Spring Break
Book Review: Birth of a System: The Baroque Cycle, by Neal Stephenson
Marco Carbone
Issue date: 12/9/04 Section: Etc.
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Clausewitz vs. Robot
Science fiction writers have long been obsessed with history. This usually manifests itself in some sort of time-travel, such as in TV's Quantum Leap or the film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, in which the heroes finds themselves in medias res during various historical events. But there's more to this obsession than just finding a setting for a time-travel story-there seems to be an underlying characteristic found in both sci-fi/fantasy geeks and historical/political, shall we say, "enthusiasts." Indeed, the very same people (including, perhaps, yourself) you knew in high school who played Dungeons & Dragons and taped every episode of The Next Generation, likely also spent time simulating World War II with Milton Bradley's Axis & Allies or reenacting complex international negotiations with Avalon Hill's fun-for-all-policy-wonks-and-game-theorists Diplomacy.
Neal Stephenson is the publishing world's paragon of such a history/science geek; it wouldn't be surprising to find him pulling out a Linux-enabled portable device in the middle of a jousting session at the local Renaissance fair. His novels have increasingly moved from science fiction to the similar, yet more daunting, genre of historical science fiction. There were hints of this change in the cypherpunk-meets-ancient-Sumeria Snow Crash, and later in The Diamond Age, a nanotechnological tale set in an oddly Victorian future.
The transition truly became evident in the magnificent Cryptonomicon, half of which dealt with code-breaking in World War II, the other half with the adventures of a modern day technologist, seemingly ripped from the pages of Wired magazine. Now, with The Baroque Cycle, a three novel series concluding with the recently published The System of the World, Stephensonian historical sci-fi has come into its own.
Fluxions vs. Derivatives
In over 2500 pages, The Baroque Cycle deals with, among other things, the emergence of modern scientific societies, industrialization, global markets, currencies, and free societies. In the first volume, Quicksilver, we meet Daniel Waterhouse, the founder of the anachronistic Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, based here in Cambridge (known then as Newtowne). He is called over to England by Princess Caroline of Brandenburg-Ansbach, later Queen of England, to settle the life-long debate between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz as to who first invented the mathematical calculus (or the study of fluxions, in Newton's obsolete terminology). Waterhouse was Newton's roommate in his youth at Cambridge University, and perhaps knows him more than anyone else, although they haven't communicated in years. He's also a good friend of Leibniz, such that the goal of his research at MBCIT is to implement Leibniz's Logic Mill, an early version of the modern computer.