| Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson, 916 pages Steve Gadd 27 March 2007 Not one to coast on the success of his early work, Stephenson weighs in with a handwritten tome set in seventeenth-century Europe. Newton, Leibniz and other historical personages are minor characters, along with ancestors of various fictional characters from Cryptonomicon. While there is plenty of interesting material, one starts to feel that the novel itself is like the enciphered letters it quotes at length, in which five lines of text are required to convey one line of content. |