I found Quicksilver a bit slow to get into, although it certainly has
its moments; The Confusion is rather more rollicking.
Still waiting for whoever's got The System Of The World out of the
library to return it - could be a long wait, 'cos it's not a short
book!
At one level, the Baroque Cycle is Whig history - it's about the
development of commerce and technology, which are largely represented
as progressive forces, and it gestures in various ways towards - and
beyond - such modern innovations as the Internet.
It would be interesting to see Stephenson tackle the two major
critiques of that view of history - the Romantic critique of
technoscientific rationality, and the Marxist / Socialist critique of
the Whig theory of value (Tories think wealth comes from the land,
Whigs think it comes from trade and commerce, Socialists think it
comes from the labour of the workers).
Dominic
On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 16:31:04 -0000, Roger Collett
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Thanks, Dom for putting us on to Stephenson.
> I am just finishing Cryptonomicon and then will start to read Quicksilver.
>
> Roger
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Douglas Barbour" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 15, 2005 3:29 PM
> Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
>
> > Mari-Lou
> >
> > The Stephenson werke is worth reading, but it's three books, The
> > Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, & The System of the World)
> > more than 2500 pages long. I loved it, an historical fantasy on the
> > change from alchemy to science & the philosophical shifts that
> > accompanied that, with an adventure story of pirates, tough ladies,
> > European wars, competing philosophers (Newton vs Leibniz) etc. thrown
> > in. I think Stephenson tries to be accurate as to the thinking of those
> > 2 masters, but it is a fantastic fiction...
> >
> > Doug
> > On 14-Mar-05, at 3:01 PM, Mari-Lou Rowley wrote:
> >
> >> Dominic, Neal Stephenson's book sounds like a must read for me. I can't
> >> profess to be anything of an expert on Leibniz, but find his writings
> >> fascinating and prescient... as do a lot of computer
> >> scientists/mathematician I interview (the science writing that pays
> >> the
> >> bills.)
> >> So not only things like object-oriented programming, but
> >> aspect-oriented
> >> programming, ant colony optimization, of course nanotechnology.. an
> >> inherent intelligence in the code...
> >>
> >> Makes me thing of Steve McCaffery's work in monodology and poetics.
> >> Heard him here a few years ago. Now he's an expat Canadian, teaching in
> >> thePoetics Program, Department of English, SUNY-Buffalo
> >>
> >> So lots more to talk about but am on deadline and must "go under" for
> >> awhile...
> >>
> >> Cheers until I surface again
> >> ML
> >>
> >>
> >> Mari-Lou Rowley
> >> Pro-Textual Communications
> >> www.pro-textual.com
> >> Tel 604.708.8512
> >> Fax 604.708.8512
> >>
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and
> >> poetics [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Dominic Fox
> >> Sent: March 14, 2005 12:47 PM
> >> To: [log in to unmask]
> >> Subject: Re: Half Cocks: Abide With Me
> >>
> >> Thank you Mari-Lou. I have only the one small book of Leibniz's
> >> myself, but other sources - I was recently reading Neal Stephenson's
> >> _The Confusion_, in which Leibniz appears as a character and spends a
> >> certain amount of time explaining his monadology in terms that make it
> >> sound suspiciously like a precursor of various modern ideas in AI and
> >> even object-oriented programming (there's a line about monads
> >> maintaining some encapsulated internal state that could've come from
> >> any Smalltalk primer). Given Stephenson's geek credentials (he once
> >> wrote a book called _In the beginning was the command line_), this is
> >> undoubtedly no accident.
> >>
> >> Stephenson may or may not have known that the word "monad" has
> >> recently been adopted by computer scientists, via category theory, to
> >> denote a particular approach to handling effects in pure functional
> >> programming languages like Haskell.
> >>
> >> Leibniz himself can sound uncannily modern at times. Tell me this
> >> doesn't remind you of Derrida:
> >>
> >> "Also, when we consider well the connection of things, we can say that
> >> there are at all times in the soul of Alexander vestiges of all that
> >> has happened to him and the marks of all that will happen to him, and
> >> even traces of all that happens in the universe, although it belongs
> >> only to God to recognise them all" (Discourse on Metaphysics, section
> >> VIII)
> >>
> >> Derrida's vestiges, marks and traces are more fleeting, of course, and
> >> one wonders whether even the divine Understanding could recapitulate
> >> them.
> >>
> >> There are other Half Cocks in the archives, or on my website here:
> >> http://codepoetics.com/half_cocks/poem.html
> >>
> >> Dominic
> >>
> >> --
> >> // Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
> >> // bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
> >>
> >>
> >
> >
> > Douglas Barbour
> > Department of English
> > University of Alberta
> > Edmonton Alberta T6G 2E5 Canada
> > (780) 436 3320
> > http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/dbhome.htm
> >
> > Speech
> > is a mouth.
> >
> > Robert Creeley
> >
> > --
> > This email has been verified as Virus free
> > Virus Protection and more available at http://www.plus.net
>
--
// Alas, this comparison function can't be total:
// bottom is beyond comparison. - Oleg Kiselyov
|