As Waterhouse boards his ship for the transatlantic voyage, the scene dissolves, we are transported back to 1661 and the narration of his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, sharing a room with Newton, begins.įar from being the usual plump, periwigged figure with a tendency to sit under falling fruit, Newton is characterised bewitchingly in this novel as a kind of savant ghost: a rake-thin near-albino who forgets to eat. Root tells Waterhouse that he is needed back in England to mediate the dispute between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over who invented the calculus.
In the first, mysterious alchemist Enoch Root travels to Massachusetts in 1713 to see an Englishman named Dr Daniel Waterhouse, who has founded "The Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts" (or, as it is known today, MIT). The novel is subdivided into three books. Quicksilver continues this historicisation of cyberculture's roots by tracing them to the 17th century. In his previous work, Cryptonomicon, he welded together two plots - one of codebreaking during the second world war one of the building of a contemporary "data haven" - to make an extraordinarily gripping and intellectually voracious whole.
Such is the implicit argument of Neal Stephenson's enormous new novel.
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