Last spring, Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Fall, or, Dodge in Hell was released. I bought the hardcover right away ( I always buy his books), but it sat on the shelf. I am a committed fan of this author. I read Snow Crash, his third book, in 2004 and was impressed! Great characters, exciting plot. Since I had not yet read William Gibson, I thought it was he who had invented cyber-punk. Actually, as it turns out, they both did. In 1984!I went on to read The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon. Always...

The last volume in Stephenson's epic Baroque Cycle is, like the previous volumes, at times brilliant and occasionally tedious, but does serve to round out the immense trilogy nicely. The first volume, Quicksilver started off with Daniel Waterhouse (the main protagonist of the series) receiving a note from Enoch Root in Cambridge, Mass, that implored him to return to England. Waterhouse had established M.I.T in Cambridge and was working on his 'logic engine' (some sort of proto computer); after a...

This series was an ambitious project on Stephenson's part, but I think he tried to do too much. I liked the characters he created and found the plot interesting, however, the books are uneven in their pacing and sort of unfocused. Sometimes it's a love story, sometimes it's an adventure, sometimes it's a mystery. He does the love and adventure well, but really falls down on the mystery aspect. It's as though he randomly decided to make things obscure for no real reason. He also just takes too da...

In Quicksilver, the first book of the Baroque cycle, it isn't obvious where Stephenson is going. That book is an enjoyable read, to be sure, but I never would have guessed Stephenson's ambition with these novels is to explain how the world we live today came about, where the scientific method rules rather than alchemy, and where money is completely interchangeable, and where finance...well, perhaps that hasn't changed so much, but anyway, where the world we live in came from. More than a simple

Patience rewarded by pure bliss.

OK - the culminating book of The Baroque Cycle trilogy, and this review will cover all three."Historical Novel" (with liberties) featuring Hooke, Boyle, Newton and other figures of the history of science (the Royal Society) given life in the tap-rooms and public houses of the times, rather than as most of us came to know them as the names associated with various mathematical laws and laboratory devices from our own time in high school and college chemistry and physics classes. All against the ba...

I was tricked into reading this, but I'm glad because why else would I have started in on this 2700 page trilogy? Years ago Neal Stephenson intrigued and thrilled me with his cyber-punk classic "Snowcrash" so that I could see where he was going with "Diamond Age" a neo-victorian culture in an incredibly futuristic world. By the time I read "Cryptonomicon" I had enough trust in him as an author to take me through a lot of reading involving multiple characters and time periods and to know it was g...

“It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently, in the subterranean places beneath the Bank, have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive."...

I am doing this as a review for the Baroque cycle altogether, so don't bother reading the reviews for the other two if you are reading this one.The Baroque cycle is a massive, epic, depressingly wide reaching body of creative work which, I believe, has made several well respected fantasy/sci-fi novelists give up and go home. If it hasn't, it definitely should. It's just so.... big. And while there are a lot of authors who have written large things (the Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time, a Son...

finished the reread of System of the World and I won't add too much beyond what i wrote in 2008 when i first read the series; less flamboyant and mostly following a 67-68 year old Daniel back in England for the momentous year 1714, but with lots of twists and turns and great appearances from Jack and Eliza (review on first read 2008) Superb ending - in all senses of the word - to the Baroque trilogy and a must for people who love historical fiction a la Dumas or D. Dunnett. The light sf-nal elem...

I don't even know how to begin to review this trilogy. It's really all one novel, and so it might then be the longest novel I've read.It has everything. An around the world sea voyage. The Barbary corsairs. Love triumphing over death. Women trimuphing over men. The beginnings of the Enlightenment. Battles. The formation of the monetary system. A duel with unconventional firearms. Blackbeard. Peter the Great. And a gaggle of mathematicians.Extensively researched historical fiction, I've been hard...

The final book in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, did exactly what the conclusion of a long complex tale, inhabited by a lively cast of characters across five continents, should do: it dazzled its reader with a seemingly unending parade of dramatic climaxes, facilitated by the carefully interwoven tales of seemingly disparate individuals.My usual complaint about Stephenson's detail-driven writing does not apply to The System of the World. Perhaps the first two insta...

My favourite way of describing Neal Stephenson as an author is that his ambition vastly outstrips his talent; and the Baroque Cycle is a good point in case, I think. It is fairly obvious what he wanted to do here (mainly because Pynchon already did it before him) and it is even more blatantly obvious that this is not the chef-d’oeuvre describing the emergence of an age and short-circuiting that age with our present time that Stephenson wants it to be.The first novel, Quicksilver had three protag...

(Excerpt from the journal of Neal Stephenson.)So here I am, trying to wrap up the last book of the The Baroque Cycle. This thing has gotten completely out of control. I knew it’d be huge when I planned it, but this story has sprawled everywhere. What the hell was I thinking? Any one of the story threads I’ve had going could be a fair sized novel in itself. Now I gotta gather them all up and try to come up with some kind of coherent ending. I’m not going to have a fan left if I don’t wrap this up...

With "The System of the World", Neal Stephenson finishes the Baroque Cycle. While the title does refer to Issac Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica", the third chapter of which is named the same. But, in the context of the entire story, it refers to quite a few different changes in the various systems from economic to scientific.As with most Stephenson books, this is a series that not all will enjoy. His writing style, while always entertaining and full of dry with, tends to l...

Well, I'm now officially depressed. I finished reading the Baroque Cycle. To say that I enjoyed reading the series would be to stretch the word "enjoyed" to the breaking point. It would be rolling the word "enjoyed" off to the juicing room. It would be hanging the word "enjoyed" until half dead, and then drawing and quartering the word "enjoyed" by four sturdy teams of horses, in the hopes that somewhere in the process "enjoyed" would choose to reveal the location of its ringleader, a much more