^Book^ Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1) @PDF@
Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle #1)
By : by Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author)
ratings : 34,319
ratings reviews : 1,992
reviews
Original Title : Quicksilver
ISBN : 0060593083 (ISBN13: 9780060593087)
Edition Language : English
Series : https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060593087/quicksilver
Paperback, P.S. Edition (US/CAN), 927 pages
Published September 21st 2004 by HarperCollins Perennial (first published September 23rd 2003)
Characters : The Baroque Cycle #1
Setting : Isaac Newton, Eliza, Jack Shaftoe, Enoch Root, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz...more, Daniel Waterhouse, Bob Shaftoe...less
Description : Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.It is a chronicle of the breathtaking Quicksilver is the story of Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and conflicted Puritan, pursuing knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe, in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.It is a chronicle of the breathtaking exploits of "Half-Cocked Jack" Shaftoe--London street urchin turned swashbuckling adventurer and legendary King of the Vagabonds--risking life and limb for fortune and love while slowly maddening from the pox.And it is the tale of Eliza, rescued by Jack from a Turkish harem to become spy, confidante, and pawn of royals in order to reinvent Europe through the newborn power of finance.A gloriously rich, entertaining, and endlessly inventive novel that brings a remarkable age and its momentous events to vivid life, Quicksilver is an extraordinary achievement from one of the most original and important literary talents of our time.And it's just the beginning...(back cover)This P.S. edition includes 16 pages of supplementary materials.Cover design by Richard L. AquanCover illustration from the Mary Evans Picture Library; painting of Great Fire of London on stepback
Literary Awards : Locus Award Nominee for Best Science Fiction Novel (2004), Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel (2004)
REVIEWS :This book is just too vast to give justice to it in the few lines of this review that I might come up with now.If you are ready to read this, here are some suggestions:1) Start with Cryptonomicon first. You don't need to read this first, but it will help you get used to Stephenson's style, and you'll appreciate Quicksilver better having done so.2) Before reading Quicksilver, spend some time brushing up on some basic English history. (Did you know that London burned? Do you know what the Monmouth (The following is an excerpt from the journal of Neal Stephenson.)After the success of Cryptonomicon, I’m having some problems narrowing down my next project. The issue is that I have far too many ideas, and I can’t decide which plot to use for my next book.I know that I want do something set during the late 17th century in Europe. It was an amazing time with huge changes in politics, culture, commerce and science, but there was just so much going on that I can’t seem to make up my mind and 4.0/4.0It's the Moby-Dick question.The plot's about an angry guy chasing a whale. There's not a lot of variation on this theme: he catches it, or he doesn't. Maybe he catches it and wishes that he didn't, maybe he doesn't and regrets that he failed. But this basic plot, a straightforward quest for revenge, is such thin gruel that you'd have to be on the lower end of the intellectual spectrum to fail to realize that the book's about something a little bit more than hunting a big fish.Even so, I think it's official: I hate Neil Stephenson's books. I hated his so called cyberpunk classic Snow Crash --a fact that sets me apart from most of the nerdegalian-- and I really hated Quicksilver.Quicksilver is kind of hard to classify, if you in fact insist on classifying it. It's kind of historical fiction in that it's set in the 17th and 18th century and follows the rise of empiricism and science. It features real people from that period, like Isaac Newton, Gotfried Leibniz, Robert Boyle, I received an unexpected visit yesterday evening from a Mr. Nosnehpets, who told me he was a time-traveller and writer from the early 25th century. He had just published a historical novel, and wondered if I would do him the service of reviewing it."Why me?" I asked, bemused."Well," replied my visitor with an insinuating smile, "You appear in it more than once. You don't know it yet, but you're one of your period's major authors."I snatched the book, Mercury, from his hands, and it was even as Well. Where to start with this... Ok. Let us first pretend that there are only two criteria to use when analysing works of fiction, (1) number of characters and (2) richness of plot. Now let us say we are drawing a chart, with quality 1 on the horizontal axis, and quality 2 on the vertical axis. Now we have a space into which we can slot a few books lying around the house. A Dickens novel goes into the upper right quadrant of the grid - many characters and rich plot to bind them together. A The gold that paid for a pound of Malabar pepper was melted and fused with the gold that paid for a boatload of North Sea herring, and all of it was simply gold, bearing no trace or smell of the fish or the spice that had fetched it. In the case of Cœlestial Dynamics, the gold—the universal medium of exchange, to which everything was reduced—was force.- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver Book 1: QuicksilverThat one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson is in some ways the strangest book I’ve read this year.The most surprising aspect of the book is the fact that there is no plot. I’ve read books that have started really slowly, and even books where the author largely ignores plot to focus on building the setting. This book, however, has no plot.For all intents and purposes, Quicksilver is The 17th Century: The Novel. In many ways it feels like the literary equivalent of an open world video game. You just go around This was the book that knocked Neal Stephenson off of my "buy on sight" list. Too long, nothing happening, the first of three dauntingly large volumes. That about sums it up. Neal Stephenson books are not for everybody. Actually, they are but not everybody will like them. This will certainly be the case for Quicksilver. It's a "love it" or "WTF did I just read?" kind of reaction. A NS book is often dense and erratic in the linear story. Mr. Stephenson has a myriad of interests and a sizeable intellect backing him up. His stories tend to delve in a variety of side topics (all of which are very informative but outside the normal story arc) and that can be off putting Reading a huge 900+ page hardcover book with a seemingly open plot filled with pages of 17th century philosophical exposition and the requirement of reading two more books just like it may seem like a chore, but for me at least, Stephenson makes it fascinating. He reveals (or invents, at the very least) the inner workings of Isaac Newton, early Dutch stock market fraud, the invention of the calculus, and Turkish harems. This all serves as a backdrop for Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza it took me about a year to get through this one. somewhat worth it, and i will get around to the second and third books of this gargantuan trilogy eventually. i learned a lot about the philosopher-scientists and byzantine politics and what it actually was like to live in the tumultuous times depicted...and didn't learn a whole lot about the inner life of a couple of the central characters. but there are dozens and dozens of truly fascinating and wonderfully written passages depicting all sorts Upon finishing the last page of Quicksilver i really was expecting a gold star; the book is physically massive and ridiculously dense with plot so anyone who finishes deserves an award.As it was split into three separate parts or books, as the author has labelled them, i decided to treat it the same; after each part i took a few days break and read something else. I believe this aided in enjoying Quicksilver. Reading it all in one go would’ve been overkill and possibly sent me insane. Book 1 – The first third of the book was generally plodding and lacking in any interesting protagonists (and no, I don't care that the oh-so-clever-writer added in as many famous characters as he could think of, they were still generally annoying). The second third showed much more promise, and was actually really fun, until the very end when everything got awful. Not like The-Empire-Strikes-Back-second-act-as-many-bad-things-happen-as-possible awful, though I think that's what the author was aiming for..
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