Quicksilver

Quicksilver, Volume One of the Baroque Cycle is an amazing novel and not for those who like quick reads. At nearly 1,000 erudite pages it depicts the lives and confusions of natural philosophers between the years 1660 and 1713 at the dawn of the scientific revolution. Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, King Charles II, and many others fill the pages with wit, history, avarice, sex, political duplicity, religious prejudice, and wars that seem to pop up by whim. 

The sheer volume of historical research evident in Quicksilver eclipses all other works of the genre. The number of “throw away” lines that… show more.

Depending on whether you read the series in omnibus form or not, Quicksilver is the first either of three or the first of ten books by Neal Stephenson, comprising the Baroque Cycle. This is a rip-roarin’, swashbuckling adventure that also manages to be cerebral and hilarious. In the biggest picture, the cycle is the story of the transition of Europe into modernity. In its specific plot threads, the narrative embraces the dispute between Newton and Leibniz over the invention of calculus, alchemy, King Solomon’s gold, the career of John Churchill, the Royal Society, and its advances in natural philosophy, and… show more.