I've been slogging through this for what seems forever... and that makes it sound like it's been a horrendous task, which it hasn't - this is a GREAT book. But it's practically three novels-worth of words, so it's been a long process. And on top of that, it's the first of a TRILOGY. The book takes place in mid 1600s England (for the most part), with a cast of characters part fictional and part real. Daniel Waterhouse, our first fictional protagonist, bumps shoulders with Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and various and sundry members of the royalty as he follows his path - a puritan in a land of catholics and protestants, very aware of the fact that as a natural philosopher he is fully eclipsed by Newton, Leibniz, Hooke.
Stephenson touches on so many aspects of life, culture, language, science, in the course of his work that I feel like I'm getting an education along the way; the origins of words and scientific ideas flow by so rapidly, and the huge, incestuous mass of relationships between the various royal houses of Europe is so difficult to keep straight that I just let myself float along like a cork on this stream of words.
The quicksilver of the title certainly refers to the actual substance, mercury, which in that era was used for many purposes - as a health tonic among others; but also to the flow of ideas and the quickening of scientific rigor, the establishment of schools of thought and the great ideas coming from great men across Europe.
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