books were good reads only because he had a good editor and the editor died. Yes, it is an interesting era, and Stephenson's fascination with it comes across, but little else. As a previous reviewer mentioned, plot takes a backstage to milieu . . I certainly won't be reading the sequels.
Rating: 
Summary: why I was royally disappointed with _Quicksilver_
Review: The ironically named _Quicksilver_ is the most disappointingly leaden
book it has been my displeasure to read in recent years. After _Cryptonomicon_ my expectations were high. Early on in
_Quicksilver_ I realized that there was no way this book could be as
good as the earlier one, so I adjusted my hopes downward
accordingly...and even then, I was disappointed. The flaws are numerous. The one thing that everyone knows about the book is that it contains a
frantic pile of trivia. I was actually looking forward to this aspect
of the book, given that I enjoy random learning opportunities as much
as the next geek, and given that this is one part of _Cryptonomicon_
that I was enthused about. _QS_ disappoints in this regard. To my
mind there are two main bins that trivia are sorted in to: (1) those
random items that are capable of clicking in an interesting way into
the knowledge structure I already have; and (2) utterly random
tidbits. NS delivered a few of the former, and a few truck-loads of
the latter. In so far as the trivia was interesting, I already knew
it (Germanic witch trials, etymology of the word "dollar", the broad
outlines and purposes of the various 16th century political
structures), and in so far as the trivia was not something I already
knew, I found it dreadfully boring (hail-storms of random names of
royalty, many of them playing minimal roles in the plot, etc.). Ah. I used the word "plot", so I've segued onto the next region of
disappointment. _QS_ does not have a plot, in the conventional sense.
Sure, in a 900 page novel (or a 2,700 page novel, really), one
wouldn't expect the broad sweep of the action to be clear by page 50,
or 100...but by page 500 or so, one would hope to have an idea of
where things might be going. The book has Theme aplenty. The Theme, however ("Things Really Changed a Whole Lot, Religiously,
Economically, Politically, and Scientifically"), is big, but too insubstantial and too vague to construct a huge novel like this on.
_A Winter's Tale_ managed to work very well with out a real plot - it
could hang off of the Theme that "New York changes a lot, and is
magical through the ages". Then again, _A Winter's Tale_ was about
1/9th the length of Stephenson's Inflated Series. Speaking of inflation, this book needed an editor, badly. Dialogue
and exposition are clunky in many many places. For that matter,
dialogue and exposition are poorly differentiated. There's a joke about
1950's science fiction that 3/4 of the plot and background information
are revealed in "As you know, Bob" asides. The same is true of _QS_.
There's some minor variation on a theme: there's "As you know", there
is "I need not mention the fact that X ...<1,000 words
elided>...because you already know that", and there is "as everyone in
the town knew...". There's a persistent and pernicious meme in the art world that to
truly convey some situations you need to recreate those situations for
the audience. Thus, the only way to convey tedium is through a four
hour movie, etc. NS seemed to be held by this meme: to convey the
intellectual ferment and vast scope of the 17th century he felt the
need write a book that was adrift in a ferment and vast in scope.
Certainly he could not have conveyed these things in a novella, but
that does not mean that he could not have pruned perhaps a third of
what he wrote. The book is large enough that there's a Dramatis Personae at the end,
which was somewhat useful...but it didn't work wonderfully well for
me, because the entries were fairly short and defined the characters
(well, historical figures) mostly in terms of descriptors and events
that did not take place inside the book. If I come across a character
who I know was present 500 pages earlier, but I'm trying to remember
whether that character was a alchemist or a merchant, it helps little
to learn that the character was a friend of the Duke of Wessex (or
what have you). This is not a huge departure from how Dramatis
Personae are usually implemented, so this is not a failing unique to
NS, but in a long, meandering, and yawn-inducing book the author
should be at particular pains to provide aids to the reader. Finally, I found it difficult to read the book at points because of
several incidents of barbarous cruelty to animals. I understand that
the moral code of the time was different, and that these actions are
historically accurate, and even that some reference should be made in
the book, so as not to commit the sin of omission, and thus render the
book less of its time...but NS went further than that and introduced
the cruelty repeatedly. If it was required to advance the plot, he'd
have an out. I would wince (and more) at a book that had explicit
scenes of child rape or brutality, but would accept it if the book was
about the pursuit and capture of a child abuser...but I would find it
hard to read a novel that threw in a random scene of a child being
scalded as punishment just, because, you know...these things happen. Yeah. Yay verisimilitude. The book was not with out wondrous scenes. Jack Shaftoe steps onto
center stage in an audacious scene at the siege of Vienna, which
matched the very best action scenes of _Cryptonomicon_. Daniel
Waterhouse meets up with danger at sea, and the intellectual faint and
bluff of the ensuing engagement is wonderful, as is the nonchalance of
the captain of the ship that Daniel is on. However, the scenes are
all too rare and far between, and concentrated disproportionately in
the first half of the novel. I suppose I'll end up reading the remaining two volumes to see if NS
manages to pull a rabbit out of a very battered and pathetic looking
hat...but I've got to say, I'm not particularly looking forward to
another 1,800 pages of lying back and thinking of Enlightenment
England.
Rating:
Summary: Wow, just wow
Review: To start off, let's talk about a few things that 'Quicksilver' is not. First of all, it's not really sci-fi. If someone held to my head and forced me to categorize the thing, I'd say it's either 'speculative-fiction' - a genre name that seems to have fallen by the wayside of late - or that it belongs to whatever category that 'Mason & Dixon' and 'The Sotweed Factor' belong to - overwrought, anachronistic, pomo, pseudo-historical novels, or something similar. What else is this book not? Well-plotted, I suppose. It does meander here and there, and the thread tying everything together seems to be along the lines of 'A whole lot of really interesting and revolutionary stuff is happening all over the place.' Is that a problem? Not for me. A) I like books that meander and B) this is the first of a trilogy - I trust things will begin to gel in the coming two books. So what is 'Quicksilver?' Well, it works on a number of levels. In the first 300 pages or so, it is largely a novel of ideas, of the philosophical, scientific and political explosion occurring in Europe in the latter half of the 17th century. Then the focus shifts to some entirely new characters, and we're smack dab in the middle of some swashbuckling adventure melded with a nuanced tale of international finance. And then the last third of the book tries to, sort of, unite the two approaches. There are times when the whole beast, to my mind, seems to be a story of the development of a vast and primitive internet. For me it's all fascinating, digressions included. Admittedly, I tend to favor big bloated novels, but I think that Stephenson has done something special here - it's a big bloated novel that works, not just as a rarified text of ideas and metaphors and such, but as a damn enjoyable story with characters that I care about. I can't recommend this enough.
Rating:
Summary: Stephenson does it again
Review: Some people complain that Quicksilver is nearly plotless and overly digressive, containing page after page of Neal Stephenson bloviating about whatever happens to catch his fancy. But for others, like me, this is the charm of his book. Stephenson is a prose stylist of epic talent whose excitement about whatever subject he happens to be writing on is infectious and engaging. Here, Stephenson has a number of ideas about modern ways to interpret the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. He frames them around the stories of a member of the Royal Society, a vagabond, and an economically savvy former harem slave. But, likeable and vivid as these characters are, they're present more as our tour guides than as characters in a traditional novel. They are Stephenson's excuses to write, and write he does, on and on and on, in a pleasingly informal and anachronistic voice, about whatever phenomenon of the late 1600's strikes him. Events and characters come and go as required when Stephenson's interest shifts. If you like the way Stephenson writes, then there's no such thing as too much of it, and editing to make the story tighter defeats the real purpose of reading his work. This is the way I feel. If you're looking first and foremost for story, buy the Reader's Digest condensed version -- but you'll be missing out on the best parts. This book is not about the destination, it's about the ride.
Rating:
Summary: Overlong and anachronistic, but in the end enjoyable
Review: What to say about Quicksilver that has not already been said? It is largely as has been reported: overlong, rambling, annoying anachronistic, not terribly well plotted. Yet for all that I rather liked it. The story is told in three long books. The first book is about Daniel Waterhouse and his relationship with Isaac Newton. Waterhouse is one of a prominent Puritan family, who have wielded some influence during Cromwell's Protectorship. But the story really takes place as Waterhouse goes up to Cambridge, just after the Restoration of the Monarchy. Daniel's loyalties are divided -- he is still his father's son, but hardly a true believer in the Puritan religious doctrines. At Cambridge he befriends the very strange and otherworldly Isaac Newton. Daniel himself is presented as a competent natural philosopher but nothing special -- he is there as a witness to genius embodied by Newton (and others such as Hooke, Huygens, and Leibniz). Daniel becomes a minor political player, Secretary of the Royal Society, sort of a tame Puritan in the Royal cabinet. This section is told on two timelines -- one following Daniel from youth to near middle-age, the other a rather pointless account of Daniel beginning a much later (1714) journey back from Massachusetts to London in order to testify in a dispute between Newton and Leibniz about the invention of the calculus. This last thread is, I think, a complete mistake -- it does absolutely nothing for the current book. I am sure it will be picked up in later books, and probably be important, but it's just so many wasted pages here. The second book abandons Daniel entirely to tell the story of two rather lower-class individuals. Jack Shaftoe (the names Shaftoe and Waterhouse will of course be familiar to readers of Cryptonomicon) is a Vagabond -- at first an orphaned boy making a living by jumping on the legs of hanged men to hasten their death and reduce their agony, later a rather lazy mercenary fighting in various wars on the continent. He comes to Vienna, under siege by the Ottomans, and by happenstance manages to rescue a beautiful virgin named Eliza, a native of Qwlghm (a fictional island off the coast of England also from Cryptonomicon). Eliza had been kidnapped from the shores of Qwlghm and sold to the Ottoman Sultan, who fortunately was preserving her to be a gift to one of his generals after the presumed success of the Vienna campaign. Eliza's experience has given her one consuming passion -- the eradication of slavery. Jack and Eliza wander back across Europe to the Netherlands, meeting Leibniz along the way and having a variety of adventures. Finally Eliza is established in Amsterdam, becoming a financial genius and a spy for William of Orange, while Jack makes his way to Paris and eventually to a seat as a galley slave. The third book switches between Eliza and Daniel, and in this book there is a somewhat coherent plot. The book become the story (told from an unusual angle) of England's Glorious Revolution, when William of Orange and his wife Mary take the crown of England from the hated Catholic James II. Eliza's role takes her to Versailles where we see the court of the Sun King, while Daniel plots against James from within his cabinet. The book ends more or less with the successful conclusion of the Glorious Revolution. As I say above -- there is much wrong with this book. It is too long. Though I was never precisely bored I was often not particularly concerned as to when I would next pick up the book. It is full of very jarring anachronisms, mostly in the speech of the characters. The overall plot, to the extent I could detect one, is hardly advanced at all in this book, though I think an argument can be made that there is a significant plot thread (taking us from the Restoration to the Glorious Revolution) that is resolved in this book and works fairly well. The characters are to some extent grotesques but mostly interesting grotesques -- they are, I suppose, the main reason I ended up liking the book on balance.
Rating:
Summary: Another Winner from Stephenson
Review: Really good book if historical fiction is your thing; could even draw you into the genre if you're not already a fan! I do kind of long for the older, high-tech stuff Neal used to write (and new guy John Robert Marlow writes now; see novel called NANO).
Rating:
Summary: The 17th century in Cinerama
Review: Neal Stephenson is not your mother's bestselling author. He hasn't got so much as half an eye on the market. The "Baroque Cycle", begun in Quicksilver, is not sci fi, not technothriller, not like anything he's done before (unless it's the brilliant local temporal color of the Macarthur scenes at the start of Cryptonomicon.) If you open it expecting a repeat, you will, like many of these reviewers, be disappointed. Neal's made his pile; now he writes to please and to challenge himself, and we're welcome along for the ride if we like. I like. Quicksilver falls roughly into thirds. It begins in England with the life of Daniel Waterhouse, a delightfully morose if wavering Puritan, groupie of natural philosophers (since "scientists" hadn't been invented yet)and sometime roommate of Isaac Newton. Among much else, he is to the late 17th century what the nerd is to the late 20th. As he moves between the worlds of the Royal Society and the Stuart court, more camera than participant, his lens gives us a penetrating view of the roots of modern science and commerce, the way they looked to a world that still interpreted them in archaic terms. The second part, patterned on Tom Jones, is as replete with swordplay and ribaldry as the first part is with intellectual rewards. Across all of Europe, it follows the adventures of Jack Shaftoe, a London urchin turned mercenary, and the dazzling Eliza, exile from the fogbound isle of Qwghlm and initiate into the highest arts of the Ottoman harem. The final section begins knitting the two worlds together, Britain and continent, science and derring-do. Historical novels typically engage us by putting characters like our ourselves into the exotic settings of another time. This does something far more interesting and difficult: it portrays the time through minds like theirs, not like ours. People who take seriously issues like alchemy, apocalypse, gunpowder markets and the divine right of kings. I found the change of mental weather wonderfully refreshing. Best of all was the dialogue, almost all of which consists of adroit fencing matches, in which diplomacy, intrigue, and sexual one-upmanship are carried on between the lines. On pp. 265-266, Leibniz pays his first visit to London, and explains to Daniel, as the latter escorts him to meet Hooke and the rest, the pleasure he's taken in studying numerous paintings of London prior to his arrival:
"Each painter can view the city from only one standpoint at a time, so he will move about the place, and paint it from a hilltop on one side, then a tower on the other, then from a grand intersection in the middle -- all on the same canvas. When we look at the canvas, then, we glimpse in a small way how God understands the universe -- for he sees it from every point of view at once. By populating the world with so many different minds, each with its own point of view, God gives us a suggestion of what it means to be omniscient." (The reader familiar with Leibniz's metaphysics will understand how neatly this expresses the place of the deity in his monadology. But you don't have to know all that for the conversation to make sense. The book is jammed with such erudition, much of it just as unobtrusive.) This book, similarly, is more a grand landscape of its century than a story. Rather than a plot, it contains many little scenes drawn from several different points of view. The Leibniz we see in the first part, the brilliant philosophe, inventor of calculus and visionary of the universal binary language to come, seems like a completely different character from the Leibniz of part two, the foppish "doctor" addicted to cheap novels and unworkable mining schemes. But what differs is the characters viewing them: the neurotonic Daniel Waterhouse, his mind deep in the birth of modern science at the Royal Society; and the mesotonic Jack Shaftoe, a man of headstrong action and no book learning whatsoever. I was riveted from beginning to end.
Rating:
Summary: There are Much Worse Books Out There...
Review: As someone who loved Neal Stephenson's previous works, (including his alias Stephen Bury) and would rate them all a 4-5 star rating, I was sad reading this. I normally read one book per week. It took me 3 months to read this. It was just barely interesting enough, (in spots) to keep me from throwing the book down in disgust. In fact that's what's so infuriating; that it is good in about 30-40% of the book. But the rest is so painfully boring, that you almost stop reading. I could not be more angry reading this after coming off of a terrific book like Crypto... I refuse to buy the other books in the trilogy, and I've never done that before. -george gilmore
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