Neal Stephenson: The System of the World

Reviewed by STEPHEN JEWELL

That the almost 2000 pages of the first two volumes of Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Trilogy, Quicksilver and The Confusion can be summed up in a mere two and a half-page preface to the third and final edition, The System of the World, neatly sums up the problems that have blighted this ambitious, but ultimately disappointing, work.

Indeed, after reading "The Story Thus Far", the conclusion must be that not much has actually happened: Daniel Waterhouse has finally returned to 18th century England, where he is embroiled in an academic feud between Isaac Newton and rival scientist Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz over which one invented calculus.

Waterhouse is also drawn into a more dangerous web of political intrigue, involving the death of Queen Anne and the rise to the throne of King James.

Fans of Stephenson's earlier science fiction novels, namely his magnificent breakthrough Snow Crash, have been accused of shunning The Baroque Trilogy because it does not boast any futuristic trappings. However, it and its predecessor Cryptonomicon suffer not because genre elements are absent but because Stephenson has quite literally lost the plot — something that was apparent in The Diamond Age, the interesting but unwieldy follow-up to Snow Crash, which was set in a retro-futuristic Victorian steam-punk era.

Just as with Cryptonomicon, which was about as accessible as a computer manual, Stephenson's prose in The System of the World is dry and he bogs the reader down in trivial detail while failing to engage. Newton and Leibniz's mathematical dispute, for instance, fails to rise above the cerebral.

The cover of The System of the World proof copy declares it to be "the thrilling conclusion" but "none too thrilling" would have been closer to the truth. This is recommended only to diehard admirers of Quicksilver and The Confusion.

* Heinemann, $49.95