Neal, could you be a bit more confusing in how you number the Baroque Cycle?

My father got me Quicksilver and Confusion for Christmas. I finally got a chance to get to a bookstore to pick up the third part of the series. I find Neal Stephenson, and I see System of the World: Volume Three of the Baroque Cycle. But just down the row is Odalisque: The Baroque Cycle #3. I read the back covers, and they describe completely different books. I look at the numbering of the books I’ve already read to give me a clue, but that doesn’t help at all: Quicksilver was “The Baroque Cycle #1”, while Confusion was Volume Two. It was my mom who finally solved the puzzle: Confusion comprises Baroque Cycle #4 and #5. Which means that I skipped over books #2 and #3 entirely without noticing. The bookstore I was in didn’t even carry #2 in any form, which just goes to show how confusing the whole thing is to everyone.

Would if have killed them to make it explicit on the covers what the exact ordering of this series is? It’s bad enough when the books don’t even say, but to be as misleading as that is probably costing him sales if bookstores aren’t even noticing that they are failing to offer parts of the series.

There are several editions being published simultaneously. IIRC, one is the three main books. The other is eight books (I think), each one of the separate books that make up each of the three main books is published as a separate paperback.

So you’d have an edition consisting of Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, and an edition consisting of Quicksilver, King of the Vagabonds, Odalisque, Bonanza, The Juncto, Solomon’s Gold, Currency, and The System of the World (which is confusing because both Quicksilver and The System of the World are the titles of both main books and sections of the main book of the same title).

Here is the list.

Three volumes, but eight parts. They later published the individual parts as separate paperbacks, so that’s why it’s all messed up.

And really, that’s not Stephenson’s call. It’s the publisher’s.

What I want to know is why he insists on calling Japan “Nippon” all the time, even going so far as to use the derivation “Nipponese.” Does he think it makes him sound smart to use the English transliteration of the Japanese word for “Japan” instead of just saying “Japan?” Schmuck.

I haven’t read the Baroque books yet, but that kept bugging the shit out of me in Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon.

The way I look at it, the world of The Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle isn’t quite our world (as evidence, I offer Qwghlm). Therefore, on that world, the name “Japan” has never taken hold and everyone calls the islands by their native name.

There’s actually a whole long list of historical deviations between our real world and the world of the Baroque Cycle in that wiki article.

Not a bad theory, actually. It would explain that great OS called Finux that I’ve heard so much about, too.

The funny thing is that Qwghlm was the one thing that jarred me so badly in Quicksilver that it actually took me about three days to mentally sort my feelings about this utterly absurd nation appearing in a story that I had thought was set in our world’s past. I honestly found myself unable to continue reading it as a serious novel until I’d finagled that “not quite our world” thing into shape…the sudden appearance of such a weird country in the narrative was unsettling. I wasn’t sure that Eliza was actually being truthful about where she came from, as if she’d made the whole place up out of thin air.

I just thought it was an elaborate joke about stereotypes of certain non-English Britishers made in the day (and today).

Since Stephenson has about one anachronism per page, most of them done to supply an endless number of under-the-radar jokes, one more over-the-top joke hardly seemed out of place.

Nippon doesn’t appear to be an anachronism, though. It’s probably the right term for the period.

The OED gives Nippon an entry date of 1577 for English.

When I read about Qwghlm in Cryptonomicon I was fascinated and immediately went and Googled it. “Wow,” I said to myself. “This place really is remote. The only things on the Internet about it are all talking about the book!”

It took me a few days to realize my error. :smack:

OK, but he also uses it extensively though Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash, which take place in the 20th century and The Future, respectively.