In the second book, Stephenson introduces Jack Shaftoe and Eliza. "Half-Cocked" Jack (also know as the "King of the Vagabonds") recovers the English Eliza from a Turkish harem. Fleeing the siege of Vienna, the two journey across Europe driven by Eliza's lust for fame, fortune, and nobility. Gradually, their circle intertwines with that of Daniel in the third book of the novel.

The book courses with Stephenson's scholarship but is rarely bogged down in its historical detail. Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory. Though replete with science, the novel is as much about the complex struggles for political ascendancy and the workings of financial markets. Further, the novel's literary ambitions match its physical size. Stephenson narrates through epistolary chapters, fragments of plays and poems, journal entries, maps, drawings, genealogic tables, and copious contemporary epigrams. But, caught in this richness, the prose is occasionally neglected and wants editing. Further, anticipating a cycle, the book does not provide a satisfying conclusion to its 900 pages. These are minor quibbles, though. Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics. --Patrick O'Kelley

Product Description

Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe -- London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds -- risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox.

And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance.

A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time.

And it's just the beginning ...

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.


A long, entertaining journey... see if it's for you!   January 7, 2004
 280 out of 295 found this review helpful

I had a fantastic time reading Stephenson's latest book. Yes, I found it an extremely long read, but every page contained a wonderful nugget which made the journey worth the effort.

Here are two examples of Stephenson's unique ability to whip up a powerful brew of humor, science, and history:

"Penn did not take his gaze away from the window, but squinted as if trying to hold back a mighty volume of flatulence, and shifted his focal point to a thousand miles in the distance. But this was coastal Holland and there was nothing out that window save the Curvature of the World"

and...

"... I am seated near a window that looks out over a canal, and two gondoliers, who nearly collided a minute ago, are screaming murderous threats at each other... The Venetians have even given it a name: 'Canal Rage'."

Which isn't to say that the book doesn't have its share of flaws - I'll talk about the two major ones here. First, if you've read Stephenson before, you are undoubtedly aware of his tendency to use 1000 words to do where 100 would have worked just fine. So, sometimes you begin to think "where was the editor?", but most of the time he is able to pull all the threads (long as they are) together into a cohesive, compelling whole. But overall, the extreme length ends up being a plus.

The other major flaw stems from Stephenson's seemingly bottomless reservoir of creativity: this book contains not one, not two, but three lead characters. But, you say, you can't have more than one lead character, no? Exactly! All three main characters are compelling in their own way, and you want to keep watching each one grow and change. As was the case with Cryptonomicon, Stephenson could easily have written an entire book just about the character Shaftoe.

The Big Question: should you invest the time to read this book (don't worry about the dollar cost - it's inconsequential relative the number of hours you'll invest reading it)? If your answer to any of the following questions is "yes", give it a try:

1) You've read a work by Umberto Ecco and liked it
2) You enjoyed physics class in high school or college
3) You can code
4) You dig binary
5) You always wondered who Newton, Hooke, and Leibniz really were
6) You see tangents as but the arcs of greater circles

Go ahead, take the plunge into QuickSilver!


A Good Emulation of a Bad Style   November 2, 2003
 131 out of 213 found this review helpful

Stephenson has written a wonderful emulation of the 17th Century "Rogue's Novel", along the lines of Simplicissimus or other early examples of the novels which spawned the later Romanesque. Unfortunately, these novels are plotless, devoid of conflict, and the characters in them have the unfortunate tendency to be ill-developed and passive, simple observers to the events around them rather than active participants in them. As such, Stephenson has written a wonderful Rogue's Novel - unfortunately, these novels died 300 years ago for good reason.

They suck.

His characters, from the well-educated to the illiterate, the aged male to the child female, the king to the rat-catcher, all speak with the same voice. Many of Stephenson's metaphors are so cludgy they hearken back to The Diamond Age. The characters in the book drift through the events he details without really having an effect upon them - despite the fact that he tries to make them into key players. There is no conflict. The characters drift through such an amazing set of events with a kind of passivity that would make Tom Pynchon blush and Albert Camus worship.

I am hopeful the next books in the series will actually have something to bite into, for if this book was no simply "setting the stage", as it were, then Stephenson has taken a mighty plunge since Crypto.


delightful complex historical tale   September 27, 2003
 64 out of 107 found this review helpful

Princess Caroline commands Enoch Root to go to Boston to persuade computational systems developer Daniel Waterhouse to come to Europe. The royal wants Daniel to mediate a geometrically growing mathematical squabble. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz claim the invention of calculus. The two geniuses are locked in a feud that could destroy the enlightened foundations of empirical data as the basis to support scientific claims. Daniel, a friend of both scientists, sails to Europe as he muses over the scientific revolution that took root in the previous century.

Urchin Jack Shaftoe treks across Europe doing odd jobs like pretending to be a Musketeer until he meets Eliza in Austria. She is an English woman who escaped a Turkish harem that was her home as a teen. She wants vengeance on the merchant that sold her into slavery and feels Jack can help her achieve her objective. Ultimately she works her way up from the former muddy street rascal to English and French royalty.

QUICKSILVER is a delightful complex telling of the birth and impact of the scientific revolution. The story line recreates some of the greats like Newton, Leibniz, and Hooke as they interact with key fictional figures. The novel contains three "books" that focus on the Age of Reason so that the audience feels they are traveling with Daniel, Jack, and Eliza. Neal Stephenson makes the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century seem vividly alive at a critical junction in when reason and technology changed the world as few eras did before or since.

Harriet Klausner


A masterpiece of historical fiction   November 11, 2003
 33 out of 37 found this review helpful

Stephenson succeeds in crafting a description of one of European history's watershed eras that encompases vast geograhies and philosphies in an equally vast number of pages. For that, unlike many other reviewers, I do not fault him. We readers are guided on a tour of the intellectual landscape in England from the time of the English Civil War through to the Glorious Revolution. Stephenson entangles us in the religious/political mayhem that ran rampant during that time. From Versailles, to Venice to the hodge-podge of flyspeck Germanic sub-principalities, we gain a feeling for the incestuous interconnectedness of the royal and noble families that were accustomed to being the only Powers That Mattered at the time. Juxtaposed against them, we are introduced to the coterie of geniuses who flourished at the time and whose scientific and philosophical endeavors reshaped the way people came to view the world.

Stephenson's voluminous description of the time, and his creation of a set of fictitious peers and contemporaries of its great thinkers allows him to explore and play with the ideas that were radically new in European culture at the time, which we contemporary readers have inherited as truths we take for granted. He does not go to pains to demonstrate how radically new some of the political theories he explores were in their historical context, and unsophisticated modern readers might have the urge to think "Well, duh... everybody knows and thinks that way... its normal." This book takes us through the struggles that unseated kings and smashed the concept of divine right, as well as through the empiricist revolution that retired the antiquated aristotelian modes of understanding the world and their alchemical/mystical offspring.

This is not an adventure story, though there are a few adventureous tales woven into it. This is a novel of ideas, and as such, it does a spectacular job, just like each of Stephenson's earlier books.