Daniel becomes a minor political player, Secretary of the Royal Society, sort of a tame Puritan in the Royal cabinet. Daniel himself is presented as a competent natural philosopher but nothing special - he is there as a witness to genius embodied by Newton (and others such as Hooke, Huygens, and Leibniz). At Cambridge he befriends the very strange and otherworldly Isaac Newton. Daniel's loyalties are divided - he is still his father's son, but hardly a true believer in the Puritan religious doctrines. But the story really takes place as Waterhouse goes up to Cambridge, just after the Restoration of the Monarchy.
Waterhouse is one of a prominent Puritan family, who have wielded some influence during Cromwell's Protectorship.
And of course Quicksilver is only the first of a trilogy!) The first book is about Daniel Waterhouse and his relationship with Isaac Newton. (The entire novel is some 380,000 words, so each book is a substantial novel-length in itself. All I can say is that I have little objection to Roberts's arguments, but that I came away from the book having enjoyed myself. For a negative review with which I almost entirely agree in specifics, I suggest Adam Roberts's. I certainly didn't love it, and it is by no means as good as Cryptonomicon or Snow Crash, but it is a generally enjoyable and interesting hodgepodge of political intrigue, early scientific inquiry, disease and grime, and eccentricity. What to say about Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver (first of The Baroque Trilogy) that has not already been said? It is largely as has been reported: overlong, rambling, annoying anachronistic, not terribly well plotted. In honor of his birthday, then, here are two reviews I did long ago, of his novels Quicksilver and Cryptonomicon.
Neal Stephenson was born on my first Halloween - October 31, 1959, when I was all of 26 days old.
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