Neal Stephenson:Well, without getting into details, the whole conceit of that relationship is that they have this bond - it’s a complementary relationship that works. Even when they disagree with each other, even when they hate each other for one reason or another, there’s this underlying bond between them that ties them together. I think that’s true of a lot of successful relationships.
I do like those two quite a bit, and that probably comes through in the book. There’s also a lot to be said for some of the other characters. I like Robert Hooke, who’s a real person. I like Daniel Waterhouse, who’s fictitious. And some of the people on Leibniz’s end of the story are also quite fascinating individuals. Sophie, the electress of Hanover, who was Leibniz’s patron, appears to have been a really fascinating and cool woman.
Interviewer:Just by naming so many characters, you’ve offered a clue about how vast this story is, and this is just the first third of the cycle. How did you organize your materials to work on this massive project?
Neal Stephenson:For every book I have worked on, not only is the book different (obviously), with different characters, different story, but the system by which I write it is different, too. I always seem to have to invent a new system for writing each book. In this case I ran through a bunch of them, because I knew I had this big data-management problem. So, I started with a bunch of notebooks, just composition books, in which I would write notes down in chronological order as I read a particular book, or what have you.
Those are always there, and I can go back to them and look stuff up even when it’s otherwise lost. Then, I’ve got timelines and timetables showing what happens when in the story. I’ve spent a while monkeying around with three-ring binders, in which I glued pages here and there trying to figure out how to sequence things. It’s a big mess. It’s a big pile of stationery. Many trips to the office supply store, and many failed attempts. But in the end, as long as you can keep it in your head, that’s the easiest way to manage something like this. You can move things around inside your head more easily than you can shuffle papers or cross things out on a page and rewrite them.
Interviewer:You mentioned earlier that you didn’t really do a lot of historical research for this book, but some of the places that you describe - such as Amsterdam - are so richly detailed in the book. Did you travel as part of your research?
Neal Stephenson:I’m drawing a distinction here between what a real researcher would consider research and what a novelist calls research. So I did a lot of research in the sense of reading books and visiting some places. But none of it would be recognized by a Ph.D. history student as legitimate research.
I visited several locations and sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn’t. It’s a hit-or-miss proposition. To give you one example, the headquarters of the Royal Society eventually moved to a place called Crane Court, which is off of Fleet Street in London. In the final volume of the cycle, we see some action at Crane Court. So I went there when I was in London, and found the street, and walked to the end of it, which is where the headquarters were. It’s sealed off by this wall of blue glass - it’s this modern office structure that they’ve just slammed down across the end of this street. Sometimes you get lucky, and you find a building that’s still standing there, and that looks the same as it did 300 years ago, and other times you find nothing at all.
Interviewer:Quicksilver contains some anachronisms, mostly of speech. Obviously, you’ve put them in there on purpose. How do you decide to use anachronism? And why?
Neal Stephenson:A person writing a historical-swashbuckler-potboiler-epic in 2003 can’t pretend that this is the first such book that’s ever been written. People have been writing such books for hundreds of years. The classic example would be the works of Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and so on. If you go back and look at those books, you can see that they are partly historically correct, or as close as one can come to that. But they are also partly a product of their times. When you read a Victorian swashbuckler novel set 200 years earlier, you can tell that it’s a Victorian novel. It’s got all this stuff in there that only Victorians would have put in. The literary style is Victorian, the diction is Victorian. And that’s true, mutatis mutandis, for any historical novel written in any period.
I never tried to entertain the illusion that I was going to write something that had no trace of the twentieth century or of the twenty-first century in it. It’s a given that a book is going to reflect the time in which it is written. I didn’t feel a strong compulsion to avoid such anachronisms, and if something came up that I thought might be funny, or that might work, I would just go ahead and slap it in there.
Interviewer:Some of the more colorful characters in your book are Hooke and the other members of the Royal Society who do things like vivisection that are quite disturbing. Was that what the real Royal Society was like at that time?
Neal Stephenson:As far as I can tell, that’s what it was like. I mean, their records of vivisection experiments are very clear. There’s no getting around the fact that they did that kind of stuff, so in a sense the easy thing would be to just reproduce that in the story and show these guys as really cruel vivisectionists. But as usual, the reality is a little more complicated and a little different. If you read the records of the Royal Society and what they were doing in the 1660s, it’s clear that at a certain point, some of these people - and I think Hooke was one of them - became a little bit disgusted with themselves and began excusing themselves when one of these vivisections was going to happen. I certainly don’t think they turned into hardcore animal rights campaigners, or anything close to that, but I think after a while, they got a little bit sick of it and started to feel conflicted about what they were doing. So I’ve tried to show that ambivalence and complication in the book.
Interviewer:These characters are also heavily involved in alchemy. Was that a primary activity for the Royal Society?
Neal Stephenson:Yeah. It started to come out in the twentieth century that Newton had devoted more of his time and energy to alchemy during his career than he had devoted to mathematical physics. That’s a fact that is obvious enough if you look at his papers - he made no particular effort to conceal this. But it was sort of suppressed a little bit during the Enlightenment and Victorian era, when people didn’t know what to make of it. They wanted to view Newton as this paragon of the scientific method, and it was difficult to fit alchemy into that structure.
The view of more modern scholarship is that alchemy was all over the place. Robert Boyle was heavily involved into it; John Locke was involved in it; Newton of course; and quite a few of these other people. They didn’t really observe a clean distinction between alchemy and what we now think of as the modern practice of science. I’ve tried to be as faithful as I can to the historical reality in the way that’s depicted in the book.
Interviewer:Language, and the uses of language, also figures prominently in Quicksilver. How does language work in the book to indicate social status, to keep secrets, to communicate more than what’s on the surface?
Neal Stephenson:In this period, of course, England was not in the middle of things. It was this little rock up in a corner of the map. I’m exaggerating slightly, but it was certainly not the case that you could go to France or someplace in the Holy Roman Empire and encounter people who knew how to speak English. English was this minor language up in the corner of Europe, but it was a very vigorous language. I find admirable the way in which these people used the English language. For better or worse, it’s crept into the way I use the language now. I much prefer the way they used English in 1680 to the Victorian style of prose, which seems really stuffy and indirect to me.