Kris’ Book Reviews

This is the first book of the Baroque Cycle, a new series by Neal Stephenson, unlike his previous works, it is not a cyberpunk novel but historical and quite a good one.First volume of this series takes place mostly in two time lines, the first is places in early 18th century Massachusetts and the second one is Daniel Waterhouse’s flashbacks into the second half of 17th century’s England. In the former part, Daniel is on his way from America to England, and in the latter author presents Daniels life beginning with studies on university and meeting Newton.

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Daniels father, a successful merchant and smuggler, is a leader of Puritan movement in England, as a result Daniel is sometimes stigmatized by mostly anglican or catholic surrounding. Nevertheless he continues his studies on Cambridge, and helping in Newton’s own research. During the course of years, more knows characters appear in Waterhouse life, like Robert Hook, which was the Curator of Experiments in Royal Society. We can see how Hook conducts his experiments, while Daniel and others help him in his efforts.

It is interesting to see how natural philosophs lived and how their inventions were born, even if it is mostly based on Stephensons assumptions and sources which he mentions at the beginning of this book. There are some quite drastic scenes presented, when Hook and his colleagues perform operation on living dog, they want to see how do the living creatures breath.

Apart from the early scientists (or natural philosophs, as they were called at that time), there is a really vivid portrait of 18th century London and people that lived in it. The great cataclysms that struck London (The Great Fire and the Great Plague) are shortly presented from the point of view of richer part of London’s inhabitants.

Moreover there are numerous philosophical disputes that Daniel conducts, either in his mind or with other natural philosophs e.g. discussion with Leibniz, when they try to define life, and if a machine can think.

Now, to the summary, fist book of the Baroque Cycle gives a very good impression. It is written in a style that forces the reader to read more and more. I look forward to read the next two books from this series (or trilogy) that Neal Stephensons has already published.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Buy (hardcover) Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

Buy (paperback) Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 8:53 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Fantasy, Neal Stephenson . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.