The Baroque Cycle

Over at BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has posted his impressions on completing the last volume of The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson's 3-volume 2700-page super-novel about the Age of Enlightenment and how the contemporaneous invention of the calculus, money, mass-market newspapers, and steam power gave birth at that time to a new System of the World.

I've also recently finished reading the complete work, and heartily enjoyed almost every chapter. If some sections are hard slogs... well, I was inclined to tolerance, not having written many 2700-page works myself lately. I don't think love stories are Stephenson's forte, although he attempts a couple. The payoff comes during the interludes when he has you convincingly inhabiting 18th century Europe (or its colonial outposts), interacting with the natural philosophers and bankers who bequeathed us most of the power over the natural world we now take for granted.

It was a tremendously exciting time if you were moving in the right circles. Stephenson gets that, and he gets enough of the underlying science and economics and history and politics right to get that feeling across in convincing fashion. In the process, he has spun himself - and the rest of us - quite an enchanting yarn.