Philosophic Mercury

The System of the World is the final and thickest part of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. The book takes some time to get going. What the first part, Quicksilver, started with—namely that Daniel Waterhouse is requested to return to England from Massachusetts—finally succeeds after 2,000 pages. Daniel Waterhouse arrives in England, and this is where the story picks up.

Although I always found the Waterhouse storyline in the previous books to be one of the most intriguing, I struggled to get into it this time. It took 400 pages before the book gained any momentum for me.

Even after that, it feels like a flickering flame, with highlights that illuminate the story, interspersed with endless descriptions of buildings, machines, and whatnot. However, this is somewhat inherent to Stephenson’s writing style, and I’m not sure if this book is an exception compared to the previous volumes. While I didn’t mind this at all in the first two parts, it did pull me out of my reading flow this time.

The highlight of the book for me is the discourse between Newton and Leibniz about calculus and, one layer deeper, the Philosophic Mercury. Stephenson brings the philosophical dispute, which plays a role throughout the entire Cycle, to life in the meeting between Newton and Leibniz. This meeting, by the way, never actually took place, but the calculus controversy did. Thirty pages full of fascinating worldviews and the system that drives the world. It’s impressive how Stephenson creates the illusion that you’re truly viewing things from a 17th-century perspective.

In the end, Stephenson wraps up the story elegantly with the addition of magical realism elements.

The journey of the Baroque Cycle is unique, something only Neal Stephenson can bring to a successful conclusion. Although I found this the weakest book of the three, it’s still worth 4.5 stars. An absolute recommendation!