Relationships with books

This is something that I feel is clearly understood but I'll just reiterate it just in case. There are at least two distinct relationships with a book - the author and the reader / critic. I know that Stephenson has come out saying that his books are not political but the reader may read politics into some of Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle. Its an issue that I'll come back to at some point, I hope in some depth.

DIY?

I've just been reading Paul Gannon's great book, Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, which is a readable and entertaining without deluging the reader in detail (whilst having the detail in the appendices). What I hadn't realised was how that Colossus was essentially a DIY project, that Bletchley Park engineers to some degree just didn't realise the strides that were about to be made. It reminds me of the data haven site in Cryptonomicon and the creation of the haven.

Eruditorium? Erudition? Root?

What has been bothering me is the way that we need to find ways of changing thinking. In John Gribbin's The Fellowship the writer brings out the seismic shifts of thinking that came about from Aristotelian thought to the Scientific Revolution and the scientific method. So what has this to do with the Baroque Cycle?

Simple. Stephenson uses the founding ofthe Royal Society almost as a way of articulating what thinkers and doers like Tim Berners-Lee have been doing with the Internet. The Royal Society and the letters that float around Europe are clearly analogous to the 1990s, also utilising the development of mercantile networks.

Perhaps one of the points of the Baroque Cycle is to try and explore how thinking changed and developed.

Intriguingly Stephenson has avoided the hyped, vaunted, played with Web 2.0 and has kept the same vision of a network about an online library of information, an infinitely extensible archive. He pretty much comes up with this in the long monologue that Leibniz has about his library idea. However it requires a radical change of thought to create, maintain this purity.

Stephenson is on record (on his website) as denying that he is a political writer and purely aims to recreate the psyches of people in the period with their paradigms. So he's not telling the reader how to think but does manage to explore how they think so this may influence the reader to consider their own position. Perhaps.

Changes - Words and differing meanings

I'm currently reading The Fellowship by John Gribbin (Allen Lane, London, 2005) which is the story of the founding of the Royal Society. (Its a pleasantly short book at around 340 pages and written in such an accessible style.)

In exploring the reasons for the scientific revolution coming about in Britain and why it had the impact it did, he writes:
"These [technological changes such as movable type, gunpowder, the publication of Copernicus's De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium] changed the intellectual envirnoment both by improving communications and providing information about new and exciting places, and by showing that the application of science could have practical benefits"(page xiii)

Following this, Gribbin points out that the definition of science comes from the Latin scientia meaning knowledge and that the word was understood in a far broader context than we do now. Stephenson is aware this change (modern narrowing?) of definition as Isaac plays with Alchemy to achieve scientific ends and the major characters of the Baroque Cycle are what we would now call polymaths. The seek knowledge from whichever field is necessary rather than keeping within hte boundaries of their subjects.

A further term which needs elucidating in its changes is "revolution" whose meaning has changed somewhat from the seventeenth century understanding. That is for a later post.

Pesky Liberals - An old lesson for a modern age

Just going on further through the Gribbin and reading about John Wilkins at Gray's Inn and his views. Gribbin comments:
"Wilkins was a gregarious and friendly man who often inspired respect and encouraged people from widely differing backgrounds to come together and discuss scientific ideas and, crucially, to carry out their own scientific experiments. His tolerance was unusual, but by no means unique, in an age which, as we have already seen, was torn by religious disagreements over ideology. As a liberal, he was criticized for, amongst other things, such dnagerous ideas as reconciliation with the Dissenters, and it is significant that the Royal Society itself, when it was set up, specifically encouraged men from all parts of the Christian Church to be among its Fellows." (page132)

Whilst Stephenson is clearly not writing a political tract, the Baroque Cycle, or at least the science narrative, demonstrates a clear working towards this seventeenth century ideal of science/quest for knowledge, bringing together different backgrounds.