A review of Quicksilver, which I’m immersed in now: “Stephenson clearly never intended Quicksilver to be one of those meticulously accurate historical novels that capture ways of thought of times gone by. Instead, it explores the philosophical concerns of today — or at least, the philosophical concerns of Stephenson. At its best, the novel does this through thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot twists. My favorite example is a section toward the end, when Eliza travels east on a spying mission and writes letters to one ambiguous ally in a many-layered code, knowing they will be intercepted and partly decoded by an ambiguous enemy, then further decoded by someone else.

But the novel is so swollen and overloaded that these delightful Stephensonian offerings are hard to follow — and even hard to identify. And ”Quicksilver” suffers from a problem common in parts of trilogies: it feels unresolved. Will it turn out to be the first third of a carefully constructed meta-novel, or a messy chunk of a bigger mess? Is it complex, or merely random? Only the next couple of thousand pages will say for sure.” — Polly Shulman, a freelance writer in New York, NY Times