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The System of the World
The third book in Neal Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle shares its name with the third volume in Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica; this is no coincidence, as a large part of this book deals with Newton himself. The vast majority of this volume follows Daniel Waterhouse, aging Fellow of the Royal Society, occasional foil and possibly the only friend of Newton, as he attempts to complete the charge assigned to him by Princess Caroline, his future monarch. Of course, Waterhouse doesn't really believe in the monarchy, but he has an agenda of his own, and can see the wisdom in trying to reconcile Newton and Leibniz.
The System of the World is the most chronologically compact of the trilogy. Quicksilver took place over a sixty-year time period and The Confusion over a decade and a half. Most of the action in this book takes place in the middle of 1714, as the ailing Queen Anne nears death, and the question of who should be the next monarch brings England near to another civil war. On one side of the debate are the Whigs, supporters of the Hanoverian succession, free trade, and industry. On the other side are the Tories, who would undo the effects of the Glorious Revolution and bring back the Catholic James III from exile in France -- supporters of landed aristocracy, unlimited monarchy, and slavery.
The Tories seem to be winning, due in no small part to the machinations of Louis XIV, whose support has allowed "Half-Cocked" Jack Shaftoe to build himself into the most powerful counterfeiter and criminal mastermind in London. Shaftoe has matured, though, and gained a powerful gravitas. Waterhouse also is not the indecisive young man or even the uncertain old man of Quicksilver; he has accepted his old age and his mortality and for once in his life shapes events rather than being borne along by them.
There is real pathos in Waterhouse's character. The choices that he has made will lead England toward steam and industrialization, and in two powerful scenes he has the chance to see the downside of the future he has made. At one point he visits a large-scale industrial operation that has left the earth around it poisoned and wasted, finding nothing to compare the scene to except Hell. At the other he witnesses workers toiling around a machine that might explode at any point, and wonders how many other dangers will be created by inventors simply trying to get things done a little faster. Still, he perseveres; for as near as the Baroque Cycle has one point, it is to explore how the nation-state, modern banking, and modern scientific method arose from the chaos of the 17th century.
In Stephenson's world, this is accomplished by plots, dueling, daring escapes, bribery, and the occasional disruption of orchestral concerts. As always, when writing a thrilling action scene, he is second to none. When this book is moving, it moves really well.
Stephenson's writing style is essentially the same as in the first two novels, although he does seem to be engaging in more deliberate anachronisms here (I counted two Monty Python references, and what I'm fairly certain is a scripting language joke). This makes his constant use of Inappropriate Capitalization and Barock Spelling somewhat more tedious to me, but I phant'sy any reader that has gotten this far will probably be able to overlook it. He still has the ability to make the reader smile once per page, and his meticulous attention to detail shows. It's clear that Stephenson is fascinated by the period, and indicative of a good writer that he actually got me to care about it as well -- his books motivated me to read some of his references, and others besides. There are also some classic hilarious scenes, chief among them a duel fought with naval artillery.
The typical flaws of a Stephenson novel are also present, unfortunately. A rather large number of characters are built up for dozens of pages and are then abruptly killed, never to be mentioned again -- and a fair number of established characters meet the same fate. This volume also contains the worst sex scene Stephenson has ever written, which is saying something. And, as is typical of Stephenson, the book goes until the end, and then just stops, after another Deus Ex Aurum ending. This time he's included a few short codas as a postscript, but be warned now: there are many unanswered questions left at the end.
In fact, the ending of the book made me somewhat angry. Fully explaining why would spoil everything, so I will tread lightly. Let me instead go back to Isaac Newton. Newton is a tragic figure because he was a bridge between two eras; he possessed one of the finest rational minds the world has ever known, and yet he spent the majority of his long life with alchemical and mystical researches. Stephenson is too lenient on Newton with regards to his paranoia and murderous rage, but curiously lessens him by suggesting that Newton simply failed to accomplish some of the things he set out to do.
I have been an avid reader of each Neal Stephenson book, and I will probably read the next book he writes. Still, I hope that his editor cracks down on him in his next endeavor, and that he doesn't allow his fondness for some characters to override the point he's trying to make.
You can purchase The System of the World from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
This book fails to shore up the otherwise good trilogy, and yet this book is rated higher than the trilogy as a whole? Is this that new math?
It's out this month? I thought it was November! I need to pay attention better...
That said, according to this review it looks like it will be a disappointment. Ouch. That disappoints me...I'll read it anyway though.
Moo.
Godammit! Why couldn't Amazon screw up my order instead.
>
> I have been an avid reader of each Neal Stephenson book, and I will probably read the next book he writes. Still, I hope that his editor cracks down on him in his next endeavor, and that he doesn't allow his fondness for some characters to override the point he's trying to make.
Ah, don't worry. Half the fun of a Neal Stephenson novel is knowing that all the characters he abruptly kills off get to come back to life in the next series.
Due to a shipping error at Amazon.com, I received my copy of this book early.
So, he means he's got first post!
Head for the hills! It's the apocalypse!
Stephenson is a great writer, but this so-so review does not surprise me.
I liked Zodiac, I found Snow Crash interesting and funny, Interface was workmanlike but engaging, and The Diamond Age is one of the books I have re-read most often.
But I just didn't "get" Cryptonomicon. Yes, lots of running around, intrigue and so on. But in the end I didn;t find it satisfying. I'm afraid that, for the Baroque trilogy, I haven't even made it past the cover blurb.
I'm sure many others will disagree (and I apologize to Mr Stephenson for any hurt feelings should he happen across this post), but for me at least I'm waiting for a return to form.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Isn't it great when the moderators have so obviously not read the article?
The first book by him that I read was Snow Crash. Pretty good book with lots of cool ideas. I really liked the idea of burbclaves but I thought that the rollerskates and skateboards were kind of stupid.
Then I checked out The Diamond Age. I loved it. The idea of the primer was really cool as was the world that he described. I must have read that book a dozen times at least and it is easily one of my top twenty favorite SF novels.
In the Beginning was the Command Line was a cool little book.
Unfortunately everything else that I have read by him has sucked. The guy just went off in directions that I have no interest in. He also really really needs an editor. His latest books could be, no should be, trimmed down to at least half their current size.
Neal Stephenson really needs to learn how to shut up. I put about 2 months into reading Quicksilver, and I absolutely loved the characters, the individual scenes and even some of the subplots. But the main plot of the book was such a pointless, endless and rambling mess that I never had the desire to stay up until 4AM reading it. The historical detail was wonderful, and this was a great book to geek out on, but I felt like I was reading an ancient, endless tome and there's only so much of that one can take. This is one series where it might be wise to invest in the abridged audiobook, I did that with Snow Crash and it was fantastic. And what's the deal with kidney stones? I mean, I know they were a frequent cause of death at the time but do we have to hear about them CONSTANTLY!
I admit that I haven't been following what's going on with Stephenson's writing plans, but it just seems to me that there were so many loose ends at the end of Cryptonomicon, all of them fertile ground for more work...
I don't even feel like I scratched the surface with this list.
Cheers,
Richard
Forgive me for injecting that memorable line from
John Carpenters "Prince of Darkness" but it does somehow feel appropriate. Why is this post (which
didn't make sense after two whole paragraphes of text
here at all. Sorry, mod me down as a troll, but it
doesn't feel right (there should be a mod mechanism
like "lacks focus" I think).
Again sorry. If my brains were less fried I'd be more charitable. Bloody SP2 is causing really odd headaches on a friends machine.
If I've suddenly stumbled into a Lit Fi forum please let me know... Shit , it's 1.30a.m. and I'm
considering how I work some more or sleep...
People who have read Stephenson's books know that he's not really good at endings. Most of his stories have a lousy ending, it feels like he just got bored or tired and decided to wrap things up real fast and just leave it at that.
I think the only Stephenson ending I like is from Jipi and the Paranoid Chip.
However, he can come up with great stories which I enjoy very much, despite the ending (which is not much of a letdown now, because the moment I start reading a Stephenson book I expect the ending to suck but it doesn't bother me).
Go hug some trees.
Stephenson has an editor? If so he needs to actually get off his ass and some work. Good story, but about 2000 pages too long.
I ordered the CD "Planet Punk" by die Aerzte on December 21st, and received it exactly 6 months later, June 21st. I have since stopped buying stuff from them. I don't care if it costs a few bucks more at bn.com, I want my stuff on time!
I'm probably at the karma cap. Mod up a funny troll instead, it lightens the mood
i for one welcome our new philosophikal overloads.
Would someone mind telling me what Deus Ex Aurum means? Google gave me nothing. Is it similar to Deus Ex Machina?
no comment
What's to become of the Epiphyte corporation and its data crypt plan?
:-)
:-)
They filed for bankruptcy while the founders ran away to spend idle lifetimes sipping margueritas in the Bahamas.
Sorry, couldn't resist, but it's obvious that Cryptonomicon was written during the dot-com bubble. We all know what happened to that bubble, therefore all follow-ups must depict a technology-pessimistic view.
Well, unless said follow-ups are set in a distant future.
Anyone else find "The Buy It Here" Barnes & Noble link ironic, given that it was Amazon that provided the original copy ...
I'm desperately resisting the temptation to place my own AWS id in here...
Lucky for us Amazon's shipping error resulted in the book being sent to someone actually capable of writing a cogent and coherent review.
I liked the first book more than the second...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
His endings remind me of ol' school Kung-Fu movies. Usually after the climatic battle, no sooner than the final blow is struck and the head baddie is dead
they roll credits.
Stephenson's endings are like that, after the story is resolved they just end with no post to wrap things up with the characters.
>
...a Neil Stephenson book that ends unsatisfyingly?
After reading Cryptonomicon I thought that was the whole point of the man. To make cool works of fiction and then have them end in arbitrary and sucky ways. The ol' "Set-em up and fail to knock-em down" technique.
-Pinkoir
>Still, he perseveres; for as near as the Baroque Cycle has one point, it is to explore how the nation-state, modern banking, and modern scientific method arose from the chaos of the 17th century.
Indeed, the trilogy is the story of how modern money and banking arose. The protagonist is capital, and how it arose from its former life as coveted metals, like silver and gold. Empiricism is seen as being dragged along by the pragmatic bankers (and hustlers like Shaftoe and the Duchess of Several Places.)Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Dovetailing nicely with this review, an antique katana of "Damascus steel" has recently gone up for auction on eBay. Readers of the Baroque Trilogy will be familiar with watered steel after wading through dozens of pages of Stephenson's discourse on its nature and origin. If you'd like to see what watered steel looks like for yourself, check it out!
"Newton is a tragic figure because he was a bridge between two eras; he possessed one of the finest rational minds the world has ever known, and yet he spent the majority of his long life with alchemical and mystical researches."
;) and from his history. And how are the legitimate questions of alchemy and mysticism to be answered, except by experimenting with their subjects, however skeptically?
There's no contradiction in a rational mind researching alchemy and mysticism. Especially in the 1600-1700s, when science was built on a the techniques and pursuits of those prior investigative models. Four centuries from now, quantum mechanics will be indistinguishable from alchemy in "rationality", or whatever mental mode practiced by generators of new information about systems of events. It will either seem too deterministic, or clumsy guesswork, depending on future evolution of science. Newton applied his fine instruments to fuzzy material, both from his lab (and orchard
--
make install -not war
There is much to be said about changes in how the world worked between the 16 and 17th centuries. Stephenson tries to capture many aspects and solidify in a narrative form. The changes in finance are particularly interesting (see also Cryptonomicon...) so they pretty much occupy the whole second book.
It got me really interested in my economics classes...
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Those guys blow. At least Stephenson has written some good stuff.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
The problem isn't that his books are too long, as a quote from the review illustrates.
And, as is typical of Stephenson, the book goes until the end, and then just stops, after another Deus Ex Aurum ending.
The problem is that Stephenson doesn't seem to know where to end a story, short or long. I sometimes think he ends them too soon, rather than too later, and he may actually be better off leaving the real climax and denoument for the reader to fill in if he can't drag one up from his digital well.
Of course I wish I could write an incomplete story one tenth as well as he does, and I will continue to read them complete or not, but lord I'd love to see what he could do if he put his mind to finishing as well as he began.
Did anyone discover an encrypted message in any of the Baroque Cycle books? I noticed that they were relatively free of typos, but a friend of mine (who gets involved in too little sleep and too much thinking as a result) began to see a pattern in the typos in Cryptonomicon.
And while I remembered a lot of typos in that book, I wondered what would happen if I made note of them. I mentioned this to my friend, and he naturally had already written them all down. Between first and next e-mails on the subject, he'd done a bit of experimenting.
"I find deliberate errors on pages 43, 86, 129, 155, 283, 319, 341, 342, 357, 385, 430, 437, 462, 477, 479, 481, 483, 526, 534, 535, 539, 574, 585, 611, 620, 887, and 918. Hope I didn't miss one there.
"take the delta between each page number and run it through a mod 26 function - like solitaire, from the book? - there's first a block of 16 seemingly garbage letters (two bytes?) beginning with a Q, followed by three Bs in a row (spacing characters?) and another Q, then the words HADIK ZIMTER. whattf?!"
Another friend of mine, Douglas Barnes, read the first draft of Cryptonomicon, which had a lot more text than the final printed copy. The eerie thing is, and this is what makes me think it worth mentioning to the slashdot crowd, early drafts had none of the typos that the first-printing hardback ended up with. Doug swears that the text was actually very clean, and that he wondered what was up when he saw the first edition, as though the typos had been inserted on purpose.
Enoch Root care to weigh in on the matter? Any budding young crytologists think they can answer Mr. Stephenson's message? Who or what is HADIK ZIMTER?
energylad
Waterhouse did *not* go to work in the new NSA under Comstock. He got Rudy to endow a mathematics chair at an Eastern Washington college for him; though how Rudy accomplished this (or indeed whether or not Rudy survived his submarine incident) is a mystery.
According to Root, Comstock's NSA spends the next several decades attempting to solve Waterhouse's crypto joke.
...when it comes to Stephenson. Many people love him and don't even *see* those flaws as flaws, and many think he's just an overblown researcher with diarrhea of the pen. Read him for yourself, but don't expect a Hollywood ending.
I, for one, love his endings, beginnings, and middles. As the about reviewer said, he makes me grin like a maniac on a very regular basis. But hey, to each their own -- I hear Pam Anderson book is positively scintillating. Or you could pick up a Dan Brown and relive the stress of hundreds of events and encounters packed into less than a week. Neal's not for everyone, but he *is* an excellent author.
The man's a genius, and he has produced a series of masterpieces. His endings are just right, unless you're a short-attention-span geek who thinks Hollywood makes good films. Go away, all of you.
"but like all of Stephenson's books, finishes ugly."
Hmmm
As for The Baroque Cycle
The final sentence of Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest I have read in any genre.
"The sunlight on her back, the breeze against her wings, the water cool under her feet, her eggs warming and maturing in the flesh of the cabra: Life, so long waited for, and not until today could she be sure that she would be, not the last of her tribe, but the first."
I will lose all respect for you, and punch you
Stephenson is wordy, not because he is trying to fill a book, but because he is exploring ideas. One does not follow from the other. For example, Orwell explored ideas widely, but you will notice a clipped, disciplined style to his work. Compare 1984 to Quicksilver. See? OP's point is not jaded, he is entirely right. ...which you admit yourself anyway in the end: He loses focus because of that intensity he brings to his research (of which writing seems to merely be a by-product). And herein lies the problem. Stephenson is showing off his research. He no longer cares for the reader's experience it seems. His plots are plodding and by the numbers now; I suggest you need to read more historical fiction to see what a cliche his recent books have been. Unfortunately it appears his ego has swollen to unprecedented size. I hope in future he will receive harsh editing.
I agree. It's even going to be an educational review for me, because I don't know what "Aurum" means. I've heard a lot of Deus Ex phrases, but this is a first.
So, "deus ex aurum" is...? Anyone?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I'm fairly certain that Herbert died before finishing the last book. The plot was outlined in relative depth, and much of the prose was written, but not all of it.
His nephew finished it. If you're really careful, I hear you can spot the point where the writing changes. I've not tried finding it myself.
This is the same nephew that went on to write the prequels. They suck, of course, but that's not so much the nephew's fault as it is Kevin Anderson's, who has the God-given ability to come into any running series and kill it off.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
I've never been a great fan and your review saves my money.
That was clearly one of the best chapters ever. I used to have a link to the first chapter, in english and (I believe) Polish, but can't find it now.
Just a few disconnected thoughts in response to the discussion of _System of the World_:
One of the great strengths of Stephenson's previous books, even the future-set ones like Diamond Age, was the incredible sureness of his touch with *contemporary* culture. He has a great facility for describing and using stuff like skater-culture, computer-geek culture, gamer culture, in ways which provide clever contrasts and make people laugh as they recognize and re-vision those things. The cultural background he shares with his readers makes a difference to the experience of reading the books. This shared background is missing in the Baroque books, thus depriving Stephenson of one of the major "fun" aspects of his authorial voice. We just don't recognize the preoccupations of Royal Society members (like kidney stones...) in the same way that we recognize the details/preoccupations of characters like Randy Waterhouse (Capn Crunch). Consider the difference between, say, the detailed description of producing phosphorus (in Confusion) versus the detailed description of Capn Crunch consumption, or any number of other funny detailed descriptions of familiar processes, in the other books. The earlier ones get us to see familiar things in new and funny ways. But the ones in Baroque Cycle don't; we have no previous understanding of phosphorus production to be made funny by his description of it. So it falls flat.
Instead of being able to rely on shared cultural referents as he does in Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon, Stephenson has to provide a ton of historical explanation in this trilogy, and it's not as graceful as it could be. A lot of the time, he seems to be showing off his research-- there's no POINT to the pages of detailed description of the particular buildings burnt in the London Fire, except for Stephenson to show readers "Look! I did a lot of research!!!" Since this is his first effort at historical narrative, and concerns a setting that he himself had to *learn* about, his grasp on the setting is uneven and it seems like he never knows how much to assume about the reader's knowledge. There are *lots* of places where he embarks on some explanation of cultural differences between "us" and the characters' milieu, or places where he wants to put in some interesting bit of historical trivia or etymology, but it's done clumsily, or even put into dialogue: Jack Shaftoe suddenly spouting something about the etymology of some word. It seems to me that these are "bits" Stephenson thinks are cool, and maybe they are, but they're not relevant to the story he's telling and *definitely* jarring when presented as dialogue by characters. There's no reason that the *character* would start explaining whatever it is Stephenson wants to say, but he can't bear to leave out whatever the clever insight is, no matter how little it makes sense as part of the *story*.
To sum up, part of the problem with this trilogy is that Stephenson is inexperienced in this *sort* of novel, and hasn't yet mastered the technique of presenting a story to readers in a *setting* he can't assume readers are familiar with. It's the lack of a shared set of familiar cultural codes to serve as background, and its replacement by tons and tons of exposition, that makes the style so uneven. Interestingly to me, he thanks the late Dorothy Dunnett in his introduction-- she wrote the best historical novels ever, and the thing at which she was *particularly* graceful was the very thing Stephenson struggles with: the merging of a plausible story with the process of informing readers about the setting, seamlessly.
Other throwaway thoughts:
I like Stephenson's endings. They are generally abrupt and dramatic, but appropriately so, and they don't leave us hanging about the plot. In Diamond Age, for instance, the story is actually *over* when Nell rescues (?) Miranda. I understand people are perhaps more used to endings where there is a "wind down" chapter after the narrative climax-- where, for instance, you would get Nell and Mir