Neal Stephenson - Interview 7.9.2003

NS: Wilkins is another character that I personally feel a lot of affection for. One of the curious facts about Wilkins is that 20 years earlier, he had written a book on cryptography which David Kahn, the author of The Codebreakers, has described as the first book written on cryptology in the English language. When Wilkins was a younger man living in a war-torn England, he wrote a book about how to keep secrets in a bunch of different ways. how to send secret messages and hide information. But later in his life, when England had settled down a bit politically, he turned around and tried to achieve the opposite of that. To create a system of writing that would be sort of like an anti-code. It would be so clear and logical that you could understand what it was saying even if you weren't fluent in that language.

HC: What are some of the other links between Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon?

NS: The links are somewhat loose, so this is not one of these situations where you've got to read one of the books to make sense of the others. There's a gap of about 300 years between the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, and if you've read Cryptonomicon, you'll recognize some family names that are in common. You can infer that some of the families in the Baroque Cycle have descendents who show up later in Cryptonomicon. It's largely a family saga kind of connection. And then there's a character, Enoch Root, who possesses unnatural longevity and shows up in person in both of the books.

HC: So it is the same Enoch Root in both of the books?

NS: Yes.

HC: How does Quicksilver fit with the rest of the Baroque Cycle? Is it exactly one-third of it?

NS: Yes, it's about a third of the story. Quicksilver is divided internally into three separate books, and each of those books is short-to-medium novel length. So about a third of the way through the volume, everything sort of stops and you begin a new story with some new characters, and as you go on, it becomes clear that these characters are related to the events and characters in the other books.

In the second volume, which is called The Confusion, there are two separate books that are intertwined quite a bit. And in the third volume, which is going to be called The System of the World, there are going to be either two or three books, subdivided in the same way as in Quicksilver. The story will be fairly evenly divided among the three volumes.

HC: You've shown us in both Cryptonomicon and in Quicksilver, that you're not afraid to have fairly abrupt and dramatic things happen to characters, up to and including death. Should we avoid getting attached to our favorite characters?

NS: (laughs) By all means, get attached. Get totally attached. Yeah, I'm all in favor of getting attached. Even if it ends in tears, it's still a good thing.

You know that Daniel's still around in 1713, because there's a flash-forward in Quicksilver, where we see him as an old man in Boston in 1713. But Jack ends volume one in a pretty awkward situation, so...

HC: When can we hope to see the next volumes in the Baroque Cycle?

NS: They're coming out at six-month intervals, so April 2004 for The Confusion, and then October 2004 for The System of the World.

Conclusion:

We hope you've enjoyed this interview with Neal Stephenson. To read an excerpt from his latest novel, visit www.baroquecycle.com.