From: rhinoceros (rhinoceros@freemail.gr)
Date: Wed Apr 21 2004 - 03:51:57 MDT
The Salon Interview: Neal Stephenson
http://www.salon.com/books/int/2004/04/21/stephenson/print.html
(free access after viewing an ad)
The author of "Cryptonomicon" and the "Baroque Cycle" talks about the brighter side of Puritanism, the feud between Newton and Leibniz, and the literary world's grudge against science fiction.
April 21, 2004 | Rumor had it that Neal Stephenson would follow "Cryptonomicon," his bestselling 1999 novel combining present-day high-tech entrepreneurs and World War II-era derring-do, with a similar tale of fugitive data and high adventure set sometime in the near future. Last year, with the publication of the first of the three-volume "Baroque Cycle," "Quicksilver," Stephenson revealed that he'd turned the dial on his time machine in the other direction. "Quicksilver," written by hand with a fountain pen in an alcove lined with a huge map of early 18th-century London, immersed the author and his legions of devoted readers in one of the most intellectually exciting and politically momentous periods of history. It was the age of such scientific geniuses as Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and the undersung polymath Robert Hooke, and also the time when our modern economic systems began to take form.
Unusual subjects for fiction, perhaps, but Stephenson makes the "Baroque Cycle" a weirdly effective mix of high-octane tutorial and ripping yarn. To balance such cerebral characters as Newton and Daniel Waterhouse (Puritan ancestor of the Waterhouses, crack mathematicians and programmers, in "Cryptonomicon"), he introduces Jack Shaftoe, aka the King of the Vagabonds and his sometime-paramour turned countess and financial whiz, Eliza. Shaftoe, like his descendant Bobby in "Cryptonomicon," skips from one outlandish but irresistibly entertaining exploit to the next, barely escaping with his skin intact: war, thieves, prison, pirates -- you name it. As for Eliza, well, she's the kind of girl who encrypts top-secret military information in her cross-stitch embroidery and surreptitiously handles the investments of half the court of Louis XIV. The second volume in the "Cycle," "The Confusion," published on April 19, continues the saga, with an even more lavish serving of the feats of Jack and Eliza.
Stephenson found time for an interview during the course of a road trip, in a borrowed 40-foot R.V., across the high desert of Washington state from Spokane to his home in Seattle. It was a long conversation.
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