Quicksilver

A while back, I read somewhere that Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle was definitely worth a read. So, when I bought some books for my birthday, I bought the first of these, Quicksilver. Now, this is a mammoth book, nearly 1000 pages worth, and it’s only the first part of a trilogy; it’s taken me a while to get it finished! Fortunately, my recent holiday gave me the chance to do just that. And it was a very worthwhile task. I’ve read some Stephenson before and he’s a very good writer or gripping stories. However, this book is something of a change of area – it’s still science fiction, but it’s historical science fiction. The science it’s concerned with is the work of Newton and Leibniz on gravity, calculus, telescopes, clocks, chemistry and much more – the first flowerings of Natural Philosophy as it emerged from the seeds planted by the Alchemists. But it’s also concerned with the development of trade, banking and currencies, with the politics of royalty and the passing of power, with the place of Vagabonds and Puritans in society, and with many other things. Suffice to say that, even though it’s 1000 pages long, it’s not a page too long. It has that page-turning quality that keeps you coming back and stops you leaving even if the light has totally faded, forcing you to read by torchlight :-)