- Shopping Bag ( 0 items )
In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves — including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox — devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger — a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe.
Meanwhile, back in Europe ...
The exquisite and resourceful Eliza, Countess de la Zeur, master of markets, pawn and confidante of enemy kings, onetime Turkish harem virgin, is stripped of her immense personal fortune by France's most dashing privateer. Penniless and at risk from those who desire either her or her head (or both), she is caught up in a web of international intrigue, even as she desperately seeks the return of her most precious possession — her child.
While ...
Newton and Leibniz continue to propound their grand theories as their infamous rivalry intensifies, stubborn alchemy does battle with the natural sciences, nobles are beheaded, dastardly plots are set in motion, coins are newly minted (or not) in enemy strongholds, father and sons reunite in faraway lands, priests rise from the dead ... and Daniel Waterhouse seeks passage to the Massachusetts colony in hopes of escaping the madness into which his world has descended.
The two primary story lines revolve around Jack Shaftoe, the infamous King of the Vagabonds, and Eliza, a seductive spy who is both puppet-master and pawn to powerful alchemists, cryptographers, and kings. The novel begins with Jack a half-insane, pox-infected galley slave aboard a pirate ship. He and a cabal of ten ingenious slaves engineer a wild plot to win their freedom -- and untold fortunes. The complicated scheme -- which involves stealing an enormous cache of silver bound for Spain -- succeeds beyond their wildest dreams; but instead of thieving a hoard of silver, the cabal now possesses gold: "not just any gold, but gold imbued with miraculous -- even divine -- qualities."
Meanwhile, Eliza -- a former slave -- finds herself penniless once again in France and must use intellect and cunning to save herself and her children from certain death. Her primary objective is to seek vengeance on the man who forced her into slavery, but fate intervenes at the most inopportune moment…
With the swashbuckling action and the quixotic ambiance of Alexandre Dumas classics such as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, the page-turning intrigue of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and a cast of characters to rival any Harry Turtledove epic, Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is destined to rank among the most ambitious historical sagas ever written. Wildly engaging, richly described and delectably complex, The Confusion is a storytelling masterwork. Paul Goat Allen
Here is a novelist who talks about the "data management problem" of writing a historical novel, and who apologizes for not responding to fan mail by explaining that he has an "irremediable numerical imbalance between outgoing and incoming bandwidth."
Indeed, Stephenson seems to have a computer metaphor for almost every aspect of the writing life, even when he's not using a computer to write. He wrote the manuscript for Quicksilver in longhand, using a fountain pen. With this slower method of putting words to paper, he explained in an interview with Tech Central Station, "It's like when you're writing, there's a kind of buffer in your head where the next sentence sits while you're outputting the last one."
"Paper," Stephenson adds, is "a really good technology."
As the author of Snow Crash, Stephenson became a cult hero to cyberpunk fans and an inspiration to Silicon Valley start-ups. His Metaverse was the Internet as cutting-edge carnival, a freewheeling digital universe where a pizza-delivery driver could become a samurai warrior. "This is cyberpunk as it ought to be, and almost never is," wrote David Barrett in New Scientist.
Stephenson followed Snow Crash with The Diamond Age, which Publishers Weekly described as "simultaneously SF, fantasy and a masterful political thriller." Stephenson then broke out of the science fiction genre with Cryptonomicon, a 928-page doorstop of a book that drew comparisons to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Cryptonomicon interweaves two cryptography-themed plots, one set in the 1990s and the other during World War II. "What cyberculture needs right now is not another science-fiction novel but its first great historical novel, and Cryptonomicon is it: an intimate genealogical portrait of the 20th century's computer geeks, great and small, and of the technosocial landscape they have more and less knowingly shaped," wrote Julian Dibbell in The Village Voice.
Hefty though it is, Cryptonomicon is a quick read compared to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which begins with Quicksilver and continues in two more volumes, The Confusion and The System of the World.
In Quicksilver, a historical novel set in the 17th century, Stephenson explores many of the roots of modern science, mixing meditations on calculus, chemistry and cryptography with a cast of oddball characters (and many of the real-life historical figures, including Isaac Newton, turn out to be very odd indeed).
"At first it feels like Stephenson is flaunting how much time he spent at the library, but the lure of the next wisecracking history lesson becomes the most compelling reason to keep going," wrote Slate reviewer Paul Boutin.
So how did Stephenson manage all that historical data?
"I started with a bunch of notebooks, just composition books, in which I would write notes down in chronological order as I read a particular book, or what have you," he explained in an interview on his publisher's Web site.
"Those are always there, and I can go back to them and look stuff up even when it's otherwise lost. Then, I've got timelines and timetables showing what happens when in the story. I've spent a while monkeying around with three ring binders, in which I glue pages here and there trying to figure out how to sequence things. It's a big mess. It's a big pile of stationery. Many trips to the office supply store, and many failed attempts. But in the end, as long as you can keep it in your head, that's the easiest way to manage something like this. You can move things around inside your head more easily than you can shuffle papers or cross things out on a page and rewrite them."
The three-pound processor inside the author's head, as it turns out, is a really good technology.
Stephenson co-wrote two political thrillers, Interface and The Cobweb, under the pseudonym Stephen Bury with his uncle George Jewsbury (whose own nom de plume is J. Frederick George). "The whole idea was that 'Stephen Bury' would be a successful thriller writer and subsidize my pathetic career under the name Neal Stephenson," he told Locus magazine. "It ended up going the other way. I would guess most of the people who have bought the Stephen Bury books have done so because they know I've written them. It just goes to show there's no point in trying to plan your career."
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line, Stephenson's book-length essay on computer operating systems, complains that graphical user interfaces distort the user's understanding of computer operations. On his current Web site, Stephenson dubs the essay "badly obsolete" and notes: "For the last couple of years I have been a Mac OX user almost exclusively."
October 1689
He was not merely awakened, but detonated out of an uncommonly long and repetitive dream. He could not remember any of the details of the dream now that it was over. But he had the idea that it had entailed much rowing and scraping, and little else; so he did not object to being roused. Even if he had been of a mind to object, he'd have had the good sense to hold his tongue, and keep his annoyance well-hid beneath a simpering merry-Vagabond façade. Because what was doing the waking, today, was the most tremendous damned noise he'd ever heard -- it was some godlike Force not to be yelled at or complained to, at least not right away.
Cannons were being fired. Never so many, and rarely so large, cannons. Whole batteries of siege-guns and coastal artillery discharging en masse, ranks of 'em ripple-firing along wall-tops. He rolled out from beneath the barnacle-covered hull of a beached ship, where he had apparently been taking an afternoon nap, and found himself pinned to the sand by a downblast of bleak sunlight. At this point a wise man, with experience in matters military, would have belly-crawled to some suitable enfilade. But the beach all round him was planted with hairy ankles and sandaled feet; he was the only one prone or supine.
Lying on his back, he squinted up through the damp, sand-caked hem of a man's garment: a loose robe of open-weave material that laved the wearer's body in a gold glow, so that he could look directly up into the blind eye of the man's penis -- which had been curiously modified. Inevitably, he lost this particular stare-down. He rolled back the other way, performing one and a half uphill revolutions, and clambered indignantly to his feet, forgetting about the curve of the hull and therefore barking his scalp on a phalanx of barnacles. Then he screamed as loud as he could, but no one heard him. He didn't even hear himself. He experimented with plugging his ears and screaming, but even then he heard naught but the sound of the cannons.
Time to take stock of matters -- to bring the situation in hand. The hull was blocking his view. Other than it, all he could see was a sparkling bay, and a stony break-water. He strode into the sea, watched curiously by the man with the mushroom-headed yard, and, once he was out knee-deep, turned around. What he saw then made it more or less obligatory to fall right on his arse.
This bay was spattered with bony islets, close to shore. Rising from one of them was a squat round fortress that (if he was any judge of matters architectural) had been built at grand expense by Spaniards in desperate fear of their lives. And apparently those fears had been well founded because the top of that fort was all fluttery with green banners bearing silver crescent moons. The fort had three tiers of guns on it (more correctly, the fort was three tiers of guns) and every one of 'em looked, and sounded, like a sixty-pounder, meaning that it flung a cannonball the size of a melon for several miles. This fort was mostly shrouded in powder-smoke, with long bolts of flame jabbing out here and there, giving it the appearance of a thunderstorm that had been rammed and tamped into a barrel.
A white stone breakwater connected this fort to the mainland, which, at first glance, impressed him as a sheer stone wall rising forty or feet from this narrow strip of muddy beach, and crowded with a great many more huge cannons, all being fired just as fast as they could be swabbed out and stuffed with powder.
Beyond the wall rose a white city. Being as he was at the base of a rather high wall, he wouldn't normally expect to be able to see anything on the opposite side thereof, save the odd cathedral-spire poking out above the battlements. But this city appeared to've been laboriously spackled onto the side of a precipitous mountain whose slopes rose directly from the high-tide mark. It looked a bit like a wedge of Paris tilted upwards by some tidy God who wanted to make all the shit finally run out of it. At the apex, where one would look for whatever crowbar or grapple the hypothetical God would've used to accomplish this prodigy, was, instead, another fortress -- this one of a queer Moorish design, surrounded with its own eight-sided wall that was, inevitably, a-bristle with even more colossal cannons, as well as mortars for heaving bombs out to sea. All of those were being fired, too -- as were all of the guns spraying from the several additional fortresses, bastions, and gun-platforms distributed around the city's walls.
During rare intervals between the crushing thuds of the sixty-pounders, he could hear peppery waves of pistol-and-musket-fire rolling around the place, and now (beginning to advert on smaller things) he saw a sort of smoky, crowded lawn growing out of the wall-tops -- save instead of grass-blades this lawn was made up of men. Some were dressed in black, and some in white, but most wore more colorful costumes: baggy white trousers belted with brilliantly hued swathes of silk, and brightly embroidered vests -- frequently, several such vests nested -- and turbans or red cylindrical hats. Most of those who were dressed after this fashion had a pistol in each hand and were firing them into the air or reloading.
The man with the outlandish johnson -- swarthy, with wavy black hair in a curious 'do, and a knit skullcap -- hitched up his robe, and sloshed out to see if he was all right. For he still had both hands clamped over the sides of his head, partly to stanch the bleeding of the barnacle-gashes, and partly to keep the sound from blowing the top of his skull out to sea.
The Confusion LTD. Copyright © by Neal Stephenson. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.f
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.6893481
Posted April 3, 2011
Great characters, great story, moves your mind thru this period of history like a winning hockey puck. Very funny very slick
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted September 19, 2009
I can't imagine one writer putting this together. This is the most powerful read I have ever experienced. At times I was engrossed and other times totally frustrated. His verbosity is method to his madness. Keep at it, you will not be dissapointed. And keep your tongue in your cheek while reading this historical unravelling of fact and fiction.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted July 20, 2004
I enjoyed Quicksilver immensely though I found some of the portions relating the tale of Waterhouse to be tedious. I was pleasantly surprised to find that in Confusion he dispensed with that storyline and integrated it as a background thread in the the continuing story of Eliza. This novel picks up shortly after Quicksilver and basically continues the same themes and characters. The biggest difference is that the book is paced much better and the story is more action packed and less cluttered with monotonous diatribes by Newton and such. The rollicking adventures of Jack Shaftoe are both amusing and poignant and the machiavellian machinations of Eliza are sinfully entertaining. All in all a phenominal sequel to a very enjoyable book and I hope that the third will move farther in this direction and away from the oft tiresome alchemical and political ramblings that ate up half of the first novel (which though enjoyable, came across as dry at times).
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 28, 2004
The pace picks up considerably in this continuation of the intertwined stories of Jack Shaftoe, Daniel Waterhouse, and Eliza, Countess de la Zeur. The plot set in motion in Quicksilver continues to twist into fiendishly complex patterns. Piracy and quests, political and financial intrigue, and the evolution of scientific thought; you¿ll find all of this and more in the hefty second volume of the Baroque Cycle. Read Quicksilver first in order to not be confused by The Confusion. Jack Shaftoe, now a galley slave in Algiers, joins a conspiracy to pirate a Spanish treasure and escape slavery. He and nine other oar-mates embark on their adventure burdened with Jack¿s usual mix of good and bad luck. Sea battles, land battles and general havoc follow the cabal of misfits across oceans and continents. Daniel has a smaller role in this volume, but the role of Jack¿s more socially integrated brother Bob waxes into a remarkable war-filled journey to free his enslaved love, Abigail. Eliza, in the meantime, has lost her fortune and her firstborn son and must tread carefully to keep her head amid the perils of the French court. Eliza works to recover her son and wreak havoc on the financial markets of Europe. Jack¿s adventures from South America to Japan and Eliza¿s maneuverings in Europe draw you along at breathtaking speed with enough momentum to propel you through the 800+ pages. The pace rarely falters and Stephenson continues to make even the secondary characters interesting. He also maintains the obvious attention to research and detail found in Quicksilver. The Confusion neatly sets the scene for the third and final book as divergent plots start to converge, and I can¿t wait to see where Stephenson will take us next.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted May 19, 2004
Neal Stephenson's The Confusion, or volume two of his 'Baroque Cycle,' is a big damn book - at 815 pages, is 100 shorter than its predecessor 'Quicksilver,' and yet with more straightforward plot feels at times longer. Packed to the brim with historical, financial, political, and anthropological detail, and stuffed with roaring action on land and at sea, 'The Confusion' delivers everything one expects from a writer as consistently inventive as Neal Stephenson. He challenges readers, dares them to invest in a dauntingly massive tale, yet possesses the knack of knowing exactly when a reasonably intelligent reader will become bored and injects delicious international intrigue or blazing adventure. 'The Confusion' is two novels - the first, 'Bonanza,' follows the swashbuckling adventures of Jack Shaftoe, as he joins a band of ten ex-slaves to steal a cache of gold and become international quicksilver merchants; the second, 'The Juncto,' a bit more stolidly follows Countess Eliza de la Zeur through her myriad political and financial machinations as she witnesses the monetary disaster than is both France and England. Take your time with this novel, but enjoy it - like its predecessor, it's a rollicking, winsomely entertaining read, with a little of everything for every taste.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted June 14, 2004
One of the great strengths of 'Quicksilver', Neal Stephenson's first instalment in his 'Baroque Cycle', was its abilty to inform as well as entertain. Against the backdrop of the Reformation and Glorious Revolution, the author has assembled a colourful collection of larger-than-life characters, some wholly fictitious, some heavily embroidered, and some quite possibly frighteningly close to the real persons. It is a testament to Stephenson's strength as a story-teller that he is able to provide such incredible detail of the the historically verifiable events of this era without the story lapsing into a history lecture. In the opening chapters of 'The Confusion', Stephenson's story veers into some less well-known aspects of late 17th Century European history, and as a result the balance between rattling good yarn and history lesson shifts perceptibably towards the latter. However, with the help of the series' most colourful character, 'Half-cocked' Jack Shaftoe, the story is soon racing along at a cracking pace, with some of the most breath-taking swashbuckling ever committed to print. From there on, the story proceeds in leaps and bounds, throwing together enough action and romance to satisfy the most jaded palate, tempered with cerebal excursions into the theory of economics, chemistry, metallurgy and the genealogy of the various European royal families. All this, plus a dramatic twist at the end which opens the door for countless developments in the next installment. I can't wait.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 3, 2004
The Confusion Neal Stephenson Morrow, Apr 2004, $27.95, 815 pp. ISBN: 0060523867 In 1689 off the Barbary Coast, a slightly insane Jack Shaftoe is one of a crew of slaves rowing a pirate¿s ship when a plan to escape surface. The ten pull off their stunt and take with them some Spanish loot that turns out to be special gold that alchemists mixed with¿divine¿ qualities......................................... At the same time that the ¿King of the Vagabonds¿ and cohorts make their escape with the gold, the woman he once rescued from a harem, Eliza looks forward to one day living peacefully raising her child while also planning to retaliate against the rogue who ¿sold¿ her to the Ottomans. However sailing the Mediterranean can prove dangerous and Eliza is too skilled an operator for the French to allow her to rusticate or urbanize in London. Instead she is drafted to help the Sun King and crafts an intricate deal to obtain money so that the French-Irish army can invade England.................................... THE CONFUSION is actually two Baroque tales interwoven (literally as the perspective predominantly shifts between Eliza and Jack and to a lesser degree the Juncto (Leibniz, Newton, etc.). The twin story lines are very amusing action-adventure tales in which both are superb, but Jack¿s swashbuckling is incredible. There is no doubt that this epic historical action thriller provides a wonderful witty winner as Neal Stephenson paints a masterly look back as he did in QUICKSILVER......................... Harriet Klausner
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted April 14, 2004
Stephenson proves here (again!) that he is equally at home with semi-historical epics and futuristic tech novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. His only competition with the tech novels is John Robert Marlow's NANO. With the semi-historical books, Stephenson has no competition...
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted February 5, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 22, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted October 8, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 18, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted March 18, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 15, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted September 30, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted January 21, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted December 14, 2009
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted March 31, 2011
No text was provided for this review.
Anonymous
Posted July 8, 2010
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
In the year 1689, a cabal of Barbary galley slaves — including one Jack Shaftoe, a.k.a. King of the Vagabonds, a.k.a. Half-Cocked Jack, lately and miraculously cured of the pox — devises a daring plan to win freedom and fortune. A great adventure ensues, rife with battles, chases, hairbreadth escapes, swashbuckling, bloodletting, and danger — a perilous race for an enormous prize of silver ... nay, gold ... nay, legendary gold that will place the intrepid band at odds with the mighty and the mad, with alchemists, Jesuits, great navies, pirate queens, and vengeful despots across vast oceans and around the globe.
...