The Baroque Cycle

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Neal Stephenson (center) makes use of historical figures as characters in The Baroque Cycle, such as (counterclockwise from upper left) Isaac Newton, Leibniz, Sophia of Hanover and William of Orange.

The Baroque Cycle is a series of novels by American writer

cryptology and numismatics
feature heavily in the series, as they do in some of Stephenson's other works.

Books

The Baroque Cycle consists of several novels "lumped together into three volumes because it is more convenient from a publishing standpoint"; Stephenson felt calling the works a trilogy would be "bogus".[2]

Appearing in print in 2003 and 2004, the cycle contains eight books originally published in three volumes:

  • Quicksilver, Vol. I of the Baroque Cycle – Arthur C. Clarke Award winner, Locus Award nominee, 2004[3]
    • Book 1 – Quicksilver
    • Book 2 – King of the Vagabonds
    • Book 3 – Odalisque
  • The Confusion, Vol. II of the Baroque Cycle – Locus Award winner
    • Book 4 – Bonanza
    • Book 5 – The Juncto
  • The System of the World, Vol. III of the Baroque Cycle – Locus Award winner, Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, 2005[4]
    • Book 6 – Solomon's Gold
    • Book 7 – Currency
    • Book 8 – The System of the World

Setting

The books travel throughout

Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in England (1660) and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The Confusion follows Quicksilver without temporal interruption, but ranges geographically from Europe and the Mediterranean through India to the Philippines, Japan and Mexico. The System of the World takes place principally in London
in 1714, about ten years after the events of The Confusion.

Themes

A central theme in the series is Europe's transformation away from feudal rule and control toward the rational, scientific, and more merit-based systems of government, finance, and social development that define what is now considered "western" and "modern".

Characters include Sir

Louis XIV of France, Oliver Cromwell, Peter the Great, John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough
and many other people of note of that time. The fictional characters of Eliza, Jack and Daniel collectively cause real historic effects.

The books feature considerable sections concerning alchemy. The principal alchemist of the tale is the mysterious Enoch Root, who, along with the descendants of several characters in this series, is also featured in the Stephenson novels Cryptonomicon and Fall.

Inspiration

Stephenson was inspired to write The Baroque Cycle when, while working on Cryptonomicon, he encountered a statement by George Dyson in Darwin among the Machines that suggests Leibniz was "arguably the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines".[5] He also had heard considerable discussion of the Leibniz–Newton calculus controversy and Newton's work at the treasury during the last 30 years of his life,[5] and in particular the case against Leibniz as summed up in the Commercium Epistolicum of 1712 was a huge inspiration which went on to inform the project. He found "this information striking when [he] was already working on a book about money and a book about computers".[5] Further research into the period excited Stephenson and he embarked on writing the historical piece that became The Baroque Cycle.[5]

Characters

Main characters

  • Daniel Waterhouse, an English natural philosopher and Dissenter
  • Jack Shaftoe, an illiterate adventurer of great resourcefulness and charisma
  • Eliza, a girl abducted into slavery, and later freed, who becomes a spy and a
    financier
  • Enoch Root, a mysterious and ageless man who also appears in Cryptonomicon, set in World War II and the 1990s. He also appears in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell.
  • Bob Shaftoe, a soldier in the service of
    John Churchill
    , and brother of Jack Shaftoe

Minor characters

Historical figures who appear as characters

Critical response

Robert Wiersem of

The Toronto Star called The Baroque Cycle a "sublime, immersive, brain-throttlingly complex marvel of a novel that will keep scholars and critics occupied for the next 100 years".[6]

References

  1. ^ Godwin, Mike; Neal Stephenson (February 2005). "Neal Stephenson's Past, Present, and Future". Reason. Retrieved 2020-09-15. Labels such as science fiction are most useful when employed for marketing purposes, i.e., to help readers find books that they are likely to enjoy reading. With that in mind, I'd say that people who know and love science fiction will recognize these books as coming out of that tradition. So the science fiction label is useful for them as a marketing term. However, non-S.F. readers are also reading and enjoying these books, and I seem to have a new crop of readers who aren't even aware that I am known as an S.F. writer. So it would be an error to be too strict or literal-minded about application of the science fiction label.
  2. ^ Stephenson comment on MetaWeb
  3. ^ "2004 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  4. ^ "2005 Award Winners & Nominees". Worlds Without End. Retrieved 2009-07-21.
  5. ^ a b c d Stephenson, Neal. "How the Baroque Cycle Began" in P.S. of Quicksilver Perennial ed. 2004.
  6. The Toronto Star
    . 2004-10-03. Retrieved 2010-04-01.

External links


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