Baroque cycle

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The Baroque cycle is a series of novels by Neal Stephenson . It consists of eight novels published in three volumes, Quicksilver , The Confusion and The System of the World . The novels are set in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and follow the development of the natural sciences at that time. Other aspects of this era are also dealt with: wars, genealogy, economy, science, politics, astronomy are interwoven. The choice of names and fields of activity of the protagonists suggests that these are the ancestors of the main characters from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon . One person, the mysterious Enoch Root, appears in both works.

"Quicksilver"

In his large-scale epic Quicksilver (consisting of the novels Quicksilver , King of the Vagabonds and Odalisque ), which takes place during the so-called Stuart Restoration , Stephenson tells of the dawn of a new era that is already casting its shadow. In the middle of a Europe that has barely recovered from the consequences of the Thirty Years' War and is being covered by new wars, in the time of natural philosophy and empiricism , i.e. the beginning of modern science, but also the time of absolutism and the Anglo-Dutch Wars was, three fundamentally different protagonists meet: Daniel Waterhouse, puritan , lateral thinker and despiser of the ancient secret sciences strives for knowledge and understanding with his friend Isaac Newton and some other great minds of baroque Europe.

At the same time, the vagabond Jack Shaftoe rose from the street boy to the king of the tramps and finally took part in the battle of Vienna as a mercenary . He frees the main female character Eliza from the hands of the Turkish besiegers, who was originally kidnapped by pirates from her homeland Qwghlm (a fictional archipelago similar to the Outer Hebrides ) and sold as a harem lady. Eliza later becomes a central figure in various intrigues at the royal courts in France, England and the Netherlands and Jack's only great love. Additionally, towards the end of the first volume, Jack loses his mind due to syphilis .

"Confusion"

The second volume of the cycle, Confusion , published in German in October 2006, deals in Bonanza with the adventures of Jack Shaftoe, who in the meantime fell into slavery and can escape with his cronies on a daring adventure. His paths lead him once around the world, with the author showing the extraction of Wootz steel and the paths of gold and silver from the new world at that time.

In The Plot the events in Europe are described. In particular because of the fulfillment of a promise from the first volume, Eliza becomes involved in the intrigues at the French court of Louis XIV and feels compelled to marry the son of the Duke of Arcachon .

The intrigues of Father Édouard De Gex lead to an unexpected finale in which Jack Shaftoe meets Louis XIV and is blackmailed into a new adventure by him, which forms the basis for the third volume, The System of the World .

This second volume of the cycle is called The Confusion , because the two partial novels Bonanza and The Plot are con-fused in the volume , as the author himself explains. The reader reads a chapter from one novel, then a chapter from the other, almost alternately. Although both run next to each other with almost no points of contact, it makes sense to read both stories at the same time, so to speak, in order to be able to easily classify timely events in the stories.

"Principia"

The last volume, The System of the World (consisting of the novels Salomons Gold , Currency and Das System der Welt ) was published in October 2008 in German under the title Principia at Random House / Manhattan.

The story is again mainly told from Daniel Waterhouse's perspective and the various storylines are interwoven and brought to a close. The novel is set mainly in London and depicts the fierce political battles between the Tory and Whig parties (the first two and for a long time the only parties in the English Parliament) over the succession to the throne of the sick Queen Anne . Furthermore, the (actual) historical conflict between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over the authorship of the infinitesimal calculus plays an essential role, which Newton and Leibnitz invented independently of one another. Finally, Jack Shaftoe, the king of the tramps, is back and lives up to his title.

The title The System of the World is identical to the title of Isaac Newton's third volume of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica , in which Newton describes what he sees as a complete system of the world. In the 18th century, this system roughly corresponded to the Grand Unified Theory (GUT) from contemporary theoretical physics.

Web links

Frozen Metaweb Wiki on the Baroque Cycle ( Memento from September 24, 2005 in the Internet Archive )