{"id":322,"date":"2005-02-26T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-01-04T21:42:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/?p=322"},"modified":"2024-12-31T12:22:30","modified_gmt":"2024-12-30T23:22:30","slug":"the-system-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/2005\/02\/26\/the-system-of-the-world\/","title":{"rendered":"The System of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><strong>Neal Stephenson<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-large-font-size\"><em>Heinemann Press<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading has-medium-font-size\">Otago Daily Times, February 26th 2005<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">In <em>The System of the World<\/em>, Neal Stephenson concludes his Baroque cycle in the style with which he began it \u2014 an eclectic and heady mixture of historical fact and fabulation that veers from painstakingly detailed descriptions of 18th century London to acts of daring worthy of James Bond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">After the diversions of the second book, Stephenson returns to the adventures of Daniel Waterhouse, with whom we started the trilogy. The ageing natural philosopher is faced with a number of seeming impossible tasks: protecting Isaac Newton at the trial of the Pyx (and effecting reconciliation between Newton and Liebniz), saving the notorious Vagabond Jack from death by hanging, and completing construction of his own \u201clogic mill\u201d. How (and if) he succeeds is not clear until the final pages and his adventures make compelling reading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-medium-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">These dramas are interspersed with a verbal portrait of the London in the early 1700s that is almost tangible \u2014 including more than one could wish to know about the city sewers \u2014 and I had great fun trying to pick what was fact from fiction. In many cases I\u2019m still not sure. All of this makes for a brick of a book, and I found myself skipping some of the geographical detail to concentrate on the action, but this is not a criticism. It simply means that I will read it again to catch the layers I missed the first time around. My only complaint is that the size of the book makes it physically hard to read, but it is well worth the effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Neal Stephenson<\/p>\n<p><\/p>\n<p>Otago Daily Times review February 26th 2005<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[32,370,35,18],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","tag-32","tag-fiction","tag-neal-stephenson","tag-odt"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1200,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions\/1200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cushla.spooky-possum.org\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}