A whopping tale of science friction

The System of the World

The Baroque Cycle, Volume 3

Neal Stephenson

William Morrow: 944 pp., $27.95

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The Confusion

The Baroque Cycle, Volume 2

Neal Stephenson

William Morrow: 816 pp., $27.95

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Quicksilver

The Baroque Cycle, Volume 1

Neal Stephenson

William Morrow: 944 pp., $27.95

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“The System of the World” is the third and final volume of Neal Stephenson’s monstrous, epic fiction, “The Baroque Cycle.” Set in the 17th and 18th centuries, this is a blockbuster of a book: At 944 pages, my copy weighs in at 2 pounds, 12 ounces. Alternating picaresque action sequences of violence, squalor and brutality with long passages of philosophical and scientific exposition, it switches its pace from the fast-forward furiousness of an MTV video to the glacial slowness of the academic expositor. To judge by the number of doorstopper novels published recently, the book business seems to think readers are eager for mammoth fiction, even as pundits complain about our time-hungry lives and ever-diminishing attention spans. But there is more than one way to digest “The System of the World.” If you don’t want to consume the whole thing, your hunger can be sated by one of its dramatic scenes, extended factoids or philosophical disquisitions. Stephenson offers both heavy fare and fast food.

Stephenson intends his novel as a historical swashbuckler, potboiler epic in the tradition of Alexander Dumas and Charles Dickens, and as a piece of science fiction -- what the author defines as “fiction that’s not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it.” Stephenson’s historical, topographical and technical knowledge of the Baroque age and of London is truly remarkable. If you want to know the layout of Newgate Gaol and the Fleet prison, the nature of coining and counterfeiting, the beauties of the gardens at Herrenhausen, the operations of the Royal Mint or the layout of every last nook and cranny of London, then Stephenson’s your man.

The novel’s plot isn’t easy to summarize, but its chief narrative thread is the dramatic struggle in the final years of Queen Anne’s reign, which ended in 1714, between the Whigs, who want to secure the Protestant house of Hanover on the throne, and the Tory/Jacobites, who want to ensure the succession of the house of Stuart and the Old Pretender. The focus of that struggle is not parliamentary intrigue or political conflict but the manipulation of the coinage and the financial system on which it depended. The Tories plot to show that the coinage has been tampered with and therefore discredit the incoming dynasty; the Whigs seek to thwart them. Here, the key figure is Sir Isaac Newton, or “Ike” as Stephenson likes to call him. Newton was not just Britain’s foremost natural philosopher but an ardent Whig and the Master of the Royal Mint, every bit as concerned with ensuring the circulation of a stable currency as he is with explaining the laws governing the motion of objects.

The twist in Stephenson’s tale and the link between this story of money and power and the worlds of philosophy and science is Newton’s obsession with gold. It turns out that Ike is an alchemist intent on finding Solomonic gold, gold “made through an alchemical process, bearing traces of the Philosophick Mercury.” He takes the post of Master of the Mint because he believes it will help him find the Solomonic gold that he is convinced has survived through the ages.

The story of Newton’s quest is populated by a cast of characters that includes many historical figures: In addition to “Ike,” there is Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Peter the Great, a succession of British royals, politicians and military leaders like the Duke of Marlborough, and a bunch of members of London’s Royal Society. Accompanying them are a range of fictional figures from high- to low-life, most notably the main protagonist, Daniel Waterhouse, a Puritan American and founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technological Arts, a man who combines the sententiousness of Polonius with the qualities of the most boring geek you ever sat next to in a physics class. Waterhouse is fair, well-intentioned and smart, but it is easy to get too much of him. Yet, like James Boswell a generation later, he has an uncanny knack of turning up at the right place at the right time. He rooms with Newton at Cambridge, witnesses the execution of Charles I in 1649 and, in this volume, is named as one of the Regents to oversee the transition from the Stuart to the Hanovers in 1714.

Newton’s alchemy, it transpires, is part of his general vision of the laws of nature, one that diverges from that of his great rival Leibniz. According to Stephenson, the historic quarrel between Newton and Leibniz over who first discovered calculus (the so-called priority dispute) was part of a larger clash over the relationship between the new mechanical philosophy and the vexed questions of human agency and free will. At the same time, Newton’s obsession with Solomonic gold leads him into a protracted struggle with Jack Shaftoe, the king of the vagabonds and a counterfeiter who has his hands on this cache.

By the novel’s end, the quarrel between Newton and Leibnitz remains unresolved, and Newton is thwarted both of the Solomonic gold and of revenge on Shaftoe. The gold, the source of so much strife, is subject to a different sort of alchemy. At Daniel Waterhouse’s behest, it is transmuted into metal punch cards for the Logic Mill -- a sort of proto-computer -- that Daniel and Leibnitz are trying to develop with the (highly intrusive) patronage of Peter the Great of Russia.

Such a bald summary cannot do justice to the many subplots, descriptive excursions, allusions and jokes (some funny, some not) that fill Stephenson’s cornucopia of a text. The whiz-bang episodes of picaresque entertainment that go far beyond the historical record work well. Leibniz’s description of Peter the Great partying with his Cossacks and a tour de force description of Jack Shaftoe and the Jacobites stealing the crown jewels in the Tower of London grip the reader while keeping up an air of Baroque extravagance. So too the climactic finale on Oct. 29, 1714; the day Shaftoe is to hang and Newton to be tried at the Mint is a witty, informative cliffhanger that holds our attention.

“The System of the World” is a fitting heir to its predecessors in “The Baroque Cycle,” “The Confusion” and “Quicksilver,” which feature many of the same characters, Waterhouse and Shaftoe for instance, on similar hunts for forbidden knowledge. Stephenson’s bravura scenes are dwarfed by grand tableaux filled to excess with infotainment. Some historical novelists complain about having to cope with too much information, too many facts; Stephenson wallows in them, drowning the reader in a sea of data. This may be good history, but it is poor fiction. At his best Stephenson captures the inventiveness, speculative mania, political divisiveness, rapid change, casual cruelty and dizzy invention of the age. At his worst his scenes are reminiscent of Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York” -- hypersensitive to detail, yet somehow lifeless because of their obsessive verisimilitude.

Lurking in these thickets of facts are the big ideas that make “The System of the World” a work of science fiction as much as a portrait of an age. What Stephenson unveils is the emergence of a new “system of the world,” the forces that made it possible and the ideas and institutions that sustained it. At its heart is the recognition of a new notion of power (whether mechanical, economic, literary or political) set forth by Daniel Waterhouse and his allies. As Daniel explains, “I am using the word Power in a novel sense ... to mean a sort of general ability to effect change, in a measurable way.... Everywhere you look you will see opportunities to put Power to use.”

The key point about power is that it is not a fixed quantity but, like the value of a commercial stock, is subject to fluctuations. It can be made to grow. As another character remarks, engines -- and these include mechanisms like a bank and a stock market as well as steam machines -- can create power and value. As knowledge advances, so does power: “The amount of Power in the world ... is ever-increasing, and the rate of increase grows faster as more of these Engines are built.” This power depends on number and measurement -- whether in the form of money (the measure of all things), numbers or serial time. It relies on what Daniel describes as the “bankers, merchants, clock-makers, or Longitude-finders ... Astronomers and Alchemists” who make it work, but above all it needs the philosophers who in the end animate the parts of the system, give it meaning and make it whole.

“The Baroque Cycle” raises questions that have puzzled some of Stephenson’s admirers: Why does he care about history? And the history of what now seems a remote age? After all, we seem a far cry from the supercool, futuristic virtual world of Hiro Protagonist, the hero of Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic, “Snow Crash.” At one level the answer is obvious: It allows Stephenson to back-project the world of hackers and geeks, to show that what seems irredeemably modern has a longer history than we knew. But something more is going on here, an agenda that we can best see outlined in Stephenson’s brilliant and fascinating essay first published on the Web and now available as a book, “In the Beginning ... was the Command Line.”

The essay is a history of computer operating systems, a passionate plea for command line-using, free Linux operating systems -- as opposed to the graphical user interfaces popularized by Microsoft and Apple -- and a broader critique of what Stephenson calls “the interface culture.” Stephenson sees our passive acceptance of these user-friendly interfaces as analogous to our passive infatuation with all sorts of visual simulacra that give us a reassuring illusion rather than a more troubling -- though eventually more productive -- knowledge and truth. Today, he says, we are bound by what he calls a “global anti-culture” in which authority is derided, positive judgment suspended, and the default mode is “hip and jade coolness.” Stephenson wants a return to a positive, more critically engaged position that makes clear what is at stake with modern technology and its uses. One way to do this is to take science out of nature and put it into history, to make clear the complex ways that scientific knowledge comes into play and to see the forces that shape its results.

In much of Stephenson’s writing there is a persistent tension between a passionate, geekish sense of infatuation with the wonders of human science and understanding -- a sort of utopian enthusiasm -- and a strong awareness of how the power of science can be exploited and distorted. Writing about contemporary computer operating systems, Stephenson envisages an idealized, engaged and knowledgeable Linux community whose free exchange of ideas produces optimal solutions. But “The System of the World” depicts the complex and sometimes dark forces that warn us that even while we celebrate scientific innovation we have a critical responsibility to guard against its misuse. *