The System of the World

ISBN: 978-0060750862

Paging back through this site, the first review in this three part book series was posted in November of 2023. Though it was not seven months of steady reading, it does speak to the size and scope of the series. Roughly 3,000 pages are what Stephenson wrote to tell this story.

Sometimes, one feels that some of those pages were wasted in displaying the research that was so assiduously conducted on the layout of buildings like the Old Bailey or Newgate Prison. On the other hand, these details do make the series have a more immersive sensation since it is clear that Stephenson is not simply writing about these places, but has obviously been to them.

The haunting refrain in this particular book concerns the Quicksilver that Daniel Waterhouse finds himself still concerned with, although most all the Alchemists have exited the scene and what remains is a new kind of Alchemy which no longer mentions items like the Philosopher’s stone. Instead, everything has taken on a different shape in the form of currency and technology. The person at the center of this new machinery is none other than Issac Newton. Newton has been relegated to overseer of the mint where all the new coins of England are to be made. Jack Shaftoe, however, now “Jack the Coiner” has been sent by the King of France to spoil this plan, and has resources in the form of the sought after Alchemical gold of Solomon.

This new system, is of course, supposed to change the entirety of the world and only one person, Princess Sophia, has a vision of the consequences if it happens to be somehow wrongly conceived. The form that vision assumes is a globe consumed by fire and left as a lifeless, black orb.

Throughout the work, each character is driven by something that they are not going to get on the terms that they want. The Solomonic gold is wanted by Newton, for instance, but he finds himself unable to get it and is instead having to work against it since his adversary is using it to undermine the currency he is developing. Jack Shaftoe really only wants to be with the Duchess, but it seems that the only thing he can do is get himself bogged down with people that have other motives that want to use him and the gold he has access to for their own ends. Peter Hoxton, a thief of watches who turns assistant to Daniel Waterhouse, really only wants to steal enough to make some money but instead winds up ensnared in a form of Apocalyptic timeline that Waterhouse was raised to believe would happen. Instead, Waterhouse becomes an atheist from interacting with the arising sciences that develop.

Throughout the novel there is speculation about what true gold is, what good it is to anyone, what Alchemy is and where does it begin and where does it end. Waterhouse summarizes near the end of the tome for us adroitly:

“It has been my view for some years that a new System of the World is being created around us. I used to suppose that it would drive out and annihilate any older Systems. But things I have seen recently, in the subterranean places beneath the Bank, have convinced me that new Systems never replace old ones, but only surround and encapsulate them, even as, under a microscope, we may see that living within our bodies are animalcules, smaller and simpler than us, and yet thriving even as we thrive.”

Indeed, the novel is full of one system foreshadowing another which leads to the next round of alliances, fallouts, and treachery.

While the Industrial Revolution begins to take off, the problem of slavery still looms. While the idea of a computer develops between the warring parties of both Newton and Leibniz, the practicality of how to achieve it is still distant as the “underground river” has not matured enough to allow for the kinds of inventions necessary to make these technical marvels a full reality. While there are fortunes to be made, there is money to be lost as monarchies rise and fall and alliances change. Timing, climate, finance, trade. All of these variables are constantly changing and being reassessed.

Stephenson masterfully tells the tale, but at times it requires the reader to do a bit too much work. Some passages require several readings to infer that an obvious event has happened. This is part of Stephenson’s style, but the oblique references are sometimes a bit too understated, and so one will read along to discover that they missed some subtle nuance that changes the course of the reading. Oftentimes, the nuance is not present until a future chapter, and so one spends time trying to figure out things that have not yet been fully revealed but are being instead hinted toward. A little of this, of course, makes for interesting reading whereas too much proves frustrating. One needs the message to be direct enough that a casual reading is sufficient to parse the message, unless one wishes to be read in college literature analysis courses. Perhaps that is partly Stephenson’s goal, but it seems doubtful. Put differently, the work is brilliant, but it would be more brilliant if the author tried to be less brilliant. Jack Shaftoe ought to point the way on how to do that.

Concerning the ending of this series, there are many things one could say. It definitely feels like a conclusion to a long, winding adventure. The pieces fit together well enough, and it is nice to see how the characters resolve their outstanding issues. Like the trial of the Pyx, the device used to make sure the currency of England is sound, we have a sense in which everyone is being “weighed” in the balance and that the conclusion will be final when the measurement is made. Probably, anyone who has read the series feels a little like Doctor Waterhouse at the end. Of course, that feeling might be tempered by the fact that Stephenson has left us a System of Writing about the World, and while it might not be perfect, it is better that the tale was told and exists than having no System at all. The only trouble is, one never knows what else is hidden in the walls of Bedlam, or in what language whatever is found might be written in should it chance to be discovered.

Perhaps, the System of the World is thinly controlled insanity and the only outcome, when the Solomonic Gold is divorced from God, is for it to burn with a fever until the dreamers are snapped out of their sickened reveries. If so, The System of the World is definitively an attempt to tell the tale while the body hallucinates.