Interviewer:These characters are also heavily involved in alchemy. Was that a primary activity for the Royal Society?

Neal Stephenson:Yeah. It started to come out in the twentieth century that Newton had devoted more of his time and energy to alchemy during his career than he had devoted to mathematical physics. That’s a fact that is obvious enough if you look at his papers - he made no particular effort to conceal this. But it was sort of suppressed a little bit during the Enlightenment and Victorian era, when people didn’t know what to make of it. They wanted to view Newton as this paragon of the scientific method, and it was difficult to fit alchemy into that structure.

The view of more modern scholarship is that alchemy was all over the place. Robert Boyle was heavily involved into it; John Locke was involved in it; Newton of course; and quite a few of these other people. They didn’t really observe a clean distinction between alchemy and what we now think of as the modern practice of science. I’ve tried to be as faithful as I can to the historical reality in the way that’s depicted in the book.

Interviewer:Language, and the uses of language, also figures prominently in Quicksilver. How does language work in the book to indicate social status, to keep secrets, to communicate more than what’s on the surface?

Neal Stephenson:In this period, of course, England was not in the middle of things. It was this little rock up in a corner of the map. I’m exaggerating slightly, but it was certainly not the case that you could go to France or someplace in the Holy Roman Empire and encounter people who knew how to speak English. English was this minor language up in the corner of Europe, but it was a very vigorous language. I find admirable the way in which these people used the English language. For better or worse, it’s crept into the way I use the language now. I much prefer the way they used English in 1680 to the Victorian style of prose, which seems really stuffy and indirect to me.

One of the odd consequences of this is that the English people who started the Royal Society didn’t like Latin. They felt that the use of Latin in philosophical discourse was impeding progress. They wanted to get rid of it. But they couldn’t with a straight face suggest that everyone use English, because it was this unknown language.

So one of them - John Wilkins, who later was the Bishop of Chester, and who more than anyone else was the founder of the Royal Society - created this artificial language. He hoped it would become the standard way that philosophers, by which he meant scientists, would communicate with each other. It’s all set forth in a way that’s supposed to be logical and orderly. Of course it failed. Hooke and Christopher Wren used it a little bit, but they were just about the only ones. But the development of this language plays a role in Quicksilver.

Wilkins is another character that I personally feel a lot of affection for. One of the curious facts about Wilkins is that twenty years earlier, he had written a book on cryptography which David Kahn, the author of The Codebreakers, has described as the first book written on cryptology in the English language. When Wilkins was a younger man living in a war-torn England, he wrote a book about how to keep secrets in a bunch of different ways. How to send secret messages and hide information. But later in his life, when England had settled down a bit politically, he turned around and tried to achieve the opposite of that. To create a system of writing that would be sort of like an anti-code. It would be so clear and logical that you could understand what it was saying even if you weren’t fluent in that language.

Interviewer:Speaking of languages, one of the toughest languages in your books is that of the people of Qwghlm, where Eliza’s from. Is Qwghlm pronounceable?

Neal Stephenson:I never say it out loud. It’s like one of those languages used in southern Africa that have sounds people can’t make unless they’ve grown up in that culture.

Interviewer:What’s the literary utility of using a made-up place like Qwghlm?

Neal Stephenson:All I can say is that it does have utility. As soon as I came up with it, it immediately became incredibly useful. Not only in Cryptonomicon, but in the Baroque Cycle as well. It needed to be invented, and I sort of stumbled over it. It’s been very useful ever since. Of course Q-W-G-H-L-M is just the transcription of the word from their writing, which is a system of simple runes optimized for people who suffer from a lot of frostbite.

Interviewer:Clearly Qwghlm is a northern European country. When you imagine what this place is like, what landscapes do you see?

Neal Stephenson:Towering spires of rock, some of which are underwater. It’s surrounded by hazards to navigation that ships are forever running aground on. Some mudflats along the beaches. Lots of ice, and lots of guano deposited by seagulls. They claim that it was formerly richly forested, but all the trees had been chopped down by Englishmen. That is true of several parts of the British Isles, so that’s not even particularly fictitious.

Interviewer:What are some of the other links between Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon?

Neal Stephenson:The links are somewhat loose, so this is not one of these situations where you’ve got to read one of the books to make sense of the others. There’s a gap of about 300 years between the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, and if you’ve read Cryptonomicon, you’ll recognize some family names that are in common. You can infer that some of the families in the Baroque Cycle have descendents who show up later in Cryptonomicon. It’s largely a family saga kind of connection. And then there’s a character, Enoch Root, who possesses unnatural longevity and shows up in person in both of the books.

Interviewer:So it is the same Enoch Root in both of the books?

Interviewer:How does Quicksilver fit with the rest of the Baroque Cycle? Is it exactly one-third of it?

Neal Stephenson:Yes, it’s about a third of the story. Quicksilver is divided internally into three separate books, and each of those books is short-to-medium novel-length. So about a third of the way through the volume, everything sort of stops and you begin a new story with some new characters, and as you go on, it becomes clear that these characters are related to the events and characters in the other books.

In the second volume, which is called The Confusion, there are two separate books that are intertwined quite a bit. And in the third volume, The System of the World, there are going to be either two or three books, subdivided in the same way as in Quicksilver. The story will be fairly evenly divided among the three volumes.

Interviewer:You’ve shown us in both Cryptonomicon and in Quicksilver that you’re not afraid to have fairly abrupt and dramatic things happen to characters, up to and including death. Should we avoid getting attached to our favorite characters?

Neal Stephenson:[Laughs] By all means, get attached. Get totally attached. Yeah, I’m all in favor of getting attached. Even if it ends in tears, it’s still a good thing.

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