Over the past few weeks (well, coming up to two months) it’s been my pleasure to re-read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, his sprawling 2,800-page historical trilogy (Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World) that covers not only a enormity in vast period of time (the main plot covers 1664-1714), but seemingly the entire known world too - from Cambridge to Cairo, Manila to Massachussetts, a huge swathe of the globe is included. Throw in the vast number of plots and subplots, and the diverse historical backdrop - not just the dawn of the scientific age (which forms the backbone), but the Restoration, Great Plague, Glorious Revolution, the birth of finance, the abolitionist movement, the Barbary Pirates and innumerable wars. It makes me wonder - was all of human history as intriguing and thrillingly complex as Stephenson has charted, or did he pick just the right time for his verbose talent to tackle?

Neal Stephenson is not only a hugely talented and dedicated researcher, but a fearless writer too, willing as he is to write in his own characters (Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse, Jack Shaftoe) and make them important as contributors to human history, weaving them together with real-life figures as eminent as Isaac Newton and Louis XIV. He manages to bring it off, even daring to make one of his characters seemingly immortal, which everyone in the novel is aware of to some degree, and what’s more - they are just fine with it, and you know what, it’s fine with me, the reader, too. It’s his ability to get away with it which makes him so enthralling to read.

When I first read the books of The Baroque Cycle, I read them as they came out (about half a year apart), which was just enough time for the memories of the first two to dull somewhat before I started their successors. This time, reading all three in a row, the rich and full universe that Stephenson has created hangs together that little bit better. Of course, no book is perfect, and I am a little biased (after all, my choice of domain name is directly inspired by his work) and if you dislike flowery prose, or you prefer your books to fit in your pocket, you won’t be a big fan. And with the book set all over the world, you’ll need an atlas, and given the vast range of topics, probably half an eye on Wikipedia to keep yourself abreast of who and what he is on about - ironically for such an escapist read, this was very much a work that you have to read firmly anchored at home.

Oh, and the artwork on the books (the hardback versions, at least) is utterly gorgeous, and neatly encapsulates the central theme of each. If you haven’t read them yet, and fancy a long and slightly fantastical journey through the past, then read them; if you have already read them, try doing it again, it really is a richer experience the second time round.

That little reverie has been brewing on my mind for some time, but was suddenly brought to the boil with this best chart ever (via Chris Lightfoot), which is a marvellous illustration of how, if the universe had been just that little bit different to start off with, it wouldn’t exist in any recognisable form whatsoever. Which reminded me of one of my favourite bits of Stephensonia, this extract from his early work, “In The Beginning Was The Command Line“. Though written back in the day when he was more obssessed with UNIX than the 17th century, his perceptiveness and uncanny ability for allegory is still the same. On (the seemingly unrelated) point that we owe our good fortune to be in a universe where the constants are just right for the formation of stars and galaxies, he manages to bring it into a perfect illustration of the geek ethic, in a eminently enjoyable read. I’ll leave you to read it yourself:

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he’s finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what’s going to happen; then down it comes–and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 1st, 2006 at 22:36:44 and is filed under General.