THE System OF THE WORLD

A certain kind of debt, which might make sense only to novelists, ought to be acknowledged to the late Dorothy Du

People who fund and staff museums-especially wee, peculiar museums-ought to be acknowledged. I don’t have any of those people’s names, but here are some interesting museums: Newton’s Room at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts; Newton’s house at Woolsthorpe; Musee Carnavalet in Paris; the Bank of England Museum; the Hague Historical Museum; the Upper Harz Mining Museum and the Bergapothek in Clausthal-Zellerfeld; and the Berg-baumuseum Rohrigschacht in Wettelrode.

Thanks to Bela and Gabriella Bollobas; Doug Carlston and Tomi Pierce; and Barry Kemp of Co

Many others have, knowingly or not, contributed to a milieu in which it was possible for me to consider writing something like this without seeming completely mad. And here I am tempted to list the names of a lot of mathematicians and physicists. But out of a concern for their privacy and a desire not to seem like I’m clinging to their ankles, I’ll draw a veil over those conversations. Suffice it to say that the Royal Society crowd written about in these books has many descendants and heirs today, who are capable of talking learnedly about monads, cellular automata, the calculus dispute, absolute time and space, amp;c. at the drop of a hat, and that it’s been my privilege to know a few of them. They seem pleasantly surprised to learn that someone actually wants to write a novel about such topics, and I in turn have been pleasantly surprised to find that they are actually willing to spend time talking to me, and out of this, quite a few good conversations have arisen over the years.

Helping in many ways to make this possible on the publishing end, and exhibiting superhuman patience over its seven-year span, were Je

Jeremy Bornstein, Alvy Ray Smith, and Lisa Gold read the penultimate drafts and supplied useful commentary. The latter two, along with the cartographer Nick Springer, participated in creation of maps, diagrams, and family trees.

The dialect spoken by Lord Gy in the third volume is a good faith effort by the author to approach eighteenth-century Scottish with all due respect and to get it as right as possible. If I’ve botched it; and if you know enough Scottish to know that I have; and if you’re thinking of giving me a piece of your mind, know that I am one-quarter MacPhail. The unca

Neal Stephenson

May 2004

About the Author

NEAL STEPHENSON is the author of the novels Quicksilver, The Confusion, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Also by

Neal Stephenson

The Confusion

Quicksilver

Cryptonomicon

The Diamond Age

Snow Crash

Zodiac

Credits

Jacket design by Richard L. Aquan

Jacket illustration of world map by Frederick de Wit from De Zee Atlas Amsterdam, 1662, Birmingham Library, UK

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE SYSTEM OF THE WORLD. Copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of PerfectBound™.

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