Neal Stephenson’s third and final volume to the Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, is out! See this Slashdot review for a good summary of the plot, strengths, and weakness – The System of the World.
What’s with the title? The System of the World is (as we are told in the novel) the title of the third book of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. More importantly it refers to the way the world is run and the transition from a Tory system based on land, aristocracy, and slavery to a Whig system based on currency, industry and mechanical power. (See my previous entries on the earlier titles Again and The Confusion.) The trilogy could be read as the fictionalization of the birth of global scientific capitalism. Stephenson tries to dramatize (in more ways than one) the ideas at this birth. This culminates in a nice, but incomplete confrontation between Newton and Leibniz (and the character Waterhouse as the simple sceptic) that is almost a philosophical dialogue worthy of Hume, but which doesn’t, unless I have missed something, really deal with their differences.
In the end I liked the book (more than Confusion) but felt let down by the Cycle. Stephenson isn’t sure if he wants to write history, accurate historical fiction, or retro-Sci-fi that is based in history. He started so many interesting threads that then wind down in dissappointing ways, partly I suppose, because they would not be true to history if he embellished them. But, what if he had had the courage of Gibson and Sterling, who, in The Difference Engine, feel free to change history following their speculation? Stephenson doesn’t dare, even when he has set up the idea of a logic mill so carefully – it just ends up packed and sent off to Russia and we are told it will be another century before it might get implemented. (Is there a sequel coming?)
So, if he doesn’t dare alter history, why doesn’t he stick closer to it? Why does he introduce these rather useless plot props like the wizards Enoch and Solomon who just show up to tweak history in some (right) direction or to represent some age that is perfectly well represented by others. (Just what do wizards add?) Why couldn’t he have rid himself of these and just written historical fiction? Or, for that matter, plain old accessible history?
I was expecting a big bang of an ending after the thousands of pages I traversed to get there, but was dissappointed. He wasn’t able to pull off a Tolkein epic climax. He didn’t dare speculate about how things could have been different and he also didn’t dare try to weave his tale into the possible as historical romance. I sense he got so caught in the research that he ended writing history but didn’t dare leave his sci-fi audience behind so he wove in some themes as bones for them. A good editor would have helped him ditch the bones, get rid of a thosand pages, and weave all the strands into his day’s ending in November 1714.
Some quotes,
“Technology ages, dunnit?”
Daniel pursed his lips to keep from laughing at the spectacle of this new, five-guinea word, Technology, emerging from that head.
“It ages faster’n we do. It can be difficult for a bloke to keep up.”
“Is that your story, Saturn? You could not keep up, and so you went bad?”
“I grew weary of keeping up, Doctor. That is my story, if you must know. I grew weary of transitory knowledge, and decided to seek knowledge of a more aeternal nature.” (p. 124-5)
“For the war is over; most of the great conflicts have been sorted out; Natural Philosophy has conquered the realm of the mind; and now – today – as we stand here – the new System of the World is being writ down in a great Book somewhere.” (Leibniz to Princess Caroline, p. 133)
I am reminded here of Jacques the Fatalist by Diderot where there is discussion of whether fate is written in a great book. Stephenson is, to some extent, in the Rablais, Diderot tradition of rambling romance.
“We are at a fork in the road just now. One way takes us to a wholly new way of managing human affairs. It is a system I have helped, in my small way, to develop: the Royal Society, the Bank of England, Recoinage, the Whigs, and the Hanoverian Succession are all elements of it. The other way leads to Versailles, and the rather different scheme that the King of France has got going there.” (Roger Comstock at the critical moment with Bolingbroke, p. 575)
“It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently, in the subterranean places beneath the Bank, have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive. … And so I say that Alchemy shall not vanish, as I always hoped. Rather, it shall be encapsulated within the new System of the World, and become a familiar and even comforting presence there, though its name may change and its practitioners speak no more about the Philosopher’s Stone. It shall be gone from view but shall continue to run along beneath, as the lost river Walbrook streams beneath the Bank of England.” (Daniel Waterhouse, p. 639)
This could explain the curious way Stephenson doesn’t, in the end, deal with Newton’s alchemical views. Perhaps Stephenson wants us to see how Leibniz and Waterhouse in effect encapsulate Newton and alchemy goes underground (showing up in novels as magic?) What is important is how the novel in some way encapsulates the two systems it dramatizes. Would it have been more interesting if there weren’t such clear good and bad guys – if Stephenson has been willing to show the feudal aristocrats as a passing system not an evil (French) one? Think of how well Lampedusa does that passage from feudal to modern in the The Leopard.
“Neither you, Sir Isaac, nor you, Baron von Leibniz, sees the slightest contradiction between your Faith and the true and fearless pursuit of Natural Philosophy. But you differ radically in how you reconcile the one with the other. If you two cannot manage it, no one can; and so I would like for you to work on that, if you please.” (Caroline at the beginning of the encounter between Newton and Leibniz, p. 676)
In some sense the failure of these two savants to reconcile Faith and Science is true to the history of ideas. We kept the Science of both and left their justification of Faith behind. Is Stephenson wondering what would have happened if they had worked together and left us a science with strong ties to faith? Why doesn’t he deal with this thread?
This journey began with a wizard walking into his door. Now it ends with a new kind of wizard standing on an Engine. Gazing down on this boiler from above, the wizard has the sense of being an angel or demon regarding Earth from Polaris. For, chastened by his failures, Mr. Newcomen has become most regular in his practices, and in this, his master-work, the seams and rivet-lines joining one curved plate to the next radiate from top center just like meridians of Longitude spreading from the North Pole. Below is a raging fire, and within is steam at a pressure that would blow Daniel to Kingdom Come (just like Drake) if a rivet were to give way. But that does not come to pass. … At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But – and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there’s a longboat waiting to take him away – he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.” (Daniel Waterhouse at the very last page of novel, p. 886)
And there you have it in that final paragraph. (Actually there are two more lines, but I’ll leave them for readers.) We have gone from alchemical wizards like Enoch to mechanical wizards like Newcomen (New – men). The system is flawed – Newton and Leibniz couldn’t work together – but it is good enough. Daniel can go home (to America and his son Geoffrey.)
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