I just finished reading The System of the World, the final volume of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. It took me 3 years, nearly half as long as the author took to write it, although admittedly I was hardly reading it full-time.

The cycle is a vast, sprawling mess. It’s set in and around 17th century London, and other exotic locations. The pages give a filthy, rotten, accurate account of life without modernity, from muddy battlefields and corpse-wading in Ireland and galley-slavery in the Mediterranean, to the climactic jailbreak out through London’s monumentally filthy sewers, busting up out of a whorehouse bog. The pages almost stink. It’s great.

The major characters are folks such as the Duke of Marlborough, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and the Hanoverian royal family, but that doesn’t stop Neal Stephenson from indulging in characteristic all-out geekery, naming a character after a UNIX command. The story may be set 300 years ago, and the author may overindulge in lurid descriptions of medieval swashbuckling, but it is nevertheless Science Fiction. This is quite remarkable, because only a single element of the entire plot is non-real; Stephenson has written a non-SF book in the style of a SF book. As a sort-of-prequel to Cryptonomicon, the geekery is required. There is a cross-stitch-based cryptosystem, steampunk computation, prior art to general relativity, and even what may be a sly reference to BitTorrent.

I bought all three volumes as they were released, years ago. They’re gigantic, hefty Tomes with gorgeous painted covers, and boy do they look beautiful on a bookshelf. I expect that’s where they’ll stay from now on. The series is 3,000 pages long - twice the length of War and Peace, another summer reading project (except that one only took one summer). These books are astonishing achievements, but my verdict is ultimately the same for both: they’re 5-10 times longer than an average book, but not 5-10 times better. If the author could’ve swallowed a little pride and hired a more ruthless editor (was there even a non-ruthless editor?), the dozens of incredibly clever, interesting, funny, and enlightening passages could’ve met each other without being separated by what ended up being the novel’s crucial flaw: too many words.