Quicksilver (Quicksilver, Part 1)

In which Daniel Waterhouse, fearless thinker and courageous Puritan, pursues knowledge in the company of the greatest minds of Baroque-era Europe — in a chaotic world where reason wars with the bloody ambitions of the mighty, and where catastrophe, natural or otherwise, can alter the political landscape overnight.

The New York Times

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...At its best, the novel does this through thrillingly clever, suspenseful and amusing plot twists.—Polly Shulman

A decade after novelist William Gibson coined the term virtual reality, Neal Stephenson burst onto the science fiction scene with Snow Crash, his own manic take on the interface between man and machine. More recently, the cyberpunk visionary has turned his sights away from the future of technology, and toward the question of how and why it arose the way it did.