Baroque Cycle
Cycle" in one e-book, including: Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World. This three-volume historical epic delivers intrigue, adventure, and excitement set against the political upheaval of the early 18th century.
Stats for nerds
115recommend
298mentions
226people
2007–2026years
51% recommend38% neutral11% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > tech-adjacent humanities work
The thing is, these people always privilege the classics over more recent works that are just as philosophical. I for one probably learned more philosophy reading a pile of Neal Stephenson novels at age 16-18 than I did in college. Heck, my History and Philosophy of Science civilization sequence had a whole quarter on the Scientific Revolution, but after reading the Baroque Cycle it was mostly old hat. :P
- I highly recommend Baroque Cycle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle
- > So we’re left with one answer: information. But what kind of information are you trying to learn from a fiction book? The book is literally labelled FALSE on the cover.
I learned so many things from fictional works.
Authors don’t just make up lies and say whatever they want. Fiction does not mean everything is nonsense. The worlds that you read about have to be believable and for that to be possible, things have to at least be partially consistent with what we understand of the world.
So many authors do real research when they write a fiction novel so that the world that they’re building can be convincing.
For instance:
* I learned how to drive a stick shift from a Young Bond novel. The author didn’t make anything up, they actually described the way that the clutch mechanism works, and how the character was controlling it with the pedals.
* I learned about Navajo code talkers from a fictional book about World War II.
* I learned about cowpox being used as a smallpox vaccine from a fictional book about a new smallpox outbreak in New York City.
* I learned that Gatorade was developed in Florida from Taken by Edward Bloor.
* I learned a lot about the reformation and the Quakers and early colonial America from the Baroque Cycle, because Neal Stephenson did real research to write that book.
Is everything that happened in the book real? No, because obviously Daniel Waterhouse didn’t exist, didn’t found MIT, and didn’t have some mechanical LLM in the 1600s.
Did some of the things in the book actually happen in real life in order for the author to set that book in the time period? Yes. Like IOUs from goldsmiths acting as paper money, and the standardization of coinage by Isaac Newton.
There is so much factual information encoded into the pages of fictional works that this is the stupidest thing I have ever read on any platform in any circumstance ever.
Pure anti-intellectualism of the highest order. An attempt to undo The Enlightenment.
- Have it in print. Fondly remember BeOS in the second half of the nineties; still have second-generation BeBox. I was amongst those who were dismayed when Apple “didn’t choose Plan B” and instead acquired NeXT (that I also had experience with, and whose hardware and software I adored, but that just didn’t “feel right” for the whole “multimedia convergence” visible on the horizon ahead). Guess I was wrong, but I still dote on my Batmobile, and the interface is so perfectly “nineties zany grunge” in retrospect: as chiselled as Motif but with a define nod to Keith Haring.
Anyway, an awesome and prescient book.
Anathem, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle… Neal Stephenson is an absolute master of his craft, though he is famous for failing to stick the landings sometimes.
- Agreed. If you love it, also read the Baroque Cycle, REAMDE, and Fall. Cryptonomicon is the best but it all fits together.
- By comparison, Neal Stephenson is much better about this stuff. His Baroque cycle is a treat.
