Interviewer:So how does the high Baroque era relate to the Enlightenment, for those of us who are historically challenged?
Neal Stephenson:I didn’t really have a good grip on this, either, and still don’t, but it appears that the Enlightenment refers to a bunch of stuff that was triggered by a lot of thinkers who were active during the late seventeenth century. Work that was done by the Royal Society and other natural philosophers of the time, combined with other currents in politics and religion, led to this later thing called the Enlightenment, more of an eighteenth-century phenomenon. It doesn’t really enter in to the book that I’m writing here.
The Enlightenment, though it sounds really good, is and should be a controversial event because although it led to the flourishing of the sciences and political liberties and a lot of good stuff like that, one can also argue that it played a role in the French Revolution and some of the negative events of the time as well.
Interviewer:In writing a historical novel, as opposed to a science fiction or general fiction novel, you included real-life characters. People like Leibniz, Newton, William of Orange, and Samuel Pepys all figure prominently in Quicksilver. In developing their in-book personalities, how did you decide what they were like? Did you use historical records?
Neal Stephenson:I was fortunate, because this is a very well documented period of history, compared to some others, and it’s documented largely in English. So it was not one of these occasions where it was necessary to learn a new language or delve into obscure historical records. I did little to no genuine original research on this. I simply availed myself of what was already out there in bookstores and libraries all over the place. So, by reading what had been written about these people both at the time and in the 300 years since then, it wasn’t too hard to get a sense of what they were like and how each interacted with the other.
Obviously, the result here is my interpretation of these characters. It’s a work of fiction, which shouldn’t be confused with history. But I’ve tried to make the essence of these characters faithful to what appears in the historical records.
Interviewer:How about characters like Jack Shaftoe and Eliza? Were they based on anybody you came across in your reading?
Neal Stephenson:They were entirely made up, but based on types that seem to have existed at that time. There was apparently a huge problem all over the place with what we would today call homeless people. They’re called Vagabonds in the book. Sometimes there were more of them, and sometimes there were fewer of them, depending on what was going on in the way of wars or economic upheavals. There were encampments of people like this all over Christendom, as far as I can tell, and sometimes they would get together and rove around in big groups scaring the hell out of the citizenry.
That’s a pretty well-attested type of person who existed back then, and Jack is my attempt to build the story of one such Vagabond. As for Eliza, she is someone who began life as a slave of the Barbary Corsairs, which may seem kind of outlandish to us now. But it is a fact that well into the eighteenth century the Barbary states in North Africa were routinely sending raiding parties up into Europe to snatch people off of beaches and take them back into slavery. Or they were overhauling ships on the high seas, seizing the cargo, and enslaving or taking hostage the people they found on those ships. So again, in the case of Eliza, I’m taking that whole class of people and trying to build the story of one individual.
Interviewer:Jack Shaftoe has an interesting disability, the nature of which makes him a perfect companion for Eliza, considering her personal history as a slave. These two have some of the most moving scenes in the book together. Are they your two favorite characters?
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.