Neal Stephenson - Interview 7.9.2003

NS: I certainly don't think they turned into hardcore animal rights campaigners, or anything close to that, but I think after a while, they got a little bit sick of it and started to feel conflicted about what they were doing. So I've tried to show that ambivalence and complication in the book.

HC: These characters are also heavily involved in alchemy. Was that a primary activity for the Royal Society?

NS: Yeah. It started to come out in the 20th century that Newton had devoted more of his time and energy to alchemy during his career than he had devoted to mathematical physics. That's a fact that is obvious enough if you look at his papers--he made no particular effort to conceal this. But it was sort of suppressed a little bit during the Enlightenment and Victorian era, when people didn't know what to make of it. They wanted to view Newton as this paragon of the scientific method, and it was difficult to fit alchemy into that structure.

The view of more modern scholarship is that alchemy was all over the place. Robert Boyle was heavily involved in it, John Locke was involved in it, Newton of course, and quite a few of these other people. They didn't really observe a clean distinction between alchemy and what we now think of as the modern practice of science. I've tried to be as faithful as I can to the historical reality in the way that's depicted in the book.

HC: Language, and the uses of language, also figures prominently in Quicksilver. How does language work in the book to indicate social status, to keep secrets, to communicate more than what's on the surface?

NS: In this period, of course, England was not in the middle of things. It was this little rock up in a corner of the map. I'm exaggerating slightly, but it was certainly not the case that you could go to France or someplace in the Holy Roman Empire and encounter people who knew how to speak English. English was this minor language up in the corner of Europe, but it was a very vigorous language. I find admirable the way in which these people used the English language. For better or worse, it's crept into the way I use the language now. I much prefer the way they used English in 1680 to the Victorian style of prose, which seems really stuffy and indirect to me.

One of the odd consequences of this is that the English people who started the Royal Society didn't like Latin. They felt that the use of Latin in philosophical discourse was impeding progress. They wanted to get rid of it. But they couldn't with a straight face suggest that everyone use English, because it was this unknown language.

So one of them--John Wilkins, who later was the Bishop of Chester, and who more than anyone else was the founder of the Royal Society--created this artificial language. He hoped it would become the standard way that philosophers, by which he meant scientists, would communicate with each other. It's all set forth in a way that's supposed to be logical and orderly. Of course it failed. Hooke and Christopher Wren used it a little bit, but they were just about the only ones. But the development of this language plays a role in Quicksilver.