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Quicksilver Wiki

This site is a mirror of the original Metaweb/Quicksilver Wiki, which is no longer online. It's meant to help you follow along while reading the Baroque Cycle.

A good starting point would be the page (or annotations) for the book in the series you're reading:

The Baroque Cycle and Metaweb

In 2003 Neal Stephenson published Quicksilver, the first novel in his historical fiction series the Baroque Cycle.

As part of this release, Stephenson set up a wiki with annotations and info on the book. This wiki was edited both by Stephenson and community of readers. Eventually it covered the second (The Confusion) and third (The System of the World) novels, both released in 2004, as well as a few other books1.

The wiki — initially called Metaweb and later the Quicksilver Wiki — was active from 2003 to 2006, but is no longer online except at the Internet Archive, which is cumbersome to access.

Reboot

This site is a mirror of the original Quicksilver Wiki — scraped from the Internet Archive, converted into markdown, lightly processed and rendered using Material for MkDocs.

All internal links should work. Some images work.

Unfortunately, most external links won't work, even if they're still active2.

Disclaimer

This site is unaffiliated with Neal Stephenson and the original Metaweb project. I get no monetary value from it. I just:

  1. like the Baroque Cycle
  2. wanted to enhance my experience (re)reading it, and
  3. thought others might be in similar situations

Like the original, it's licensed under GNU FDL.

Contributing

While the original Quicksilver Wiki was easy to edit, this version lives in a Github repository at:

https://github.com/nathanbraun/quicksilver-wiki

And for now is only editable via pull requests, which you are welcome to make.

  1. Mainly Stephenson books — Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash — but also a few other ones. ↩

  2. I accidentally wrecked most of them while parsing the markdown. Eventually maybe I'll go back to the html and grab them again. ↩