: : : The Baroque Cycle is coming… : : :
Has an excerpt! Will be on my Palm next hotsync.
Quicksilver : Volume One of The Baroque Cycle
Neal Stephenson’s new book announced.
The editorial review now on Amazon
Book DescriptionIn 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.
Daniel Waterhouse possesses a brilliant scientific mind — and yet knows that his genius is dwarfed by that of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. He rejects the arcane tradition of alchemy, even as it is giving birth to new ways of understanding the world.
Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London street urchin and is now a reckless wanderer in search of great fortune. The intrepid exploits of Half-Cocked Jack, King of the Vagabonds, are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe.
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. Traveling from the infant American colonies to the Tower of London to the glittering courts of Louis XIV, and all manner of places in between, this magnificent historical epic brings to vivid life a time like no other, and establishes its author as one of the preeminent talents of our own age.
Sounds amazing. And there is that name: Shaftoe straight from Cryptonomicon. That alone is intriguing.
The title is of interest to me. Obviously this is set in a pre Internet era. But not in a time before the archetypes of cyberspace were around. I am in the middle of, well further than that, almost completing an essay on that topic, and Quicksilver looms large. Mercury, or Hermes as the Greeks called him was working, driving the realm we now know as cyberspace. I wonder if Stephenson has made the same connection? Undoubtedly!
Scandle? Just USA true to form.
Egad! They Lied!
Bad Subjects: Item by Jonathan Sterne:
The scandal is that there is no scandal.
Orcinus
Orcinus Has an interesting article in PDF on Fascism.
Review of Pattern Recognition
This is what the cover looks like in NZ – nice! I am loving the book. I literally chose this book by the cover, I thought I’d brouse the SF section at Scorpio and see if there were any with nice covers. Usually SF books have the worst covers of all genre. Of course I was also swayed by the authors’s name, even though I have not liked all of his previous books. He coined the word cyberspace perhaps he will pull out another lightening bolt.
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy
Shirky: A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy:
…the core challenges for designing large-scale social software.
An excellent essay.
BLOGGER :: Dano FAQ
BLOGGER :: Dano FAQ: “BlogThis!”
Looks like I’ll be back in business – I lost my old Blog this! which slowed me down.
Workers of the World Unite
Loyalty Day, 2003 This is surely like a red rag to a bull (or its a joke!) How about we make all web pages red for a week!
This site has the story! May Day!
From here: History:
Our modern celebration of Mayday as a working class holiday evolved from the struggle for the eight hour day in 1886. May 1, 1886 saw national strikes in the United States and Canada for an eight hour day called by the Knights of Labour. In Chicago police attacked striking workers killing six.
The next day at a demonstration in Haymarket Square to protest the police brutality a bomb exploded in the middle of a crowd of police killing eight of them. The police arrested eight anarchist trade unionists claiming they threw the bombs. To this day the subject is still one of controversy. The question remains whether the bomb was thrown by the workers at the police or whether one of the police’s own agent provocateurs dropped it in their haste to retreat from charging workers.
In what was to become one of the most infamous show trials in America in the 19th century, but certainly not to be the last of such trials against radical workers, the State of Illinois tried the anarchist workingmen for fighting for their rights as much as being the actual bomb throwers. Whether the anarchist workers were guilty or innocent was irrelevant. They were agitators, fomenting revolution and stirring up the working class, and they had to be taught a lesson.
Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engle and Adolph Fischer were found guilty and executed by the State of Illinois.
In Paris in 1889 the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) declared May 1st an international working class holiday in commemoration of the Haymarket Martyrs. The red flag became the symbol of the blood of working class martyrs in their battle for workers rights.
Mayday, which had been banned for being a holiday of the common people, had been reclaimed once again for the common people.