The Solomonic Gold

[mmcirvin]

Having read the whole enormous thing, I can say that the very end was a bit more satisfying than I expected from the early parts of The System of the World. Altogether the whole thing strikes me as kind of loose and sprawling, with many brilliant parts, but also with much flab that could have been cut. That said...

(And, bearing in mind that I still haven't gotten around to reading the second half of Cryptonomicon, which probably has at least a tangential bearing on what follows...)

The brilliant rationalist explanation for the Solomonic Gold that I started concocting midway through reading The Confusion fell apart completely. Stephenson imagines this stuff as a sort of magical gold isotope that is slightly heavier than regular gold. The alchemists in the story think that it is somehow alloyed with the Philosophick Mercury, a substance that is more or less the Philosopher's Stone and inheres in gold that was created through alchemical transmutation.

Now, in our world there is no heavier-than-normal stable isotope of gold. However, there a couple of unstable, slightly heavier isotopes with a half-life of days that decay to mercury. So I was imagining gold that had somehow been exposed to a heavy flux of neutrons, perhaps in some primeval Oklo-like natural reactor, and had been fractionally transmuted into mercury; this stuff might appear to be slightly heavy gold (if somehow the mercury happened not to be chemically separated out; I know it amalgamates with gold readily). Presumably Isaac Newton would eventually succeed in getting his hands on a bunch of the stuff, and manage to extract from it... mercury! Quicksilver! But not the Philosophick Mercury, just garden-variety quicksilver, perhaps with an odd isotopic composition. And Alchemy would be tragically disappointed.

But that's not what Stephenson was going for at all. In the world of the Baroque Cycle, which is historically a fairly minimal secret-history variant of our own, apparently Alchemy really works; there are a small number of functionally immortal Wise Men out there who have been around for thousands of years, are possibly identical with characters in the Bible, and receive information by mainlining it from God or some supernatural source. They've got the Philosophick Mercury and the secrets of transmutation and eternal (or at least long) life, but it gives them little satisfaction, and they've decided to induce the Age of Alchemy to pass from Midgard and usher in a new rationalist age because men are happier when they know why they know things. The Solomonic Gold really is suffused with the Philosophick Mercury and doesn't fit into a scientific conception of nature at all, which is why Enoch and Solomon would really prefer that it be kept squirreled away.

It's a pleasing metaphor, I suppose; there's some audacity in doing a magic-goes-away story that doesn't treat the process as essentially tragic, and a certain echo of the Jaynes material in Snow Crash. But it also feels less original than I expected it might when I was midway through the cycle. And I'm also wondering if Stephenson was intentionally seeking to fake out people like me who, upon hearing of heavy gold, would immediately pull out a Chart of the Nuclides.

Comments

Oh yeah, he wanted to out us.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes.
You, me, and (thousands?) of others Neil got to know after Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon were deliberately baited by Solomonic Gold in the first two novels.
Over and over again , in interviews, he referred to the "Baroque cycle" as science fiction. Finally, it is revealed that Solomonic Gold is truly magical, and accordingly has no place on the periodic table.

At first I was disgusted, but I have come to agree that it was the better literary choice.