The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle, #3)

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The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle #3)

4.26 of 5 stars 4.26 · rating details · 9,569 ratings · 370 reviews

The Barnes & Noble Review
The System of the World, the third and concluding volume of Neal Stephenson's shelf-bending Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver and The Confusion), brings the epic historical saga to its thrilling -- and truly awe-inspiring -- conclusion.

Set in the early 18th century and featuring a diverse cast of characters that includes alchemists, philosophers, mat

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Paperback, 908 pages

Published September 6th 2005 by William Morrow Paperbacks (first published September 21st 2004)

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Jul 30, 2011 Kemper rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, sci-fi, modern-lit

(Excerpt from the journal of Neal Stephenson.)

So here I am, trying to wrap up the last book of the The Baroque Cycle. This thing has gotten completely out of control. I knew it’d be huge when I planned it, but this story has sprawled everywhere. What the hell was I thinking? Any one of the story threads I’ve had going could be a fair sized novel in itself. Now I gotta gather them all up and try to come up with some kind of coherent ending. I’m not going to have a fan left if I don’t wrap this up...more

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Apr 27, 2008 Thomas rated it 5 of 5 stars

Whew. About 2,700 pages later, and thank heavens it wraps up beautifully, making the long trek well worth the effort. Now that I've reached the end, I realize fully how enjoyable the journey itself was.

People often asked me what these books are about. Er. It's a story of alchemy (human more than chemical), economics, word origins, English history, history of science, philosophy, bravado, character and a little love. Like all of Stephenson's work thus far, it is large and contains multitudes — co...more

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Sep 18, 2007 Ben rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: People who have read Cryptonomicon

Shelves: pleased-to-have-read

I am doing this as a review for the Baroque cycle altogether, so don't bother reading the reviews for the other two if you are reading this one.

The Baroque cycle is a massive, epic, depressingly wide reaching body of creative work which, I believe, has made several well respected fantasy/sci-fi novelists give up and go home. If it hasn't, it definitely should. It's just so.... big. And while there are a lot of authors who have written large things (the Lord of the Rings, the Wheel of Time, a Son...more

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Feb 05, 2008 Amy rated it 2 of 5 stars

This series was an ambitious project on Stephenson's part, but I think he tried to do too much. I liked the characters he created and found the plot interesting, however, the books are uneven in their pacing and sort of unfocused. Sometimes it's a love story, sometimes it's an adventure, sometimes it's a mystery. He does the love and adventure well, but really falls down on the mystery aspect. It's as though he randomly decided to make things obscure for no real reason. He also just takes too da...more

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Nov 17, 2010 Benjamin Thomas rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction, historical-fiction-britain

After nearly three long years of reading these books by Neal Stephenson I have finally completed the final volume. The System of the World contains the final three novels in his huge Baroque Cycle, a “project” read that I began back in 2008. This volume contains these three novels: Solomon's Gold, Currency, and The System of the World. All told there are nearly 3000 pages of historical fiction, historical fact, irreverent humor, and a bit of science fiction thrown in.

I don't have too much to say...more

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Sep 08, 2008 Karl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I don't even know how to begin to review this trilogy. It's really all one novel, and so it might then be the longest novel I've read.

It has everything. An around the world sea voyage. The Barbary corsairs. Love triumphing over death. Women trimuphing over men. The beginnings of the Enlightenment. Battles. The formation of the monetary system. A duel with unconventional firearms. Blackbeard. Peter the Great. And a gaggle of mathematicians.

Extensively researched historical fiction, I've been hard...more

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Dec 01, 2008 Marc rated it 3 of 5 stars

Finished the last book in this series. Wow, was it long. Don't knwo that it needed to be that long. Lots of diverse wanderings through the plot line that eventually all come together but didn't seem altogether necessary. Instead of invoking the typical "Years later", and giving a summary of what happened in between, he goes into depth for each characters travels (in somewhat episodic form, i.e. lots of detail about a few events, fast forward in between). Still, I enjoy his concepts and voice. I...more

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Mar 25, 2013 David rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of Cryptonomicon

(I'm going to write once for the whole Baroque Cycle and re-post for all three volumes.)

Definitely door-stoppers, and reading this is a bit of an ambitious project. Sort of a homework assignment for the serious Stephenson fan. The history and economics lessons are all interesting, but there's just SO MUCH of it, it may start to strain the attention span at times. The action and humor are all still there, just a bit spread out. At one point, it had started to have a certain "eat your vegetables"...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it · review of another edition

The conclusion to The Baroque Cycle is a veritable doorstop, but a doorstop perhaps worth its weight in 18th-century gold coins

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Apr 06, 2013 Lindsay rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone, provided they've read the other books in the series

Shelves: adventure, alternate-history, enlightenment, fiction, read-for-fun, read-postcollege, historical-fiction

With this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from one set-piece action scene to another that is typical of Stephenson's endings, I thought he actually succeeded at tying everything up in this one. I guess he can do that when he's got an entire epic-length novel in which to end things, as opposed to the fifty pages or so he tends to devote to endings in his stand-alone novels.

In this volume, unlike...more With this enormous volume, the Baroque Cycle comes to a close. While there is the same kind of speeding up, adding new plot threads and jumping from one set-piece action scene to another that is typical of Stephenson's endings, I thought he actually succeeded at tying everything up in this one. I guess he can do that when he's got an entire epic-length novel in which to end things, as opposed to the fifty pages or so he tends to devote to endings in his stand-alone novels.

In this volume, unlike its predecessor, the three books blend seamlessly into one another, and the mega-novel reads just like it had all been written at once. (Maybe it was --- it was published first as a three-in-one volume, and only later were the individual books released.)

Daniel Waterhouse, the first of the three protagonists to be introduced in Quicksilver, is also the first to show up here. Having been drawn out of his long retirement in Massachusetts by Enoch Root, to try and mediate Newton and Leibniz's decades-long feud over (nominally) the credit for inventing calculus and (ultimately) differences of opinion on cosmology, he has arrived in England, where he is standing in a field that will be the site of an "Engine for Raising Water by Fire" (i.e., a steam engine). From there, he goes on to London in the company of a mysterious person named Threader, whose innumerable discreet business transactions with various wealthy townsmen make the trip take far longer than it should. Daniel figures out that Threader deals in the newfangled paper money that Daniel finds so baffling. At the end of this long, meandering trip, something explodes near their coach. Daniel recognizes the flame as that produced by phosphorus, which tells him 1) the explosion was not an accident and 2) whoever made the bomb is an Alchemist.

This one simple task that Daniel is given --- get Newton and Leibniz to talk to each other and start working together instead of at cross purposes --- mutates into an imposing snarl of "side quests" in RPG parlance: Newton is Master of the Mint, and plagued by a mysterious counterfeiter named Jack the Coiner, whom Daniel ends up helping him hunt down; Leibniz has found a royal patron for his Logic Mill project, and he wants Daniel's help in getting the thing built, as well as giving it raw information to encode. There is also a succession crisis --- Queen Anne is childless, old and sickly, and both her brother James and her cousin George have claimed the throne --- and a criminal investigation for Daniel to embroil himself in.

Both of the other protagonists, Jack and Eliza, have entered the story by now: Jack is, of course, Jack the Coiner, working covertly for Louis XIV to undermine Britain's economic power, and Eliza has attached herself to the Hanover court, as she is a close friend of Princess Caroline, whose mother wed George August, who is now one of the claimants to the English throne. Eliza and Daniel are playing for the same team --- Daniel is a Whig, mostly for cultural reasons (he's a Puritan, and there is strong overlap between the Puritans and the Whigs), he's helping Leibniz, whom Eliza also tries to help, and he's helping Newton, whom the Tories are trying to discredit as Master of the Mint. But Jack is working against both of them, which must cause him some internal conflict because he still loves Eliza, though he tries to make himself forget this.

Other characters figuring in this volume are Jack's brother Bob Shaftoe, who is still a sergeant in the Queen's (later King's) Own Black Torrent Guards, and who, with his regiment, helps Daniel and Newton raid a castle belonging to a Tory lord where they suspect Jack the Coiner may be hiding, and later takes part in some skirmishes with Tory militiamen. His regiment is also charged with guarding the Pyx, where samples of coins taken from circulation at regular intervals are kept under lock and key, stored until such time as someone high-placed takes it upon himself to have their purity assayed in a Trial of the Pyx.

There is also Eliza's handsome and resourceful German-born son, Johann; a Puritan shipbuilder named Nathan Orney, who has some wonderfully arch exchanges with Daniel (they call each other "Brother Nathan" and "Brother Daniel," though their feelings for one another are pretty far from brotherly); the huge, one-armed Russian agent provocateur named Yevgeny; the wily Jesuit priest Edouard de Gex, who is in England supervising Jack's sabotage of the English currency; Dappa, who has left Jack's employ for Eliza's, and who has taken up the pen to write articles condemning slavery; and Charles White, an odious person who serves the Viscount Bolingbroke, leader of the Tory faction, and who decides that Dappa, being a black man in England, must be someone's property, so he might as well be his, Charles White's, property. He has Dappa thrown into jail, from whence he directs all his pamphleteering at White personally. Their feud culminates in what may be the most absurd dueling scene this side of Twain's "The Great French Duel."

The ending of the book is truly epic: two climaxes build at once, cutting from one to the other. They have been long in coming: they are the Trial of the Pyx and the execution of Jack the Coiner. Stephenson draws them out, longer I think than any other scene in any of the books. But the drawing-out doesn't feel slow at all; it gives those scenes a sense of grandeur and finality.

Another thing I loved about the ending of this book --- which, after the two climaxes play out, consists of a series of epilogues showing where each major character ends up --- was its thematic coherence. Toward the middle of the book the title is explained: Princess Caroline is presiding over the reconciliation of Newton and Leibniz, and she tells them she wants them to work together because she senses that a new System of the World, a more rational one guided by science, technology and commerce, was being born, but that it was a fragile one that would require both of their combined efforts to keep on track. She specifically worried that the flowering of science would lead to a withering of Christianity, and she called on both philosophers to try to forestall that. At the end of the book, Daniel is standing in the middle of a mine that has been pumped dry by one of the new steam engines, and he reflects that the new System has succeeded in displacing the old. Throughout the saga, Daniel and Eliza have been instrumental in bringing it forth: Daniel has furthered the cause of Natural Philosophy, and Eliza has championed commerce. Eliza's anti-slavery labors also fall under the rubric of this new System: as Daniel sees it, the machines the new System enables man to build will do the work that slaves used to do, and will render slavery obsolete as well as morally wrong. (I do not think that this is true; I know that slavery has survived the machine age.) Newton seems to have one foot in the old System and one foot in the new; he's the world's pre-eminent Natural Philosopher, and as Master of the Mint he oversees the rationalization of England's economic system, but his great passion is Alchemy. Indeed, he tells Daniel he only took the Mint position to try and get his hands on the fabled Solomonic gold, the gold suffused with the Philosophic Quintessence that makes it heavier than all other gold and that, distilled, hardens into the Philosopher's Stone that grants eternal life. And Jack seems to be entirely a man of the old System, thriving on chaos and unpredictability. Everything he does --- undermining Newton's coinage, trying to have Daniel, Newton or both of them killed, throwing his lot in with the absolutist King Louis XIV, as opposed to the ever-more-republican English government, stealing the Solomonic gold and unleashing it upon the world --- seems opposed to the forces of Reason and Modernity, except that he also exemplifies some very modern values, like individualism and egalitarianism. As King of the Vagabonds, his command of the Mobb, and his appreciation for the Mobb's power and knowledge of its nature, prefigure the modern era when most countries are democracies. And in that way, Jack comes off as the most forward-looking of the characters, seeing the potential of mere peasants to be political actors when Daniel and Eliza are fixated on Kings, Barons, Dukes, Princes and Princesses.

Long story short, Neal Stephenson is a genius. I do not doubt I will revisit this series many times.(less)

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Sep 03, 2012 Scott rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Final (blessedly) volume of the trilogy. Admittedly, if the volume two hadn't had a solid ending, I may not even have read this one. I've mentioned before that Stephenson, having a very scientific mind, has a strong adoration of processes of all varieties, and doesn't shy away from waxing narrative about otherwise dry science. Hence, while we see the end of the stories begun in the first volume of the series, the reader has to wade through some of Stephenson's own fascinations a little more than...more

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Aug 13, 2010 Melissa Rudder rated it 4 of 5 stars

The final book in Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle, The System of the World, did exactly what the conclusion of a long complex tale, inhabited by a lively cast of characters across five continents, should do: it dazzled its reader with a seemingly unending parade of dramatic climaxes, facilitated by the carefully interwoven tales of seemingly disparate individuals.

My usual complaint about Stephenson's detail-driven writing does not apply to The System of the World. Perhaps the first two insta...more

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Jul 16, 2010 Amanda rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: series, bought-copy, science-fiction

This is the third book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - well, the last three books, since Stephenson actually wrote eight books that made up the cycle which were then published to form a trilogy. Here the majority of the action takes place in London, where virtually all of the protagonists we have been following end up bringing the story to a mighty conclusion.

The basic plot is that of a murder mystery, but comprises many other components. Daniel Waterhouse has completed his epic trip back a...more This is the third book in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle - well, the last three books, since Stephenson actually wrote eight books that made up the cycle which were then published to form a trilogy. Here the majority of the action takes place in London, where virtually all of the protagonists we have been following end up bringing the story to a mighty conclusion.

The basic plot is that of a murder mystery, but comprises many other components. Daniel Waterhouse has completed his epic trip back across the Atlantic at the urging of Princess Caroline. She wished him to bring about the reconciliation of those two mighty Philosophers Leibniz and Newton. In the process of which he ends up stumbling across Jack's scheme to debase English currency (which he is being blackmailed into by the King of France and the dastardly Edouard de Gex). Trying to summarise the plot - the many strands and the different events - is difficult without having to repeat what happened in earlier books or flick through many pages trying to remind myself of exactly who Saturn was and why the Tsar of Russia made an appearance.

The cast of characters is enormous and it can be difficult to keep them separate at times, although our main characters have become extremely three dimensional. Daniel, Eliza (although she makes a small appearance in this volume), Jack, Isaac Newton, Dappa, Bob Shaftoe, Ravenscar, Princess Caroline, Leibniz - all these characters become beloved and it is of interest to see what happens to all of them.

The three volumes as a whole - the Baroque Cycle - are a truly amazing achievement. It is nigh on 3000 pages dense with facts, with ideas, with characters, with exciting escapes and political machinations. We are shown the beginnings of the world system that we know today - with law enforcement, political parties (Whigs and Tories), real estate and, of course, currency. Either this was written as a fact or Stephenson came up with an extremely clever idea in that currency is called such because of the current of money flowing into London, in this case. There are many such moments during all three books, where you marvel at the level of research and detail that has gone into every element of the story.

It is interesting that these books are almost always shelved in the fantasy/sci fi section but, barring the presence of Enoch Root and his little procedure (I shall not say more, for fear of spoiling certain things!) they are more historical in nature.

One of my disappointments in this and the previous books is the pacing - we can go from thrilling page-turning events into a deep philosophical discourse and this can make the reader grind to a halt. Despite the exciting nature of the plot in general, there were times when I felt as though it was a struggle to read any further, and this is a sad fact when considering that this should be a series read by everyone. It is a classic in the making - or would be, barring the slow and turgid prose at times. Having said that, it didn't do Tolkien any harm and some people may, in fact, find this one of the charming aspects of Stephenson's writing.

I am extremely glad that I read this series, but I shall not be embarking on a re-read for many, many years - if at all. However, I do have the notion that the characters and events will niggle and stay with me - the mark of a book that has had a big effect on me. This should have been a five star experience, but I keep it to four stars purely because of the difficulty of the reading. Recommended (with reservations!) (less)

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Sep 03, 2009 Kristine rated it 5 of 5 stars

In Quicksilver, the first book of the Baroque cycle, it isn't obvious where Stephenson is going. That book is an enjoyable read, to be sure, but I never would have guessed Stephenson's ambition with these novels is to explain how the world we live today came about, where the scientific method rules rather than alchemy, and where money is completely interchangeable, and where finance...well, perhaps that hasn't changed so much, but anyway, where the world we live in came from. More than a simple...more

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Jul 15, 2009 Robby rated it 3 of 5 stars

I finally finished the Baroque Cycle (after what felt like several decades). Throughout my struggle to finish the 2000+ page trilogy I found myself continually wondering why I was still plowing through. Yes, there were great characters, and yes, Stephenson has an amazing way with dialogue (IMHO one of the best), and he has really captured a time period -- when natural philosophers and pirates were kings. But his long-winded passages often made me begin to skim (not something I am proud of). The...more

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Feb 10, 2013 Peter Fortune rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-high, science

The prequel of Cryptonomicon ends with this third volume of The Baroque Trilogy. Its title is the title of Newton's third book of "Principia Mathematica."

"The Confusion" set us up for economic conflict between England and France: Leroy (Louis XIV) charges his friend Jack Shaftoe to on a mission to corrupt the English Mint's coinage. Louis seems to understand Lenin's adage that to corrupt a country you need only corrupt its currency. Isaac Newton (as director of the Mint) is charged with prevent...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Todd rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: amazing-books

I lived in fear that no-one I know will ever plod their way through all these books, so I can have someone to talk with about how great they are. Fortunatley, the two sisters I lived with in Germany many years ago are devoted fans awaiting the translation of System with some anticipation.

I say, I think it takes three thousand pages to write a story, in which your readers are so invested in the lives and fortunes of your charachters, that they can exhalt at the fineness of such an ending. What a...more

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Oct 05, 2010 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 21, 2009 Justin rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a beautiful trilogy that is trying at times. I don't know if the series deserves 5 stars, but this, the third novel of the trilogy, certainly deserves more than 4. I loved it. It may be partially due to the sense of accomplishment one gets at the end of this book for having read the entire series. Maybe it is fitting that I finished this book the same weekend I ran a marathon. Reading the Baroque Cycle is a literary marathon with its own highs and lows. The lows, and the associated pain...more

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Dec 12, 2008 Charles rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Nerds and gluttons for intellectual punishment..

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 19, 2010 Jon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-own

Holy shit that was tedious. "That" being the whole serious. And this is coming from someone who made it through The Silmarillion twice.

System was definitely my favorite book in the series. It brought together all the story I thought was just wankery. I'm curious to see how it goes for a second read through, but no.

I'm not sure that this changed my opinion of Stephenson at all. He manages to be funny and dead serious at the same time. He's the only author I've encountered who can do spatial descr...more

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Dec 30, 2008 Fiatluxury rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is really more like a 3.5 stars for me - the first two books in the Baroque Cycle I thought were better with the second book "The Confusion" being closest to a 5 star. Stephenson throws out a whole slew of threads and brings them pretty satisfactorily together regarding: commerce, alchemy, shipping, rebellion, scientific inquiry, pirates, slavery, economics, physics, political intrigue, sexy countesses with a head for numbers, a half-castrated vagabond adventurer and his band of ex-slave en...more

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Dec 22, 2012 Douglas rated it 3 of 5 stars

I was hoping to be able to dispense with The Baroque Cycle in one go—to be honest I can't remember greatly liking one book in the trilogy over another, and I really want to put some distance between myself and those 2700+ pages.

It's not that the story's not entertaining—it is, and and it's amusingly written, too, with an omniscient narrator who likes to break the authorial third wall with snarky commentary on fashion choices in the 1600s—and as always with Stephenson you'll learn a great deal....more

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Jan 18, 2012 Nathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The final volume of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which is set around the year 1700 and has characters ranging from vagabonds to King Louis XIV, from illiterate sailors to Sir Isaac Newton. Lovely writing in this. Not too hard to read (except in metaphysical or scientific passages) but still rather dense and took a long time. Of course, the flip side of lovely writing is that the author has a tendency to let it go on for a bit long, and this is certainly true here - many sections could definitely...more

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Mar 29, 2011 Justin rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy-scifi

The System of the World is the third volume of the Baroque Cycle, and in fact a collection of the final three individual books Stephenson wrote for this particular series. Yet, it seems somewhat unfair to judge the piece as either three separate books, or even as a separate volume. This series hangs together in a way that, at an equivalent page count, most series have begun to lose a bit of their luster.

The hardest part of the Baroque Cycle for me to stay invested in was the arc-long description...more

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Jun 06, 2011 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

After approximately 3,000 pages, it's hard to say whether the warm feelings one has for the Baroque Cycle are better attributed to the merit of the work or to Stockholm Syndrome.

In this final volume, Stephenson's characters (Waterhouse, Shaftoe, Eliza) and the near-automatons-modeled-after-historical-figures they interact with (Leibniz, Newton, Caroline of Hanover, et al) are once again on hand, this time to bid adieu to the Enlightenment and to usher in Modernity. Along the way there's the usu...more

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Sep 27, 2009 Steve rated it 5 of 5 stars

Well, I'm now officially depressed. I finished reading the Baroque Cycle. To say that I enjoyed reading the series would be to stretch the word "enjoyed" to the breaking point. It would be rolling the word "enjoyed" off to the juicing room. It would be hanging the word "enjoyed" until half dead, and then drawing and quartering the word "enjoyed" by four sturdy teams of horses, in the hopes that somewhere in the process "enjoyed" would choose to reveal the location of its ringleader, a much more...more

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Jul 30, 2012 Matt Brown rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A superb end to the series, although coming to write my review several months after finishing reading I find myself not able to recall most of the salient details that would form a coherent review.

Suffice to say, despite the size and commitment required to read this trilogy through to the end I think it was worthwhile and I thoroughly enjoyed the books.

I think I'll probably come back in 6-12 months and read them again, I felt like my poor historical knowledge and ability to recall who the chara...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Chris Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

I plodded through this book, I found the writing style overly descriptive to the point that I got ticked off with the author. I often skimmed some of the multi-page paragraphs, this was a problem as buried in same paragraphs were often important information, often forcing me to reread several pages of the book. This is why I put this book down once and didn't pick it up again for years.
I was unsatisfied by the ending, it had too many loose ends. Its possible that the author intended to leave som...more

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Dec 13, 2011 Steve Lew rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: historical-fiction

I'm writing one quick review for the whole baroque cycle and pasting it on all three books. My five star reviews reflect the fact that I had a blast reading this stuff and was very sorry that it eventually ended. I'm going to mention a couple of flaws, but what I have to tell you is that these are great books and you should drop everything and read them. Anyway, NS did a cubic shit-ton of research to pull this off, and as you know he is a capable and thorough researcher. I'm sorry to say that he...more

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About Neal Stephenson

Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known primarily for his science fiction works in the postcyberpunk genre with a penchant for explorations of society, mathematics, cryptography, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired Magazine, and has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff...more

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Quotes from The System of the World

“For most of the day and night, time oppresses me. It is only when I am at work on the innards of a clock-or a lock-that time stops."

"The clock stops, you mean."

"No. Time stops, or so it seems. I do not sense its passage. Then something interrupts me-I become aware that my bladder is full, my mouth dry, my stomach rumbling, the fire’s gone out, and the sun’s gone down. But there before me on the table is a finished clock-" now suddenly a snicker from the mechanism, and a deft movement of his hands. "Or an opened lock.” — 3 people liked it

“But blasting the drummer into the river, though it would have been easy at this range, was not a good way to be inconspicuous.” — 1 person liked it

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The System of the World (The Baroque Cycle #3)

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