Book One of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver introduces Daniel Waterhouse as a complex character intimately enmeshed with the major controversies of his day. As a child, he witnessed the death of the King of England with the coming of Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads. As a youth, he attends a re-emergently Catholic Cambridge, rooming with young Isaac Newton and studying "natural philosophy" instead of preparing for the Apocalyse his father expects in the year 1666. (Instead of the expected end of days, Daniel meets the Black Plague in that year, and watches his father die in the Great London Fire.)

And we know that in later years, this pilgrim does finally go to the New World, where he starts the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technological Arts, and intrigues a young boy named Ben (Franklin) into scientific inquiries. (Actually, the book opens on the seventy-plus year old Waterhouse, and the rest of the story is told as flashbacks interspersed with "current day" journeys. This is the same Innis-mode technique Stephenson used in Cryptonomicon.)

Quicksilver is shot through with references to mercury—I counted twenty-three overt occurrences in the first few chapters. The quicksilver theme brings together messages (Mercury was the messenger of the gods), natural philosophy, alchemy and chemistry (mercury is an important element to all three), medicine (Mercury's symbol was used by physicians, and elemental mercury was often prescribed), and war (Hg was an essential ingredient in explosives of the day).

Daniel Waterhouse explores his belief in religious free will against the background of revolutions in science, mathematics, cryptography, religion and politics. Like drops of mercury on a heated plate, he ranges far and wide, and reflects the brilliance of those around him.

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Bobby Shaftoe went to sea,
Silver buckles on his knee.
He'll come back to marry me.
Mother says so!

Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe is the eponymous King of the Vagabonds in Book Two, and easily the most likeable character in the novel. Here is where Quicksilver swings into adventure-mode, as Jack gallivants across the Holy Roman Empire, liberating damsels in distress and rescuing the odd coin or two—or vice versa.