Back to the future

Cyberfiction takes U-turn in novel about 18th century 'hackers'

Jay Pawlowski, Special To The News

Friday, September 26, 2003

In the opening chapter of Quicksilver, Neal Stephenson's latest novel, a visitor interrupts Dr. Daniel Waterhouse at the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts. Waterhouse is busy at work on his Logic Mill - a machine for organizing information using pushrods and cards marked with binary notation. Strings of ones and zeroes, for example, represent ideas such as "Noah's Ark," "sunspots" and "traditional impotence remedies."

In designing the Logic Mill, Waterhouse has, for all intents and purposes, set out to build the first personal computer.

The year, by the way, is 1713.

To Stephenson's fans - and there are many of them - this might not come as such a surprise. He's already established himself as a visionary who sees into the past as easily as he spins scenarios of the future.

How we got here

Hailed as the last of the cyberpunk authors, Stephenson is best known for integrating technology, philosophy and information theory into grandiose, somewhat fantastic plots. After his first two books mostly slipped past the public eye, Stephenson burst into the spotlight with the 1992 future-shock thriller Snow Crash, a book about a computer virus that also infects people.

The virtual-reality landscape of this novel brought droves of cyberpunk fans to his doorstep and put Stephenson among the ranks of Isaac Asimov and William Gibson - writers seen as prophets of where technology might take us.

Stephenson then turned heads in 1999 by shifting his focus from where we were going to how we got here. "The more I thought about the future of computing," the author told Salon.com, "the more interesting it was to consider the history of it."

The result was Cryptonomicon, a publishing sensation with dual plots set in World War II and the 1990s.

With mathematics and code- breaking at the novel's core - not to mention clocking in at a whopping 918 pages, including appendices - Stephenson hadn't exactly programmed himself for commercial success. But his loyal fan base of nerds, hackers and sci-fi junkies got Cryptonomicon off to a good start, and the ensuing buzz (not to mention the critical praise) finally gave Stephenson much-deserved mainstream attention, despite the novel's length. Cryptonomicon even knocked Harry Potter off the top of Amazon.com's best-seller chart for a brief spell.

And now Quicksilver takes us even further into the past - way back to the 17th and 18th centuries. Yet it is a time much like our own, in which scientific discovery and technological innovation advance at an alarming rate.

Isaac Newton has just introduced the telescope and completed his monumental Principia Mathematica. People are starting to understand gravitation, calculus and inertia. Yet they question, as now, how God, the human soul and free will fit into a technological world that can be categorized, drawn out and explained with equations.

With a plot that comes together more quickly than Cryptonomicon and offers political intrigue, religious corruption and spirited characters, the 927-page Quicksilver just might be what puts Stephenson on the map for good.

To understand Stephenson's writing is to understand the true mind of the hacker. If early cyberpunk, fans embraced the fantasy of tough- talking, leather-jacketed computer jockeys in William Gibson's writing, Stephenson's readers see something closer to the truth in his characters: a little bit of themselves.

"Everybody reads Neal Stephenson here," a Microsoft manager once told Newsweek. "He's our inspiration."

The hacker mindset

For Stephenson, hackers aren't just computer whizzes. The hacker is a personality type - the kind of person who thrives on problem solving and manipulation of ideas. In Snow Crash, for example, although the hacker hero happens to be the world's greatest swordfighter, it is his research and lengthy discourses on linguistics with a computer that end up saving the day.

Rewind 200-plus years and you've got the hackers - or natural philosophers, as they call themselves - of Quicksilver.

Daniel Waterhouse, Isaac Newton, and German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz attempt to crack the secrets of the universe in a world whose ideology is dominated by Calvinism, predestination, and the Divine Right of Kings.

If it's history, it still has all the best elements of science fiction: themes centered around the social and philosophical implications of technology and science; the struggle for progress against a corrupt system locked in its ways; and the playful yet poignant speculations that leave one wondering "What if?" long into the night.

Quicksilver picks up where Stephenson left off in Cryptonomicon. After being warned by his editors that Cryptonomicon was beginning to push the physical limits of bookbinding, the author left out a couple plot strains that took readers into the distant past. Stephenson now uses that material to develop his next project, a "cycle" of books - he's careful not to use the "T" word, trilogy - centered on historical figures and the ancestors of the characters in Cryptonomicon.

The Baroque Cycle, of which Quicksilver is the first installment, promises to be epic. Waterhouse and his fellow natural philosophers, including Newton, Enoch Root and the inventor Robert Hooke, attempt to bring about a new era of scientific enlightenment against the tumultuous backdrop of the precarious English monarchy.

As politics begins to tear the group apart and Newton retreats further into alchemy, Waterhouse finds himself in the unlikely role of resident religious dissident in the court of King Charles II. Meanwhile, the crafty ex-slave Eliza infiltrates the court of Louis XIV as conflict between England and France looms near.

Their paths cross at a critical time in history - one that will shape Western thought forever.

Quicksilver captures the spirit of discovery with Stephenson's relentlessly dry sense of humor. Waterhouse and his Royal Society fellows perform experiments with amusing eccentricity. They drain the blood of dogs, analyze kidney stones, and even connect a man's severed head to a fireplace bellows to make it "speak" - all the while sounding like a bunch of tired kids working on a group science project past midnight. One fellow attempts to measure the frequency of a fly's wings beating. "Useful data if we are to build a flying-machine," he says flatly.

Trademark discourses

But while they are often funny, the natural philosophers are no clowns. Stephenson's readers have come to know and love his trademark technological and philosophical discourses, which often force the reader to stop, take a deep breath, and soak it all in:

"I get it not from Calvin but from Natural Philosophy," Daniel says. "The mind is a machine, a Logic Mill. That's what I believe."

"Like the one you have been building across the river?"

"A good deal more effective than that one, fortunately."

"You think that if you made yours better, it could do what the human mind does? That it could have a soul?"

"When you speak of a soul, you phant'sy something above and beyond the cranks and gears, the dead matter, of which the machine - be it a Logic Mill or a brain - is constructed. I do not believe in this ? I suppose because it puts me in mind of Alchemy. This soul, this extra thing added to the brain, reminds me of the Quintessence that the Alchemists are forever seeking: a mysterious supernatural presence that is supposed to suffuse the world. But they can never seem to find any. Sir Isaac Newton has devoted his entire life to the project and has nothing to show for it."

A book about today

As obsessed with detail as the book is, Quicksilver sometimes glosses over important character relationships as the narrative moves forward in time. For example, Waterhouse's association with a popular London actress is first introduced as a sort of one-night stand, and much later we find out that there was something of a regular relationship between them. More on this connection might have made Waterhouse - who begins the story as a devout Puritan - an even stronger character.

Yet Stephenson's qualities are all here and Quicksilver is not merely a period piece but a book very much about today. As we've come to expect with this writer, it's all about the flow of information and how that information shapes history.

One of the book's endearing qualities is the way it shows people discovering, for the first time, aspects of our universe that we now take for granted. John Wilkins, Waterhouse's early mentor at the Royal Society, sums this up with the understatement of the millennium: "I believe that binary arithmetickal engines will be of enormous significance."

Talk about being ahead of your time.

But then again, that's par for the course when dealing with Neal Stephenson.

Quicksilver will likely bring a host of new fans into the fold. With its insights into our modern world, the book should appeal to everyone who wonders where technology is taking us, not just cyber nerds looking for their next fix.

And the best part is this: No one needs a pair of rubber Vulcan ears to attend a Stephenson reading.

Jay Pawlowski is a Denver freelance writer and cyberpunk fiction aficianado.