<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

The Baroque Cycle is a lengthy trilogy by Neal Stephenson. It consists of the novels Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World, the shortest of which fills up over 800 pages.

It's a vast historical novel in which fictional characters mingle with the likes of Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, Louis XIV, and even a very young Ben Franklin. It runs from the mid-17th to the early 18th century, and takes place in London, Versailles, Amsterdam, Algiers, Boston, Mexico City, Cairo, and many other places. Its major theme seems (to me) to be the struggle to bring the modern world into existence, climaxing in a conflict between those who would bring into being a new, complex world in which talent and ambition can take one anywhere, and those who would preserve a simple world in which one's place is determined by one's class and family.

The Baroque Cycle is related to Stephenson's earlier novel, Cryptonomicon, in that many of the fictional characters will have names that are familiar to readers of the earlier work. Characters include Waterhouses, Shaftoes, Comstocks, a Hacklheber, and a Goto, for example.