Neal Stephenson's Past,Present, and Future

The author of the widely praised Baroque Cycle on science, markets, and post-9/11 America.

Mike Godwin from the February 2005 issue

(Page 4 of 4)

Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize "enthusiasts" (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years.

Reason: A critic once said of Thomas Pynchon that he was one of the few modern novelists for whom what the characters do for a living is more defining than what their emotional relationships are. It seems to me that you have that same focus. In The Baroque Cycle, the biggest romantic relationship in Daniel Waterhouse's life occurs mostly offstage, unless you count his difficult friendship with Isaac Newton.

Stephenson: There's a false dichotomy embedded in that. It's possible to have an emotional relationship with what you do for a living. And this is especially true when you work with other people, because naturally you form emotional relationships with those people, which get all tangled up with your relationship to the work itself.

Daniel Waterhouse has all sorts of emotional relationships with people. It is true that his romantic relationships with women play little overt role in the book. But he's got a quite complex web of relationships to his father and to the rest of his family, as well as to people like the Bolstroods, who are so close that they might as well be family. And over the course of the story he develops relationships with people like Wilkins, Hooke, Oldenburg, Newton, and Leibniz. The book is much more about those relationships than what Daniel does for a living. We actually see very little of what Daniel does for a living and much more of his interactions with these other people. The reason he is summoned back from Boston in the opening chapters of Quicksilver is precisely because he is known to have relationships with Newton and Leibniz that no one else has.

Reason: In the last decade or two, there's been a surge of fiction set in the 17th century: Tremain's Restoration, Pears' An Instance of the Fingerpost, Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring. Is there something about the era that speaks with particular significance to the 21st century?

Stephenson: The glib answer would be that this is such a broad question that I could only answer it by writing a big fat trilogy set during this era. And if I try to answer this question discursively, that's what it's going to turn into. So I'll fall back on saying that it just feels interesting to me.

Here are a few specifics. The medieval is still very much alive and well during this period. People are carrying swords around. Military units have archers. Saracens snatch people from European beaches and carry them off to slavery. There are Alchemists and Cabalists. Great countries are ruled by kings who ride into battle wearing armor. Much of the human landscape--the cities and architecture--are medieval. And yet the modern world is present right next to all of this in the form of calculus, joint-stock companies, international financial systems, etc. This can't but be fascinating to a novelist.

Some older systems have reached a splendid apotheosis. Probably the most splendid is the court of Louis XIV at Versailles. Others mentioned include the Spanish Empire, the Mogul Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately it was not possible to explore all of these in very much detail in these books without making the cycle five times as long as it was already.

At the same time, with the benefit of hindsight we can see that all of those great systems were peaking and going into decline. The most conspicuous example, again, is Louis XIV's version of the French monarchy, which held together as long as he was there to run it. But he was one of a kind, and as soon as he died it all began to unravel and ceased to exist in a few decades.

Again with hindsight, we can see that the new structures and systems that supplanted the old ones were being established during this period. And they were being established in some unlikely places by some unlikely people. The role of persecuted religious minorities--Jews, Huguenots, Puritans, Armenians--is especially interesting here.

That's all to give some explanation of why the period is interesting to me. Of course, I can't speak for the other writers you have mentioned.

Reason: In The Baroque Cycle, with some exceptions, you stick to a modern, comic mode. Since it's clear from your parodic passages that you can do period voices when you want to, why did you choose to make the language so modern?

Stephenson: The Three Musketeers has a distinctly 19th-century flavor, even though it's set in the 17th century. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reads like an Elizabethan play, not like an ancient Roman history. I'm hesitant to draw such comparisons because there is always the critic who jumps in with the cheap shot: "Oh, look, he's comparing himself to Shakespeare." So as a parenthetical aside to those who think that way, I'll stipulate that I'm not a Shakespeare or even a Dumas, but I am capable of learning from them.

I could have tried to write the entire Baroque Cycle in Jacobean English, but at some point I'd have had to ask myself, "Who am I kidding? Everyone knows this was written in the 21st century." The sensibility from which it's written is that of the high-tech modern world. To purge the whole cycle of all traces of modern English would have seemed forced and absurd. So I just wrote it in whatever language seemed best to get the story across, which in some places was modern-sounding English and in other places was period English.

Reason: There are some mysteries in the trilogy that you don't fully explain.

Stephenson: Mysteries and unresolved questions are a part of real life, and so it's OK for them to exist in novels. As a matter of fact, I'm inclined to be a bit suspicious of any novel in which everything gets tidily resolved at the end. It doesn't feel right for me to do this. So I typically leave some things unresolved. It's not an oversight.�

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