Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)

(Baroque Cycle (1))

968 pages

English language

Published June 1, 2004 by William Morrow.

ISBN:
9780060599331
OCLC Number:
63517512

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Volume One of The Baroque Cycle (Not to be confused with Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1)

Quicksilver is a massive, exuberant and wildly ambitious historical novel that's also Neal Stephenson's eagerly awaited prequel to Cryptonomicon--his pyrotechnic reworking of the 20th century, from World War II codebreaking and disinformation to the latest issues of Internet data privacy.

Quicksilver, "Volume One of the Baroque Cycle", backtracks to another time of high intellectual ferment: the late 17th century, with the natural philosophers of England's newly formed Royal Society questioning the universe and dissecting everything that moves. One founding member, the Rev John Wilkins, really did write science fiction and a book on cryptography--but this isn't history as we know it, for here his code book is called not Mercury but Cryptonomicon. And although the key political schemers of Charles II's government still have initials spelling the word CABAL, their names are all …

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