The Confusion

By Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 2004: $27.95
ISBN 0060523867
Reviewed by William H. Stoddard
September, 2004

The System of the World

By Neal Stephenson
William Morrow, 2004: $27.95
ISBN 0060523875
Reviewed by William H. Stoddard
September, 2004

With these two books, Neal Stephenson completes the Baroque Cycle, which began in 2003 with Quicksilver. Effectively, this is one gigantic novel, each of whose parts is on the scale of Atlas Shrugged or The Lord of the Rings. Moreover, the entire Baroque Cycle is, in effect, a prequel to Stephenson’s previous book, Cryptonomicon, which explored the linkage between computation, cryptography, and international finance in two linked narratives, taking place during World War II and several decades later. The Baroque Cycle takes the reader back several centuries, to the century following the Restoration, to show the ancestors of the heroes of Cryptonomicon and their involvement with earlier forms of the same developments.

Structurally, this story has multiple layers. It starts out with one of its major characters, Daniel Waterhouse, as an old man in Massachusetts Bay Colony, summoned back to England to mediate a quarrel between Newton and Leibnitz. Stephenson then takes the reader back to Waterhouse’s youth and his involvement with the Puritan revolution and the founding of the Royal Society. Then the story takes a sharp turn to introduce two other major characters, Jack Shafto, a mercenary soldier serving in Vienna, and Eliza, an escaped slave from the harem of the Turkish sultan. They fall in love, fall into misunderstandings, and are parted. In the course of the second volume, Stephenson follows their separate careers—Jack’s as a seafarer circumnavigating the globe, and Eliza’s as a spy, financial manipulator, and eventually duchess. All this in fact is backstory; the third volume moves forward again to show England, many years later, as shaped by their various actions. It also picks up Waterhouse’s story, and his involvement with Newton, Leibnitz, and 18th-century English politics. And in the end, Stephenson actually ties all these stories together in a single conclusion.

For libertarians, this series has a great deal of interest. One of its themes is the birth of the ideas that are now called libertarian, in an age when anything like libertarianism had scarcely been thought of. Stephenson shows the first people to dream of one day making an end to slavery, and the creation of a banking system intended to prevent kings from destroying the currency. One of the minor delights of the book is its unabashed sympathy for whiggery. Many generations of writers have romanticized the younger Stuart pretender, “Bonnie Prince Charlie” (for example, Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs hints at Stuart sympathies by having its hero turn out to be the lost Lord Clancharlie), and by extension the Stuart cause; but in reality the Stuart cause was almost entirely reactionary, favoring the Catholic church and landed wealth. Stephenson’s heroes are Whig sympathizers, and thus attached to the party where proto-libertarian ideas found a home.

Beyond this, the wider intellectual scope of this story is impressive. The second volume, for example, has an amazingly lucid explanation of Leibnitz’s theories of pre-established harmony and how they fit into the rest of his ideas. The third volume does the same for Newton’s alchemical preoccupations, which took him away from physics and mathematics for so many years.

Are these books science fiction? The question came up during the choice of finalists for last year’s Prometheus Award. The fantastic elements in Quicksilver did need to be looked for, but they were there; for one thing, the viewpoint character in the opening chapter was Enoch Root, who also appears as a major character in Cryptonomicon, during World War II. This series of books still leaves more of the questions about Root unanswered, but gives enough information to make his fantastic qualities clear, building up the implications of his apparent immortality.

Beyond that, this is a novel that applies some of the key methods of science fictional writing to an earlier era in history. It has fantastic inventions (the efforts of several key characters to build mechanical computers), amazing natural discoveries (a form of gold that weighs more than other gold), heroic explorations (a circumnavigation of the world), heroic scientists (not only Waterhouse, but Hooke, Leibnitz, and Newton), and secret conspiracies to transform the world. It even has an imaginary country, the British realm of Qwghlm, first presented in Cryptonomicon, inhabited by people who speak a language with no known relatives, not even Basque. It uses all the familiar devices to show, not a future that might be, but a past that might have been. Except for the dates, it has everything that a science fiction reader could want—and a political and historical theme that libertarians will find sympathetic.