This is an archive page. What you are looking at was posted sometime between 2000 and 2014. For more recent material, see the main blog at http://laboratorium.net

Now, of late, I've been seeing actual grammatical English text in place of the gibberish now and then. Thus:

Which, of course, raises the question: where are they getting these passages for their spam-steganograph? Thanks to Google, now we know.

The bit above, for example, is from The Story of Tangalimlibo, which is apparently a Xhosa folktale. I hadn't realized that the Xhosa were so into cyber-hucksterism. But have a look at this next one:

Leaving aside the obvious pharmaceutical pitches, the fragments in this one, in order, are from:

• Frankenstein
• (unknown)
• The Art of War
• A History of Science
• Frankenstein (again)
• A History of Science (again)
• Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
• The American Republic

Let's hear it for the public domain, eh?

I liked it.

It's hard to call this book a novel. Even at 900+ pages, it's missing normal novel traits such as a recognizeable plot. It wasn't clear to me until I was on around page 700 that the "Baroque Cycle" (of which Quicksilver is the first third) is really just one William Vollman-length book, rather than three linked Neal Stephenson-length books.

Quicksilver opens in the early 1700s with a couple of scenes that set up what looks like the beginnings of a classic adventure story: our hero is called out of retirement for one last mission. There's a brief digression while he flashes back to the 1660s to set up his back-story . . . and then the digression eats the novel whole: there's nothing but flashback.

So okay, no plot. Reviewers have also been ripping Stephenson apart for anachronism, cartoonish violence, adolescent sexuality, and his frequent discursive asides on silver-making, the London Bridge, Cartesian dynamics, and so on.

Me, I more or less take these for granted. That what you get with a Stephenson book. You know you're going to get an earful on the mysteries of currency speculation; you know you're going to have to deal with a scene in which the plucky heroine is threatened with rape and does something plucky about it. Such is the price of admission.

For that price, you get plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, because Stephenson is a brilliant stylist. He knows how to throw a paragraph together so that the sentences pile on with sublime absurdity. I expected plenty of these moments; I wasn't disappointed.

But I also got something extra: for once in his career, Neal Stephenson has created a fully-rounded protagonist, a credible character with an appealing complexity. This from a man, mind you, who named the lead of one of his earlier novels "Hiro Protagonist."

Daniel Waterhouse, the figure at the center of Quicksilver is an indifferent Puritan during the flamboyant Restoration, an average scientist in the company of geniuses, a mid-level notable at a court of schemers and fops. He is a man caught up in intellectual, religious, and political currents far beyond his control, and something of a coward. But he has a pensive thoughtfulness that Stephenson develops wonderfully, and over the slow course of the novel, what at first seems like a dull passivity becomes a more subtle form of courage.

Quicksilver is, in its non-novelistic way, an attempt at tying together the various forms of turmoil that defined the 17th century, and using Waterhouse as a vantage point for this business succeeds quite handily. There are other, more picaresque, parts to the narrative, ones with more adventure and thrills, but I found them less memorable. It's Waterhouse's slow growth -- and the emphasis is on slow, in a book of this length -- that really works.

But, man, why did no one on your staff point out that it might be a bad idea to send out a picture of you standing next to a giant "Road Closed" sign?

No kidding.

Gnutella can withstand a band of hungry lawyers. How many realtime search engines can claim that? Not Napster, that's for sure. Just to emphasize how revolutionary this is: hungry lawyers are probably more destructive than nuclear weapons.

In many ways, then, the theory of a sovereign Cyberspace was a theory of class. The idea of Cyberspace as a sovereign bestowed a privilege on Cyberspace residents -- it allowed them to ignore laws, especially intellectual property laws, that the rest of society remained bound to follow. It falls into a category of efforts, familiar through history, to use a worthy sounding idea to preserve the special status of an established elite. It is in this need to exclude that we find where the true borders of Cyberspace were, and what they did. For years, it was the barriers created by technological knowledge that kept everyone but a small group from sharing in the opportunities of the Internet. UNIX was the Latin of the Internet. And so for a long time it was in a sense true that Cyberspace was a place, yet for all the wrong reasons. It was a place only because it was difficult to get to.