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Topic: Eliza (Stephenson character)

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The System of the World (novel)

Daniel Waterhouse

Gottfried Leibniz

Allusion

18th century

	Neal Stephenson - Sine.Qua.Non's Journal
		Stephenson mixes historical and contemporary settings, handling both with great skill, as he presents a large cast of vividly imagined characters, notably including the original code breaker's granddaughter, and makes both the tale's technology and its conspiracies highly believable.
		Eliza, raised in a Turkish harem from which she escapes, lives fairly successfully by her wits, which encompass the know-how for supplying the ingredients of gunpowder.
		Stephenson, enjoying cult status for his 1999 novel Cryptonomicon as well as the first two installments in a trilogy he calls the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver [BKL S 1 03] and The Confusion [BKL F 15 04]), brings the long-winded but compulsively readable series to its conclusion.
	sinequanonblog.squarespace.com /neal-stephenson (1161 words)

	washingtonpost.com: The Past as Prologue
		Stephenson is not the first writer to appreciate that the late 17th century's striking advances in optics, steam power, timekeeping and cosmology -- along with the founding of the Royal Academy and the final guttering of alchemy -- constituted a scientific revolution in its own right.
		Stephenson never uses the word "capitalism," just as he doesn't quite use another term apposite to his work: "swashbuckler." His massive enterprise -- full of astoundingly implausible adventures and assertions of historical inevitability -- can be seen as an amalgam of Alexandre Dumas and Fernand Braudel, a mix that tends to separate unless shaken forcefully.
		Stephenson's characters are invariably presented as good or bad according to whether they espouse beliefs that hold up today, and 18th-century London seems to interest him only insofar as it presages the modern era.
	www.washingtonpost.com /ac2/wp-dyn/A46025-2005Jan3?language=printer (724 words)

	Eliza (Stephenson character) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Eliza is a native of Qwghlm who as a young girl is abducted into slavery by Barbary pirates.
		Eliza's shrewdness and financial acumen combine with her sexual attractiveness to earn her entry into the highest ranks of European society.
		Eliza (along with Louis XIV's cryptographer Bonaventure Rossignol) is an ancestor of Rudolph von Hacklheber from Stephenson's earlier work, Cryptonomicon.
	88.208.194.172 /wiki/index.php/Eliza_(Stephenson_character) (301 words)

	Eliza (Stephenson character) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Eliza is a main character from Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle (consisting of the novels Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World).
		Reasons to suggest this is for her humble origins (withstanding birthrights) as a common slave rising to the upper reaches of high society, much like Shaw's heroine rising from a flower girl to a proper lady of society.
		All the while, Eliza seeks to find the identity of the man who is responsible for her enslavement.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Eliza_(Stephenson_character) (388 words)

	Excessive Candour
		Eliza, who becomes a spy and something of a cryptoanalyst and helps invent the stock exchange, and who sleeps (eventually) with people it is important for Quicksilver and its sequels to be on the right side of, could have been delivered to the central line of story in a few dozen pages.
		The Eliza of these pages reads like a boy-geek's fantasy, a female who sounds like a man pretending to be an out-front gal, a guy who (just kidding!) gets a bit boastful about the alluring female bits he's magically donned, for as long as the vaudeville of pretend history lasts.
		Eliza seems, in other words, strangely immune to the appalling things she sees and experiences; she is more like some Temporal Adventuress out of Michael Moorcock than a real person caught in real time eating the real shit of the real world.
	www.scifi.com /sfw/issue337/excess.html (2100 words)

	King of the Shaggy Dogs
		In the case of Eliza, the reversal is momentous and nigh-catastrophic; she has made her fortune in the markets of Amsterdam and secured the favor of the House of Orange and is making her way to conquer London society when adverse winds drive her ship into a French port.
		Stephenson tries to give himself cover by claiming Jack’s rash acts are often inspired by "the Imp of the Perverse," but it is all too transparent that this is merely a rubric for Jack’s own code of Vagabond honor, which we would like to admire.
		Stephenson’s demonstration of his familiarity with the geography of London alone could fill a dissertation, and yet it has negligible import to the story or the characters.
	www.speakeasy.org /~demiurge/stephenson.html (2147 words)

	Quicksilver
		I suspect I enjoyed it more than Stephenson's usual audience of science fiction readers did; while y'all were hanging out on the Slashdot and lining up to see Revenge of the Sith and what have you, I was reading 19th century travelogues and playing Europa Universalis II and basically being a history geek.
		Yes, Stephenson's prose attempts to convey a bit of the flavor of the 17th century (though he can't resist the recurring joke of dressing up 21st-century phrasings in 17th-century clothing).
		Stephenson loves his meta: he peppers his 927-page opus with commentary about long-windedness in narrative, pairs long passages describing clothing with plot points about codes hidden in long passages describing clothing, and so forth.
	adamcadre.ac /calendar/11524.html (951 words)

	The summit of Mount Stephenson - Salon
		Stephenson enjoys flinging turds -- and apparently, during the Enlightenment, there was plenty of ammunition at hand.
		If, as another of his characters declares, understanding how the world works brings us closer to God, then so too does making the world work for us, because that smoothly operating machine is the ultimate proof of our comprehension, of the world, and of God.
		Stephenson doesn't just care about technology and money and excrement -- he cares about the intersection of God and science, the emergence of democracy, the rethinking of religion, the birth of the digital computer, and the abolition of slavery.
	dir.salon.com /story/tech/books/2004/09/22/system/index.html (1044 words)

	ElizabethHand.com
		Stephenson, whose Cryptonomicon became a touchstone of the Internet era, has admitted great admiration for David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest; and Quicksilver, while spinning a tale around the origins of the Modern Age, exhibits many of the now-familiar tics of the post-post-modern novel: footnotes, playlets, doggerel, seemingly infinite lists.
		Stephenson's intent appears to be to distill all of these things -- along with the development of the stock exchange, birth control, surgery, weaponry, modern politics and religion, and so on and so forth -- into the literary equivalent of the Alchemist's Stone, or at least a roaring good read.
		Stephenson is not the first to use this rich material as the background for a novel.
	www.elizabethhand.com /review03.shtml (4627 words)

	'Quicksilver': The Original Information Age
		Stephenson clearly did a great deal of research for this book, and he seems reluctant to let a crumb of it go to waste.
		Stephenson bundles much of his research into conversations, packing his characters' mouths with favorite details, such as the derivation of the words ''guinea,'' ''dollar'' and ''sabotage.'' Much of the dialogue is painfully clunky.
		Stephenson clearly never intended ''Quicksilver'' to be one of those meticulously accurate historical novels that capture ways of thought of times gone by.
	www.nytimes.com /2003/10/05/books/review/05SCHULMT.html?ei=5007&en=f92a32907659ab16&ex=1380686400&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position= (1321 words)

	Jack's Back - New York Times
		Stephenson's is a jaunty enough style, however, and though he is an almost inhumanly industrious writer, he is not a difficult or pretentious one.
		Thus characters in ''The Confusion'' often sound a little like talking figures in an Epcot Center diorama, as if totally aware of their contributions to posterity and humankind.
		Stephenson's long-windedness is notorious, and it's aided along by the fact that he is not a particularly careful stylist.
	query.nytimes.com /gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E3DF1538F93BA25757C0A9629C8B63&sec=&pagewanted=all (977 words)

	SF REVIEWS.NET: The Confusion / Neal Stephenson
		To this end her machinations know no bounds, but even in her most ruthless moments (at one point, she deliberately infects a minor nobleman with smallpox, which eventually kills him and his mistress, simply because the man has sexual designs on a friend's young daughter) she's never unsympathetic or unlikable.
		Stephenson has never pretended not to be a demanding writer — this is the man who wrote an 1100-page book about code-breaking, after all — but the point is that he delivers.
		It is Stephenson's philosophy that exciting entertainment need not be exclusive of that which engages the mind, and the Baroque Cycle is his testament to that philosophy.
	www.sfreviews.net /confusion.html (805 words)

	Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson - read review
		Eliza, too, is concerned with the flow of money, as she is set to learn everything possible about it in order to help the King of France fund his wars.
		In Eliza's there are tons of letters as she contacts different people to figure out how to use the financial system, trade, and such to make money.
		Eliza becomes a spy (more codes) and cats paw, going from being a member of a harem to the mistress of powerful men to the Duchess of Qwghlm.
	www.mostlyfiction.com /history/stephenson.htm (1717 words)

	Boing Boing: Neal Stephenson's System of the World concludes the Baroque Trilogy
		At the center of all of this is the Duchess Eliza of Arcachon-Qwghlm, a distant ancestor of the Qwghlmers from Cryptonomicon.
		The characters are Stephenson's best: funny, likable, roguish, brilliant, and insightful, and they serve to illuminate his research, and almost never seem like an artifice for this purpose.
		They are slow in many places, bogged down in detail (especially the intrigues among the many royals), as though Stephenson was bent on conveying the sheer tedium of life in the 16th and 17th centuries.
	www.boingboing.net /2004/11/21/neal_stephensons_sys.html (583 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: The System of the World, by Neal Stephenson, Hardcover, Bargain
		Eliza has risen from the streets to the nobility without losing any of her creativity or her talents as a schemer; nor has outlaw Jack Shaftoe lost any of his wiliness.
		Stephenson keeps up the expected torrent of words, but as with the other two books, he keeps your attention with an iron fist of plot in a velvet glove of delightful prose.
		Stephenson's glorious geek historical fiction is as meticulous and beefy as an encyclopedia (and sometimes reads like one), but as he weaves the patterns of this multitudious plot to a triumphant and ambitiously constructed finale, it's hard not to recognize how extraordinary an achievement this 'Baroque Cycle' represents.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=9780641734700&pwb=1&z=y (2218 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-20)
		Stephenson moved from York County, South Carolina, to Smith County, Tennessee; thence in 1806 to Maury County, Tennessee; and in 1819 all the family, married and single, moved, to Lawrence County, Alabama.
		Stephenson, Collinsville, Texas When Ann Eliza Stephenson was married to Dr. Graves, she dropped the name Eliza, and substituted for it, "Stephenson." Since her marriage she has written her name Ann S. Graves.
		Stephenson has some inventive genius, which is shown by the fact that he has devised and placed upon the market a complete set of instruments for removing tonsils, consisting of scissors, forceps, and tongue depressor, which are manufactured now by three of the largest instrument makers in the world.
	pages.sbcglobal.net /mike_in_katy/CALVIN.DOC (21105 words)

	Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Neal Stephenson - Quicksilver at Epinions.com
		I know that the main characters are fictional and that the actions of the real characters may not always be wholly in line with what actually occurred.
		Stephenson does, whether he's describing pre-industrial age silver mining, the display of Cromwell's head on a stick, or the development of financial speculation in Amsterdam.
		Stephenson weaves his characters lives and angsts into the full backdrop of the period -- from Waterhouse's kidney stone problems...
	www.epinions.com /content_147586715268 (799 words)

	Review \| Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
		The novel, the first of a trilogy Stephenson is calling The Baroque Cycle, is set in the late 17th and early 18th centuries and is stuffed with a museum's worth of miscellany.
		Another character claims his goal is to translate all human knowledge into a new philosophical language, consisting of numbers.
		At one point Eliza is asked by Louis XIV to fake an orgasm to cover up his own screams during a hemorrhoid operation as his courtiers wait in an adjoining room.
	www.januarymagazine.com /fiction/quicksilver.html (1580 words)

	Barnes & Noble.com - Books: Quicksilver, by Neal Stephenson, Paperback, Reprint
		Principal among these events are Jack Shaftoe (distant ancestor of a character from Cryptonomicon, 1999), a none-too-bright mercenary with a penchant for barely escaping hideous death, and the clever Eliza, rescued from a Turkish harem by Jack, and quickly set on a path of ambitious social-climbing among the French nobility.
		Stephenson mostly does away with plot and contents himself with letting his characters jape and amble about the place, engage in erudite, pages-long discussions on alchemy, slavery, or religion, running into fascinating people, and staging a smashingaction sequence every now and again to keep everyone awake.
		Stephenson's dialogue is normally sharp and quick with descriptions that convey everything with a satirical overtone.
	search.barnesandnoble.com /booksearch/isbninquiry.asp?ean=9780060593087&pwb=1&z=y (1925 words)

	Books 4
		Stephenson introduces his cast of thousands, most important of whom are Jack Steptoe (AKA, Quicksilver, Jack the Coiner, "Half-Cocked Jack," and numerous other names), Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse, Newton (Isaac, not Fig), and Leibniz.
		He develops several strong characters and a couple who are clearly meant to play larger roles in the books to come.
		Her characters live on a world created by two gods who begin to war with each other.
	writeonill.org /books4.htm (3937 words)

	Books 4
		Stephenson introduces his cast of thousands, most important of whom are Jack Steptoe (AKA, Quicksilver, Jack the Coiner, "Half-Cocked Jack," and numerous other names), Eliza, Daniel Waterhouse, Newton (Isaac, not Fig), and Leibniz.
		What I like about this series is that Stephenson appears to have done his homework and the characters of Leibniz and Isaac Newton are believable, even when they are spouting philosophy.
		He develops several strong characters and a couple who are clearly meant to play larger roles in the books to come.
	www.writeonill.org /books4.htm (3937 words)

	Lunch With George! : Neal Stephenson Discussion
		In this wonderfully inventive follow-up to his bestseller Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson brings to life a cast of unforgettable characters in a time of breathtaking genius and discovery, men and women whose exploits defined an age known as the Baroque.
		Eliza is a young woman whose ingenuity is all that keeps her alive after being set adrift from the Turkish harem in which she has been imprisoned since she was a child.
		Daniel, Jack, and Eliza will traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures including Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, and other great minds of the age.
	www.lunchwithgeorge.com /lwg_stephenson.html (1150 words)

	Amazon.ca: Quicksilver: Volume One of the Baroque Cycle: Books: Neal Stephenson (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-09-20)
		Stephenson is especially impressive in his ability to represent dialogue over the evolving worldview of seventeenth-century scientists and enliven the most abstruse explanation of theory.
		Stephenson has matched ambition to execution, and his faithful, durable readers will be both entertained and richly rewarded with a practicum in Baroque science, cypher, culture, and politics.
		Stephenson's (Snow Crash; Cryptonomicon) masterfully complex and entertaining plot braids the life of Daniel Waterhouse, a colleague of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, with that of the "king of the Vagabonds," Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, and Eliza, a harem slave turned powerful financier.
	www.amazon.ca /Quicksilver-Baroque-Cycle-Neal-Stephenson/dp/0060593083 (2282 words)

	The System of the World - Neal Stephenson
		Those who made their way through Quicksilver and The Confusion will find it hard to resist, but any eagerness is quickly tempered by Stephenson's very patient and deliberate presentation: the book proves to be a (perhaps excessively) drawn-out final chapter.
		Stephenson even manages to get Leibniz (travelling incognito) and Newton to meet, but their differences are not easily reconciled.
		Stephenson wants to explain it all, and while some of the scenes so closely detailed -- the jails, the procedures, some of the crimes -- are fascinating, much is not.
	www.complete-review.com /reviews/stephenn/system.htm (1513 words)

	The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2) -- book review
		Eliza is a great beauty enslaved, along with her mother, on the beach of Qwghlm.
		Eliza is your prototypical abolitionist, at least once she is removed from the Turk’s harem by Jack and has a chance to once again pursue her destiny.
		Stephenson’s style in this epic is diamond bright, his wit razor sharp, and he brings to bear a ocean-vast knowledge of history and science.
	www.curledup.com /confusio.htm (1473 words)

	Stephenson's Baroque Cycle \| Ask MetaFilter
		Stephenson doesn't seem to be as skilled as Pynchon at that synthesis--at present, my impression is that he just seems to be going on at length about Things He's Interested In (cryptography; finance; the history of science).
		If a character is going from point A to point B in London, Stephenson describes everything the character sees along the way.
		Stephenson is a genius writer and researcher...but he tends to be loquacious when brevity would work as well.
	ask.metafilter.com /15780/Stephensons-Baroque-Cycle (2764 words)

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