{"id":51,"date":"2004-04-23T10:47:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-23T10:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=51"},"modified":"2025-04-25T18:55:14","modified_gmt":"2025-04-25T18:55:14","slug":"baroque-action-sequence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/?p=51","title":{"rendered":"Baroque Action Sequence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m sadly nearing the end of reading Neal Stephenson’s<\/a> Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1)<\/i><\/a>. It makes me somewhat sad to near the end of a great book, but I am heartened by the fact that there are two more volumes to come, and I saw The Confusion (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 2)<\/i> in a bookstore display window in the airport last night.<\/p>\n

While Cyptonomicon<\/i> still tops the list of my all-time favorite books, Quicksilver<\/i> is humbling in its breathtaking richness of detail, history and compelling storyline and characters. Every so often I have to set the book down and marvel at the amount of research that must have gone into this rather large tome. <\/p>\n

I wonder if it is harder to create an entire world filled with rich history (say, The Lord of the Rings<\/i>) or to meticulously research the real world and weave a fascinating story into it.<\/p>\n

It is not so very often that I am reading an action sequence in a book and I am actually overcome with a rush of adrenaline, especially if I am sitting in a cramped airplane seat next to someone who is large enough to have justifiably purchased two seats, but didn’t. Such was the case when I read a sand-sailer action sequence. A sand-sailer (and I hadn’t heard of it) is basically a large skateboard with a sail on it, which is used on beaches. In the novel, William of Orange rides one every morning, and there’s a great sequence with horses, sand-sailers, pirates, muskets and stuff. Woo. I was thinking it would be worth making the book into a movie, if just for that sequence.<\/p>\n

Woo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m sadly nearing the end of reading Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver (The Baroque Cycle, Vol. 1). It makes me somewhat sad to near the end of a great book, but I am heartened by the fact that there are two more … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[513],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3754,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/3754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journal.electric-rocket.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}