Gopher Baroque

[R. A. Hettinga]

<http://www.villagevoice.com/print/issues/0341/giuffo.php>


The Village Voice: Books:

At 1,800-plus pages, Neal Stephenson's just getting started

Gopher Baroque
by John Giuffo
October 6th, 2003 5:15 PM


Quicksilver messenger: Stephenson
(photo: Brian Smale)



Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle
By Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 944 pp., $27.95
Buy this book


What do viruses that pass from online hosts to silicon carriers, books that
teach the most powerful aspects of culture and train readers to use that
knowledge to their advantage, data havens, WW II-era crypto-battles, and
powdered-wig-wearing, connivin courtiers (who traffic in rumor and status)
have in common? They all rest at the centers of Neal Stephenson's plots,
and they all deal with the ways in which information transmission is at the
nexus of technological and social change.

In Stephenson's latest, it's the 17th century. Religion is on the run, and
"Natural Philosophy" is spreading like an intrusive fungus all across
Europe. The sovereignty of kings is threatened. And everywhere, and
seemingly nowhere, is the mysterious Enoch the Red, the elusive key to
Stephenson's "Baroque Cycle" and its opener, Quicksilver .

There will be geek-gasms aplenty in every IT cube  as Stephenson's
long-awaited follow-up to Cryptonomicon picks up where his similarly sized
1999 epic left off, tackling the role that code making and breaking plays
in world affairs and social advancement. It focuses less on cryptography
and more on the development of the scientific method, and the ways in which
the main characters -- Daniel Waterhouse, Eliza de la Zeur, and Jack
Shaftoe -- influence the events surrounding the maturation of modern science.
Concepts that we take for granted -- gravity, calculus -- were, during the
Baroque period explored in the book, radical ideas that could lead to
disrepute (a grievous wound to anyone living in the rigid social strata of
post-Cromwellian England) or any number of grotesque punishments.

This is a novel of Ideas, and while there's more than enough swordplay to
buckle the most jaded of swashes, there's a sense that Quicksilver only
swabs the plot deck for Stephenson's planned sequels ("The Confusion" ,
April 2004, and "The System of the World", October 2004). One of the book's
major points lies in the Baroque series' title. Stephenson spends many
pages detailing the smells, fluids, architecture, and mores of an
incredibly fecund period of discovery. This is meandering with a fierce
purpose; elaborate scene-setting on a grand stage, conjuring a time and
place so completely that when the cycle is complete, the full
gravity -- literally -- of the changes being wrought will be felt.

Guiding us through this dead wonderland is a cast of characters that
begins with the ancestors of Stephenson's Cryptonomicon characters --
the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes -- and continues through a list of
royalty and nobility that would cow Shakespeare.

They also serve as foils for Stephenson's irrepressible sense of humor
-- he wants us to have as much fun reading as he obviously did
writing. An early passage painstakingly describes the oppressive
obsolescence of one character's home, using an unreliable timepiece as
a centerpiece:

"The eight-foot-high grandfather clock in the adjoining hall contributed a
sort of immediate presence with the heaving to and fro of its
cannonball-sized pendulum, which made the entire house lean from one side
to the other like a drunk . . . the wild clamorous bonging that exploded
from it at intervals that seemed suspiciously random, and that caused
flocks of migrating waterfowl, thousands of feet overhead, to collide with
each other in panic and veer into new courses."

The evolution of market systems and the shifting nature of currency
are also explored to an exhaustive extent, and the only thing more
impressive than Stephenson's command of these seemingly disparate but
interconnected subjects is the knowledge that he's only warming
up. This is ground he's covered before -- in different eras, toward
different ends -- but it all attests to one novelist's obsession with
the power of information, the dangers of closed systems, and the
liberating, revolutionary power that can result from keeping them
open.

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'

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