WILLIAMIIIOF ORANGE: 1650-1702. With Mary, daugher of James II, co-sovereign of England from 1689.
WINTERKING: see Frederick V .
WINTERQUEEN: see Stuart, Elizabeth .
WREN, CHRISTOPHER: 1632-1723. Prodigy, Natural Philosopher, and Architect, a member of the Experimental Philosophical Club and later Fellow of the Royal Society.
YORK, DUKE OF: The traditional title of whomever is next in line to the English throne. During much of this book, James, brother to Charles II.
DE LAZEUR: Eliza was created Countess de la Zeur by Louis XIV.
A work like this one hangs in an immense web of dependencies that cannot be done justice by a brief acknowledgments page. Such a project would be inconceivable were it not for the efforts of scholars and scientists dating back to the era of Wilkins and Comenius, and extending into the present day. Not to say as much would be unjust. But in a work of fiction, which necessarily strays from historical and scientific truth, acknowledgments can backfire. Serious scholars mentioned below should be applauded for their good work, never blamed for my tawdry divagations.
The project would not have happened it all were it not for serendipitous conversations several years ago with George Dyson and Steven Horst.
The following scholars (again in alphabetical order) have published work that was essential to the completion of this project. While eager to give them due credit, I am aware that they may be chagrined by my work’s many excursions from historical truth. Readers who want to know what really happened should buy and read their books, while blaming the errors herein on me: Julian Barbour, Gale E. Christianson, A. Rupert Hall, David Kahn, Hans Georg Schulte-Albert, Lee Smolin, Richard Westfall, D. T. Whiteside.
Particular mention must go to Fernand Braudel, to whose work this book may be considered a discursive footnote. Many other scholarly works were consulted during this project, and space does not permit mentioning them here. Of particular note is Sir Winston Spencer Churchill’s six-volume biography of Marlborough, which people who are really interested in this period of history should read, and people who think that I am too long-winded should weigh.
Special thanks to Bela and Gabriella Bollobas, Doug Carlston, and Tomi Pierce for providing me with access to places I could not have seen (Bollobas) or worked in (Carlston/Pierce) otherwise. George Jewsbury and Catherine Durandin and Hugo Durandin DeSousa provided timely assistance. Greg Bear lent me two books; I promise to return them! And for talking to me about gunpowder, and listening equably to the occasional rant about Alchemy, thanks to Marco Kaltofen, P. E., of the Natick Indian Plantation and Needham West Militia Companies.
Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience, were Jennifer Hershey, Liz Darhansoff, Jennifer Brehl, and Ravi Mirchandani.
Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate draft and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees. More detail is to be found on the website BaroqueCycle.com.
QUICKSILVERMETAWEBINTRODUCTION
QUICKSILVERDRAMATISPERSONAE BYTYPE
1E-Book Editor’s Note/Apologia
An electronic book published in 2004 is about as anomalous a cultural entity as they make ’em. Little loved in this, their infancy (i.e., commanding a miniscule readership within a miniscule readership - i.e., readers of books), e-books are mainly praised for their portability and tolerated by their corporate backers because they are believed to represent “the future of publishing” (never, oddly, “a future”; always: “the future”).
But e-book technology is rather pitiful, as compared with other things going on in the culture today - CGI movies, for example, and the Digital Versatile Discs that exercise them so fully. Computer-Generated Imagery on a DVD is fun. There’s no arguing with it: point and click; plus other tricks.
E-books, like the computers that you must currently employ to obtain access to them, need some puzzling-over. Still, we try. But the anomaly is there. An e-book - this digital, intuitively malleable thing - is as frozen in time as is its print “equivalent” (as we like to say). The e-book edition of Quicksilver that you are reading, incidentally, was published many months after its first hardcover edition and may or may not have incorporated the various fixes that get made to book files as they are prepared for eventual paperback publication. (In other words, there are errors herein, but simply running spell-check was not an option.)
This section of Quicksilver, asserting itself (elsewhere, in marketing copy) as a font of “e-book extras,” and attempting to draw an analogy to the “special features” that distinguish a DVD, is in fact a mere copy-’n’-paste job (with some styling by the editors) from online sources created by Neal Stephenson in collaboration with his publisher and others. These sources, to which we have elected not to “live-link,” may or may not exist at the time that this e-book file has found its way into your hands (thus the election not to live-link). In which case our little effort here may serve some archival purpose, and wouldn’t that be grand?
With each feature that appears herein, we have noted the URL from whence, in early February of 2004, it came. Please enjoy these materials in the confines of this e-book - but, should they live on, do visit the Uniform Resource Locators we have provided and relish the many more riches that we hope are still out there.
A source of particular bounty is the Quicksilver Metaweb, as introduced by Neal Stephenson nearby.
http://www.baroquecycle.com/interview.htm
Therese Littletoninterviewed the author on July 9, 2003.
Interviewer:Quicksilverincludes some of the most important events and people during a crucial nexus between historical eras. What compelled you to write about this particular time period?
Neal Stephenson:Around the time that I was closing in on the end of Cryptonomicon [1999], I heard from a couple of different people about some interesting things having to do with Isaac Newton and with Gottfried Leibniz. One person pointed out to me that Newton had spent about the last thirty years of his life working at the mint, which was interesting to me. In Cryptonomicon there was a lot of stuff about money, so I had been thinking about money, anyway.
The other related thing that I bumped into about the same time - I was reading a book by George Dyson, called Darwin Among the Machines. He talked a little bit about the work of Leibniz with computers. Leibniz arguably was the founder of symbolic logic and he worked with computing machines. I found it striking at a time when I was already working on a book about money and a book about computers that there were these two people 300 years ago who were quite interested in the same topics. And not only that, but they had this big, famous rivalry that supposedly was about which of them had invented the calculus first, although it was really about a lot more than that.
I began to do a bit of reading about that era and immediately got excited about it because so many things were happening all at once during that time period. So, I decided that as soon as I got done with Cryptonomicon, I would turn all my efforts towards trying to write a historical piece set during that era.