This is exactly how I felt about Cryptonomicon. I’ve mentally done a “no thank you” every time I walk past Quicksilber in the book store.
What’s weird about it is that taken a chapter at a time, Cryptonomicon contains wonderful, sometimes spectacular, writing. As a whole however, it left me scratching my head. In this case I think the whole is less than the sum of the parts.
I have enjoyed his other works (the diamond age, snowcrash, cryptonomicon) i haven’t read the others yet.
I got this for christmas and started reading it. At first the jumpint around from one time to another was confusing. I mean he did pull it off well in Cryptonomicon, but in that case we were jumping from WW2 to present day which was quite easy to follow. For someone such as myself jumping from 1765 to 1798 and back again… well that was a little less easy to follow.
In addition I also felt like some of it was a lot of set up for not much delivery. I hope that it builds to something in the next book.
There were some very good bits overall, but some of it seemed nedless, as though he had fired his editor and just published the novel completely off of his first draft.
Since i’m not big on spoilers I won;t give away any details, but I also felt cheated as to how some of the characters were treated. Especially after we read about them for a few hundred pages.
I forgot to mention, ont thing that was a bit odd in Cryptonomicon as well as in Quicksilver is his penchant for using the character’s full names every time he mentions them.
I am sure part of this has to do with the time leaps and making sur eyou understand who he is referring to, but frankly if you need to do this every paragraph, you might want to revisit your writing style 
“What’s weird about it is that taken a chapter at a time, Cryptonomicon contains wonderful, sometimes spectacular, writing. As a whole however, it left me scratching my head. In this case I think the whole is less than the sum of the parts.”
That sums up my feelings about Cryptonomicon exactly: the trees were a lot more interesting than the forest. And based on this thread, I guess I’ll be skipping Quicksilver as well.
When the whole series is done, someone tell me if it all suddenly clicks together. 
I certainly agree that Quicksilver is much like Cryptonomicon in style. If you didn’t like the latter, you’ll be unlikely to like the former. And of course Q is part one of three, so plotwise it really only gets 1/3 of the way “there” (wherever “there” may end up being) by the end of the tome. At however many gazillion pages long it is, trust me, it ain’t a book, it’s a tome!
I believe you’re talking about Jack Shaftoe. There’s no reason to be disappointed. His story seemed to end pretty abruptly in the book, didn’t it? I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that it’s just a cliffhanger.
Here’s a fortuitous little thread! I just finished the book last night.
A. MEN. But then again, I had no idea until today that it was the first book of a trilogy. NOw I have to give serious consideration to whether or not I want to bother slogging through the next two.
I had no idea what was motivating most of the characters, and some would have such looooong periods go by before surfacing again that I’d entirely forgotten who in the hell they were by the time they popped back into the plot again. I also made the mistake of putting the book down and reading others in between, so it took me much longer than average to get through this one, but damn. WhenWilkins died, there’s a line to the effect of, “Wilkins was Daniel’s lord in every sense,” and goes on to define how important W. was to D. When I read that I thought, “Oh, really? I had no idea. Thanks for telling me rather than demonstrating that in the preceding hundreds of pages.” Arrgh!
What it comes down to is, as fond as I am of Neal Stephenson, the man needs an editor. A GOOD, diligent editor. I’m reminded of the bit in Cryptonomicon where one of the main characters (sorry, this is from memory) uses the device that can pick up on and display text being typed on a computer on the other side of a wall. And then there are a ridiculous number of pages devoted to the transcription of what the other person was typing, all about his panyhose fetish. Totally, utterly pointless and completely irrelevant to the plot and/or characters.
I was just glancing through Amazonand I found out that the second book in this series “The Confusion” (couldn’t be more aptly named) will be out on the 13th of this month!
Crap! I haven’t finished Quicksilver yet.
I just started book two last night.
I gots me some reading to do!
I got an advance copy and have read the first three or four chapters. It’s starting out much stronger than the first.
I’ll pick it up but i probably won;t read it for a month or so. If I read the trilogy back to back i’d probably just about finish it in December. For some reason it took me a long time to read through it. In the time it took me to finish that book, I’ve read 3 others and i still have 3 weeks to go.
Damn, already? I thought after the big gap in time between Stephenson’s previous book and Quicksilver that we’d have a while to go yet. Heck, has it even been a year since Q’s release? Well, he’s got me caught anyway; I’ll be down at the bookstore on the 17th!
The three books were always meant to come out six months apart. The System of the World will be released September 21st.
Thanks, rdm, I did not know that. Well, obviously. But thanks!!
A bit of an old thread, but at least a few of the posters are still around.
I just started reading Quicksilver and I have to agree with the consensus. It feels like a slog. The thing is, I love Stephenson in general, and have no problem with his long tangents. I mean, I read Cryponomicon twice, and that was a book that devoted about twenty pages to the proper way to eat Captain Crunch cereal when refrigerated milk is unavailable.
I think the problem is that I just don’t care about this period in history. If I ever have to see the words “Calvinists” and “Papists” again it’ll be too soon. Part of the problem here is that there’s no justification given for the wars. The main characters are either non-religious or silent about their motivations. This is probably a good thing since I doubt Stephenson could really argue their cases properly, and I suspect it would be boring in any case. But it also means that a huge source of conflict in the book is just “there” with no reason for its existence.
The stuff relating to the Scientific Revolution is more interesting. Daniel’s interactions with Newton, Hooke, Leibniz, etc. are fun. But there’s also kind of a “Forrest Gump” vibe to it, where Daniel’s path just happens to intersect all of the prominent figures in scientific history. It doesn’t feel natural.
Jack’s various adventures are compelling, and the finale of the escape from the Hexen put a big smile on my face. But they aren’t quite enough to carry the book, and their power is diluted by Jack’s syphilitic madness. We aren’t quite sure how much is real at a certain point.
Anyway, I’m going to finish and try to continue on with the other books (I bought all three for my Kindle), but so far this is the Stephenson book I like least so far. REAMDE previously had the spot, but it was still a fun adventure better than any Dan Brown book. It just didn’t have the usual Stephenson charm. But Quicksilver isn’t doing either.
Neal Stephenson started very strong. Snow Crash and Diamond Age were excellent. Then he caught a serious case of graphomania. He tried, hard, to scramble back to excellence with Anathem, but then really really whiffed with REAMDE. And with Seveneves he’s just flailing. Too bad.
I don’t really agree with that. I liked Anathem a lot. I thought he built a really compelling universe there; it resembles our own, but sorta caricatured. It got kinda weird at the end, but I’m cool with that. Seveneves started strong but got weaker in the second half. And REAMDE, while not great, was at least a page-turner.
Ultimately, Quicksilver has the flaw of being boring. Everything else is forgivable if it isn’t boring. But Moby Dick was less of a slog. Maybe I’m just more interested in whaling than 17th century religious wars and courtly intrigue. And waaay more interested in undersea cabling.
I think I’d be more interested if things were set a century or so later. Information in the 17th century moved very slowly. But the late 18th century saw the development of sempahore lines, and shortly thereafter telegraphs. It must have been an enormous transformation to go from taking a few days to send a message on horseback to a few minutes. I could see Stephenson really digging his teeth into all the social, economic, and political changes a thing like that entailed. Hmm… maybe the books will actually get there. Only a couple thousand pages to go :).
I liked the series (although the ending just kind of fizzled out, as per usual), but to me it was just a collection of neat historical anecdotes. The overarching plot, such as it was, didn’t really grab me.
I liked it better than Cryptonomicon, which I thought had a worse ratio of neat anecdotes to hair-brained plot.
Man, I loved this series. I am not much of a reader but I read all three books TWICE. Quicksilver was my favorite.
Not sure what drew me to it. I did read and love Cryptonomicon first. I also like historical fiction. And have read a ton of other Stephenson. Haven’t gotten through the post-baroque-cycle books yet tho. After this series I became even less of a reader I guess.
The period just fascinates me I guess. And the historical characters too. Maybe I am drawn in by the kickass female character.
I wonder if I’d like it less if I were more of a reader and had more to compare it to
Historical anecdotes are fine by me. I quite enjoyed Stephenson’s essay Mother Earth, Mother Board, for instance, which doesn’t have a plot at all. It starts in the mid 19th century when there was a lot of excitement surrounding undersea telegraph lines, and continues on to (roughly) today.
I guess it really is that I don’t like the period. The events all seem so arbitrary. Oh, so-and-so king just died, and now someone else with Roman numerals after his name is king, but he belongs to this church that has this undetectably minor difference in doctrine and so these other people have to either abandon their side or lose power, and blah blah blah. But the history of science and engineering is more deterministic, and you can see what the overall pattern will be without getting bogged down in the details. The characters involved still have their quirks, but you haven’t lost the thread of the story if you miss one minor interaction.
At any rate, I’m actually glad to see that some people really liked it. It just isn’t for everyone.
My problem with the Quicksilver trilogy wasn’t the time period. In fact, I’d love to read and learn more about the time when most of our modern world was built/created.
But I realized that every time Stephenson wrote about something I did know about (physics or computers or the implications of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem as applied to human neurology), he got it wrong. So how could I trust what he was saying about history? And my enjoyment of it immediately fell off.