I have to say I disagree with most of Niall’s post because I thought it was absolutely fantastic - all of it - especially the theactrickal interludes and the gratutious famous people (fame is, afterall, gratuitous). Thanks for doing this though or else I’d never have made time to start despite having had copy sitting around for several years.

You can see parallels with Pynchon and it also reminded of John barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and Lawrence Norfolk’s Lempriere’s Dictionary - but it is better than those (so far). The other historical writer that seems to me to have some relevance would be George Macdonald Fraser (although obviously there one can tell the fictional bits from the history) because the rules are similar: the fiction has to fit in with the history but the net effect is to completely change the meaning of the history. What happens is you end up with a sort of historical psychology and a dreamlike narrative. Whereas historians, like analysts, used to examine the narrative dream and try and get back to the latent causes; Stephenson eschews all that and writes a ‘history’ which privileges its manifest content over all else - i.e. the point is supposed to be that you can’t separate out the History form the Fiction.

There is an argument that the novel is inherently science fictional in that it allowed the imaging of the future as a kind of resource for the bourgeois society that emerged in the 17C - Stephenson is acting in keeping with this idea. the logical endpoint of that development would be classless society, freedom of thought and will etc etc: again Stephenson is writing accordingly (so there is an agenda but as it is my agenda too that doesn’t cause me problems as a reader).

I actually found Daniel to be the strong point - he accorded with my experience of life; hence I had no problem identifying. He is like the hero of a dream narrative - someone to whom things happens rather than a fixed character and the point is to learn how to live like that without falling into the trap of assuming a fixed character. therefore, the passage Niall quotes about how he realises ‘playing himself’ is going to be difficult IS the KEY point of self-realisation in the book.

And the best thing is - there’s still more than 2000 pages to go …

Which isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the books immensely - just that I’m sure a large chunk of the game-playing went over my head, whenever it was being any less subtle than a large gold brick.

I found precocious child-Ben-Franklin more annoying, I have to say, if only because his appearance seemed more gratuitous; at least with Newton I’d been waiting for him to turn up.

If you’re doing this a book at a time, how are you going to handle Books Four and Five?

Is that going to present a particular challenge?

*looks at The Confusion*

Ah.

*checks Nic’s paperback copy, just in case that helps*

Balls. Uh, don’t know. I think the answer to your question is “cross that bridge when I come to it.”

And I agree with Niall about the mixture of idioms - anachronistic references to Isaac Newton’s ’shit list’ just got my back up.

But I also agree with Paul, that the Cycle as a whole improves as it goes on. The appearance of historical characters becomes less gratuitous (I think Stephenson does give Daniel a career trajectory that would allow him to meet most of the people he does), and the idiom less inconsistent.

It’s a bit like Tolkien, in a way. You can see, in Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien evolving his writing style from the novel he started out on, a sequel to The Hobbit, to the novel he eventually came to write. And I think that’s the case with Stephenson - Book One of Quicksilver represents Stephenson still finding his way a bit.

If you’re doing this a book at a time, how are you going to handle Books Four and Five?