Heavy!

It's a sign of a great writer that when you reach the end of one of his 1,100 page novels, you find yourself wishing there was still more to read. That is how I felt when I reached the end of Neal Stephenson's superb novel, Cryptonomicon, and that is why I have eagerly dived into the first volume in his 4,000 page Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver. Most of the action in the novel is set in the 17th century and, just as in Cryptonomicon, several real historical personae appear in the book. Ben Franklin has already appeared, but it is clear that Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz and Sir Isaac Newton are going to be significant personages in this epic. Most of the main protagonists in Quicksilver are ancestors of the protagonists from Cryptonomicon, which is interesting in a Blackadder kind of way.

Not quite, but Almost Medieval.

".... I think I've died
About six hundred times.
There's less of me now and
More of me then.
I'm moving back to the Age of Men.


Jump off the tarmac, there's no
Stagecoach speed limit.
Outside the office hangs the man on the gibbet."