Neal Stephenson - Interview 7.9.2003

NS: Many trips to the office supply store, and many failed attempts. But in the end, as long as you can keep it in your head, that's the easiest way to manage something like this. You can move things around inside your head more easily than you can shuffle papers or cross things out on a page and rewrite them.

HC: You mentioned earlier that you didn't really do a lot of historical research for this book, but some of the places that you describe--such as Amsterdam--are so richly detailed in the book. Did you travel as part of your research?

NS: I'm drawing a distinction here between what a real researcher would consider research and what a novelist calls research. So I did a lot of research in the sense of reading books and visiting some places. But none of it would be recognized by a Ph.D. history student as legitimate research.

I visited several locations and sometimes that worked, and sometimes it didn't. It's a hit or miss proposition. To give you one example, the headquarters of the Royal Society eventually moved to a place called Crane Court, which is off of Fleet Street in London. In the final volume of the cycle, we see some action at Crane Court. So I went there when I was in London, and found the street, and walked to the end of it, which is where the headquarters were. It's sealed off by this wall of blue glass--it's this modern office structure that they've just slammed down across the end of this street. Sometimes you get lucky, and you find a building that's still standing there, and that looks the same as it did 300 years ago, and other times you find nothing at all.


HC: Quicksilver contains some anachronisms, mostly of speech. Obviously, you've put them in there on purpose. How do you decide to use anachronism? And why?

NS: A person writing a historical, swashbuckler, potboiler epic in 2003 can't pretend that this is the first such book that's ever been written. People have been writing such books for hundreds of years. The classic example would be the works of Dumas. The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and so on. If you go back and look at those books, you can see that they are partly historically correct, or as close as one can come to that. But they are also partly a product of their times. When you read a Victorian swashbuckler novel set 200 years earlier, you can tell that it's a Victorian novel. It's got all this stuff in there that only Victorians would have put in. The literary style is Victorian, the diction is Victorian. And that's true, mutatis mutandis, for any historical novel written in any period.

I never tried to entertain the illusion that I was going to write something that had no trace of the 20th century or the 21st century in it. It's a given that a book is going to reflect the time in which it is written. I didn't feel a strong compulsion to avoid such anachronisms, and if something came up that I thought might be funny, or that might work, I would just go ahead and slap it in there.

HC: Some of the more colorful characters in your book are Hooke and the other members of the Royal Society who do things like vivisection that are quite disturbing. Was that what the real Royal Society was like at that time?

NS: As far as I can tell, that's what it was like. I mean, their records of vivisection experiments are very clear. There's no getting around the fact that they did that kind of stuff, so in a sense the easy thing would be to just reproduce that in the story and show these guys as really cruel vivisectionists. If you read the records of the Royal Society and what they were doing in the 1660s, it's clear that at a certain point, some of these people--and I think Hooke was one of them--became a little bit disgusted with themselves and began excusing themselves when one of these vivisections was going to happen.

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