Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.
Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate draft and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees. More detail is to be found on the website BaroqueCycle.com.
QUICKSILVERMETAWEBINTRODUCTION
QUICKSILVERDRAMATISPERSONAE BYTYPE
An electronic book published in 2004 is about as anomalous a cultural entity as they make ’em. Little loved in this, their infancy (i.e., commanding a miniscule readership within a miniscule readership - i.e., readers of books), e-books are mainly praised for their portability and tolerated by their corporate backers because they are believed to represent “the future of publishing” (never, oddly, “a future”; always: “the future”).
But e-book technology is rather pitiful, as compared with other things going on in the culture today - CGI movies, for example, and the Digital Versatile Discs that exercise them so fully. Computer-Generated Imagery on a DVD is fun. There’s no arguing with it: point and click; plus other tricks.
E-books, like the computers that you must currently employ to obtain access to them, need some puzzling-over. Still, we try. But the anomaly is there. An e-book - this digital, intuitively malleable thing - is as frozen in time as is its print “equivalent” (as we like to say). The e-book edition of Quicksilver that you are reading, incidentally, was published many months after its first hardcover edition and may or may not have incorporated the various fixes that get made to book files as they are prepared for eventual paperback publication. (In other words, there are errors herein, but simply running spell-check was not an option.)
This section of Quicksilver, asserting itself (elsewhere, in marketing copy) as a font of “e-book extras,” and attempting to draw an analogy to the “special features” that distinguish a DVD, is in fact a mere copy-’n’-paste job (with some styling by the editors) from online sources created by Neal Stephenson in collaboration with his publisher and others. These sources, to which we have elected not to “live-link,” may or may not exist at the time that this e-book file has found its way into your hands (thus the election not to live-link). In which case our little effort here may serve some archival purpose, and wouldn’t that be grand?
With each feature that appears herein, we have noted the URL from whence, in early February of 2004, it came. Please enjoy these materials in the confines of this e-book - but, should they live on, do visit the Uniform Resource Locators we have provided and relish the many more riches that we hope are still out there.
A source of particular bounty is the Quicksilver Metaweb, as introduced by Neal Stephenson nearby.
http://www.baroquecycle.com/interview.htm
Therese Littletoninterviewed the author on July 9, 2003.
Interviewer:Quicksilverincludes some of the most important events and people during a crucial nexus between historical eras. What compelled you to write about this particular time period?
Neal Stephenson:Around the time that I was closing in on the end of Cryptonomicon [1999], I heard from a couple of different people about some interesting things having to do with Isaac Newton and with Gottfried Leibniz. One person pointed out to me that Newton had spent about the last thirty years of his life working at the mint, which was interesting to me. In Cryptonomicon there was a lot of stuff about money, so I had been thinking about money, anyway.
The other related thing that I bumped into about the same time - I was reading a book by George Dyson, called Darwin Among the Machines. He talked a little bit about the work of Leibniz with computers. Leibniz arguably was the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines. I found it striking at a time when I was already working on a book about money and a book about computers that there were these two people 300 years ago who were quite interested in the same topics. And not only that, but they had this big, famous rivalry that supposedly was about which of them had invented the calculus first, although it was really about a lot more than that.
I began to do a bit of reading about that era and immediately got excited about it because so many things were happening all at once during that time period. So, I decided that as soon as I got done with Cryptonomicon, I would turn all my efforts towards trying to write a historical piece set during that era.
Interviewer:So how does the high Baroque era relate to the Enlightenment, for those of us who are historically challenged?
Neal Stephenson:I didn’t really have a good grip on this, either, and still don’t, but it appears that the Enlightenment refers to a bunch of stuff that was triggered by a lot of thinkers who were active during the late seventeenth century. Work that was done by the Royal Society and other natural philosophers of the time, combined with other currents in politics and religion, led to this later thing called the Enlightenment, more of an eighteenth-century phenomenon. It doesn’t really enter in to the book that I’m writing here.
The Enlightenment, though it sounds really good, is and should be a controversial event because although it led to the flourishing of the sciences and political liberties and a lot of good stuff like that, one can also argue that it played a role in the French Revolution and some of the negative events of the time as well.
Interviewer:In writing a historical novel, as opposed to a science fiction or general fiction novel, you included real-life characters. People like Leibniz, Newton, William of Orange, and Samuel Pepys all figure prominently in Quicksilver. In developing their in-book personalities, how did you decide what they were like? Did you use historical records?
Neal Stephenson:I was fortunate, because this is a very well documented period of history, compared to some others, and it’s documented largely in English. So it was not one of these occasions where it was necessary to learn a new language or delve into obscure historical records. I did little to no genuine original research on this. I simply availed myself of what was already out there in bookstores and libraries all over the place. So, by reading what had been written about these people both at the time and in the 300 years since then, it wasn’t too hard to get a sense of what they were like and how each interacted with the other.