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Book Review of Quicksilver (Baroque Cycle, Bk 1)

Quicksilver (Baroque Cycle, Bk 1)
reviewed on
Helpful Score: 2


I've loved all of Stephenson's other stuff, but I couldn't finish this one. There are several main characters, and it takes a very long time for the connections between them to become obvious (I made it through almost 800 pages and some of them were still unconnected - I guess he was leaving something for the other two behemoths in this series). The action is not as fast-paced as Cryptonomicon. The story is about earlier generations of the same families as Cryptonomicon, and again Stephenson weaves historical people in, including Ben Franklin, Newton, Leibniz, and many members of the British royal society.