Darwin8u's Reviews > Quicksilver

That one man sickens and dies, while another flourishes, are characters in the cryptic message that philosophers seek to decode.
- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

Not done, with BIG Quicksilver, just finished internal-Book 1: Quicksilver. It gives a bit of a low-brow SF Pynchon vibe. It works well in parts, and falls a bit flat in parts. I sometimes wish Stephenson wouldn't chase down every last snowflake. I really do, however, enjoy the primary narrator Daniel Waterhouse and his interactions with such figures as Isaac Newton, Samuel Pepys, John Wilkins, etc.

Having already read Cryptonomicon, I was also glad to see Enoch Root (one of my favorite characters from that book). Like Pynchon, Stephenson takes historical fiction and probes the fiction needle into history at funky angles. He thrills at causing his fictional characters to interact in oblique ways to historical characters. Given the large amount of negative space in history (think about how much we DON'T know about people like Newton, or even the consumate diariest Pepys), a creative writer of historical fiction can bend/reflect/refract the light of the past to tell many compelling stories (and they don't even have to be plausable, they just can't completely contradict major historical events).