To put up with me, you have to put up with Neal Stephenson. Here is a review of his latest, with I thoughly enjoyed. Note the reviewer.
As the planet permutates, a word to the world and the wise
Reviewed by Glenn Harlan Reynolds
Glenn Harlan Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee, and a columnist for TechCentralStation.com.
The System of the World
By Neal Stephenson
Morrow. 892 pp. $27.95
The characters in Neal Stephenson's new novel, The System of the World, have a problem. The problem is that new technologies, and new ways of living, thinking, communicating and working, are changing their lives, and they have to figure out what to do about it. Some are trying hard to influence the changes, working to make the future better for everyone. Some are just trying to get on with their lives. Others are fighting the changes with all the resources at their disposal. Still others are trying to profit from the changes, in terms of money and power.
It sounds a lot like today's world, but Stephenson's novel is set in 1714.
The System of the World is the third and last novel in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, following Quicksilver and The Confusion. (And, like them, it's also a sort of prequel to his earlier novel Cryptonomicon. The Baroque Cycle is not for the faint of heart - it's long, dense, and full of talkative characters and historical allusions. I found the opening chapters of The System of the World a bit windy, but the narrative soon takes off, with plenty of action and sex to leaven the philosophical ruminations.
As Queen Anne nears death and Jacobites try to restore the Stuarts, Princess Caroline of Ansbach tries to broker a resolution of the longstanding dispute between Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton over who invented the calculus. Princess Caroline thinks that the solution to the world's problems is to get its philosophy straight. Only then, she argues, can a new System of the World be established without disaster. (There's a moving scene in which she sets a globe afire to illustrate the dangers of bad philosophy, dangers that, sadly, came to pass in the real world.)
Unfortunately, Newton and Leibniz, though both admirable and sometimes likable, can't seem to resolve their disputes, being divided by concerns of ego and religion.
Meanwhile, Princess Caroline's interlocutor, Daniel Waterhouse, finds himself involved in episodes of counterfeiting, car- (well, coach-) bombings, and secret messages There's even a scene in which Waterhouse and Newton try to defuse a ticking bomb on board a drifting fishing boat in the North Sea. Through it all, we see how money and information are changing the world:
... the place was after all a Market, not a Palace, Parliament, College, or Church. Markets drew a particular sort of person, just as those other places drew different sorts. And the sorts who found a market a congenial and rewarding place to be, were those who thought quickly on their feet, and adapted to unlooked-for happenings with facility; they were, in a word, mercurial. The driver of that coal-cart had perhaps ten seconds in which to make up his mind what he ought to do. Yet he had decided. And probably rightly.
Money, information, and markets are a major theme throughout the Baroque Cycle, and Stephenson does an excellent job of illustrating just how radical the attitudes and behaviors that are commonplace today seemed in the 17th and 18th centuries. The notions that wealth could consist in ideas and information - and even, as Waterhouse discovers in The System of the World, in ways of coming up with new ideas and information - represented a departure then. But they've led to the world we inhabit today.
Stephenson's message isn't anything as simplistic as "the market will take care of everything." But he does demonstrate, through countless vignettes such as the one above, that even as the Erudite and the Wise are trying to develop a new System of the World, the world is busy developing systems of its own. And if things didn't turn out as well as Princess Caroline hoped, they worked out, in many ways, better than anyone in 1714 could have imagined. Let's hope that over the next 290 years, things improve as much, for the System of the World is changing again, for better or for worse. |
