Worldcon, Monday

[tamaranth]

08/08/2005 | 10:00 | L(Dochart) | Finding the Fantastic in The Baroque Cycle | A much-lauded SF writer and computer scientist writes a meganovel on the emergence of the scientific method. Writes it with a fountain pen! But is the Baroque Cycle SF, or just fiction about science? | Tanya Brown, Paul Kincaid, Charles Stross
Didn't make notes during this panel; instead, I attempted to recreate it once I was on the train south. Hence, unable to distinguish who said what!

Is it fiction about science, or science fiction?
- clear indication of Stephenson's fascination with computing
- ok, written with a fountain pen, but only because he had a catastrophic disk crash and lost first draft ...
- Mary Gentle wrote 1610: A Sundial in a Grave by hand in an attempt to keep it short. 10 weeks, 280K!

The fantastic in the Baroque Cycle
- Enoch Root is only obviously fantastic at the start if you've read Cryptonomicon. He does show evidence of immortality / longevity later on, but not immediately and never explicitly
- the gold ...
- the understated miracle that happens to Newton and Waterhouse
- (TB) everything that seems fantastic -- vision of goat-headed Devil, glowing warriors, and so on) is explained rationally. It's what isn't explained that is The Fantastic.

Is it SF?
- yes, in terms of the freshness, the point of view, the mindset: the 'sensawunda'
- starts with a medieval mindset, finishes with an Enlightenment mindset
- it's about application of science (phosphorus grenades etc) as well as scientific method
- writing with SFnal voice
- style as well as content

Is it alternate history, amended history or played-with history?
- the CABAL -- same initials, different people (he needed Comstock, I reckon)
- more prominent role of Puritans in this universe than in reality
- PK says the presence of Benjamin Franklin right at the beginning of the book -- he's never mentioned again -- is an indicator that this is a particular sort of book.

Interconnections between Cryptonomicon and Baroque Cycle: phosphorus, Samurai swords, family names, Enoch Root

Information as currency -- and currency as a form of information.
CS: it's all about money. IN's role at the Mint was to equalise currency. (ref the fair at Cambridge.)
(I counted up the ways that information is conveyed from character to character -- sign language, solid gold punch cards, binary knitting, codes, flags, horseback messengers, the Armenian net-work ... -- and noted that, for a complete illiterate, Shaftoe is perfect example of someone who sidesteps an entire layer of information and still achieves power / success)

The 20th-century mindset of (some of) the characters.
CS: Eliza as time-traveller from The Diamond Age -- deliberately out of her own time in order to introduce sense of disjointedness
TB: no, she's a cyborg.
CS: is there any evidence for that?
TB: none whatsoever. But you know I'm right. ... Her cruelty and impassivity
CS: to whom? (a conversation I shall pick up in email)

CS and PK vastly irritated by Stephenson's invention of Qwghlm (though they don't object to Queena-Kootah).

De Gex as the anti-Stephenson -- capitalist and so on
Waterhouse as Stephenson -- continually questioning, son of a preacher

And some notes that we only came up with afterwards, like the Arhurian symbolism at the very end (dying kings, barges, attended by great ladies etc)

I trust that Mr Stross will be making his apologies for suggesting that a more appropriate title for Quicksilver would've been Daniel Waterhouse and the Philosopher's Stone ...



And then, after lazing around hoping that the people I hadn't seen would magically materialise in the coffee lounge, we set out for the long, long trek South ...