The Mercury Award for Big Books
Tim Bray has been slowly reading through QuickSilver. He’s not the only one. I’m on page 264 and I’ve been reading for nearly two weeks now. By my standard this is incredibly slow. I usually cruise through 200 pages a day, and read Cryptonomicon in about a week.
However, I am loving Quicksilver and it ties into a lot of things I am interested in; early scientific advances, Newton, Hooke, Pepys, the Plague. It was funny watching Steve Coogan (not often I say that these days; the last series of Alan Partridge was whipping the rotting carcus once too often) as Samual Pepys the other night on BBC2 after reading Neal Stephenson’s version of him.
I may be in the minority of most of Stephenson’s previous readers (sci-fi/cyber/neo-victorian or whatever) for liking a good historical story.
That is why I loved “The Years of Rice and Salt”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006511481/qid=1071742683/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/026-2331353-6811602 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which also touches on many of these areas in an alternate universe way. The plague wipes out western Europe and the scientific advances made by Newton and others are made by the Chinese and Muslins.