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'Quicksilver' Website and Release Date
EvilBastard writes "Neil Stephenson's next book in the Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver, now has a publishing date of the 23rd of September, 2003. This book appears to follow the Shaftoe, Waterhouse and Root family line back to the early 18th Century. You can find a short extract online."
I heard Stephenson give a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on Thursday of last week, where he discussed this novel. It sounded very interesting, albeit a departure from his normal science fiction type novels. He discussed what he considered to be the "soap opera" of the Newton-Leibniz controversy regarding the invention of calculus, which spread to other areas. Eventually this led up to a description of Leibniz's ideas metaphysics, which he regards as highly relevant in regards to computer science, cellular automata, and quantum physics. His descriptions of these events were slightly convoluted but that was part of their charm, and while I expected some type of discussion of technology or Snow Crash / Cryptonomicon type topics, I was pleasantly surprised to hear his 18th century tangent. He's a very talented and fascinating man.
On a side note, he mentioned that he only speaks about once every five years and that he's very anti-social. He said his books are not a social process and come entirely from him, as opposed to including feedback from others. Still, I'm glad to have this man off in his little corner of the world thinking and researching about fascinating topics, broadcasting his findings to the rest of us.
Spoiler space.
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It might be possible that we are talking about Enoch Root, not only a relative with the same name, but the same person who appears on Cryptonomicon. It's been hinted a few times in several places, Cryptonomicon included. Stephenson himself said that there's a "SciFi" turn in Cryptonomicon which will become more evident in Quicksilver.
Presumably, as the other two main characters from the blurb on the site have the surnames Waterhouse and Shaftoe, we're talking some sort of 18th Century prequel to Cryptonomicon somehow.
Presumably the Waterhouse and Shaftoe characters are ancestors of the characters in Cryptonomicon. Whether "Enoch" is an ancestor to Root in Crypto, or is (ahem) something entirely different remains to be seen.
.siggy
Just raise the taxes on crack.
As this page reminds, Enoch died in cryptonomicon and came back later on.
I knew that wasn't a plot hole.
Interesting indeed.
(2,3-Benzopyrrole)