Turning to page 1 of the acknowledgments of Quicksilver, initial 900+ page installment (finally out in paperback) in Neal Stephenson’s multi-volume Baroque Cycle, I can’t help but think it is unnecessarily coy, if not more then a little smug, to refer to the oncoming 3000 or so pages of fiction that the reader has graciously put themselves into the path of as “a discursive footnote”.

Having however made it as far as page 75 last night, I have to say I have no idea where he is going with all this, and it is far and away Stephenson’s best writing to date. If it weren’t for the faint whiffs of science fiction lingering in the air hinting at unseen, and unapproved forces at work, I imagine it would be canonicalized on the spot. Stephenson’s technique of dry observational narration that barely conceals the narrator’s cosmic, and sometimes rather low humor works startlingly well transplanted from its science fiction origins to an Enlightenment period piece. That all said I’m approximately 2.5% (assuming the next 2 volumes will be ballasts of equal size, and leaving asides the obscured relationship with Cryptonomicon), so it could go anywhere from here.

Lastly it is interesting to note that Stephenson has finally found a solution to his endings (or lack thereof) problem. Logic dictates that in a physical object, like a book, with a front and a back, no matter how thin you make the pages (and they are very thin indeed) there must be a finite number of them. However Stephenson seems to be working from an entirely new insight that as the number of pages in a work asymptotically approaches infinity the ending (or lack thereof) becomes less important then simply concluding. It will be interesting to see if this revolutionary new technique allows him to overcome his historical difficulties in this regard.