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Review of Quicksilver:  Volume I of the Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson Neal Stephenson is the greatest living fiction writer in the English language. Okay, that's hyperbole. But Stephenson is himself a Master of Excess, so I can indulge myself, knowing I'll always be a piker compared to him. I do not hesitate to proclaim that he has redefined the historical novel. It's no exaggeration to say that when I saw a fat new Neal Stephenson volume at Borders, my adrenal arousal soared.  I dropped all the other books I was lugging around the store, pounced on Quicksilver, ran to the counter to pay for it,  and drove home home as fast as possible to start reading. The only problem is that savoring Stephenson is hard work.  It's not enough to be just normally smart. You have to be educated in specific ways to catch his esoteric mathematical and historical allusions. Lucky me, I am. Moreover, you need sturdy intellectual discipline to hang in there through the 944 pages of plot and character convolutions. I've got that staying power. And you gotta love history. I do. Finally, you have to have appetite. I've got plenty.  He's not an hors d'ouevre or even a full meal. His books are like a forced march through an all-you-can-eat bacchanalian banquet that lasts for weeks.  Stephenson writes "dense literature": every word and sentence is heavily weighted with multiple profound meanings. (Either that, or there is no meaning and I've been seduced by the challenge of penetrating deliciously complex nothingness). You can't exactly wolf this down. You have to roll every tidbit around on your mental palette and shift forward and backward and sideways and into another dimension in order to figure out what in the hell those flavors are?!!!!  His characters dialog in triple entendre. His Byzantine plot skips from one decade to another and zigzags across continents without any segues whatsoever. There are plenty of threads that are never tied off, and years after reading one of his books, you will wake up in the night wondering what ever happened to a fascinating character who appeared to be critical to the plotline but who was just left out in the middle of nowhere.  Still . . . the brain strain is worth it. This is as much as I've been able to figure out in the greedy delirium on the my read-through: "Quicksilver" is the first volume of a mega-trilogy historical novel of the (primarily) 17th Century. As you may know from reading Cryptonomicon, Stephenson generally writes about periods of momentous, disruptive social change of which the keystone is scientific discovery. In this case, he explores the connections between multiple human breakthroughs: (1) the intellectual discoveries of the Scientific Revolution and the birth of modern physics, (2) the moral and emotional challenges of the Protestant Reformation, (3) the political volcanoes of the Early Modern Era, in which kingship itself was dethroned, and (4) the birth of global trade and international financial institutions . . . and how they all challenged and destroyed the prevailing world view. It takes a Neal Stephenson to make all that seem more entertaining than "The Best of Saturday Night Live".   Among his qualities as a fiction writer, Stephenson is the penultimate Theme Explorer.  His favorite theme is the complex ways in which advances in human knowledge produce troublesome questions about prevailing authority and thereby feed a river of accelerated social change.  Of course, hardly any of his characters understands what's really happening. It's up to the reader to piece together the clues which are missed by the characters.  That's what turns his novels into mysteries that are never quite solved within the covers of the books.   For Stephenson's characters, there is always a small group of genius-type "seekers":  those who are "in the know" and engaged in intellectual speculations which in turn figure in the upheavals of a horrible war and big political turn-around. In this case, the geniuses include Big Brain Players like Newton, Hooke, Boyle, Leibniz, Huygens, Spinoza, and Locke.  Then there are intriguing political cameos of France's Louis XIV, England's Charles II and James II and the Duke of Monmouth . . . and a crystal sharp portrayal of William of Orange. Into this character stew are strewn cunning peasants and grasping Puritan merchants and vagabond soldiers and street waifs and clever, spying courtesans. What could you expect from a Definitive 17th Century Epic which takes you galloping across the chaotic battlefields of the 30 Years War and on to the success of Britain's Glorious Revolution?  In the corners his narrative, Stephenson includes tantalizing vignettes of London, Boston, Versaille, Cambridge, Prague, Amsterdam . . . and various country villages, rivers and roadways running between these capitals.  Stephenson shows us what is going on at all levels of society, in all the streams that fed the revolutions of this historical watershed.  The "action aspect" of this otherwise cool esoteric inquiry is in the bloody disruptions of warfare. And yep, "Quicksilver" is an action-packed adventure romance on top of everything else. He's got some breathless scenes, but you gotta get through the brainstraining esoterica to get to these fabulous adventure episodes . . . or the action parts won't make much sense. Ooops, I forgot to mention that Stephenson is also the most evocative descriptive writer and narrator I have ever read. He can coin the potent phrases like nobody's business. Ooooh, really . . . it's a serious but delicious read and all I can say is "Write faster, Dude!". Every time I walk into a bookstore I'm hoping for that golden moment when I find another one of your banquets to devour.