My nomination is "The Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson: "Quicksilver," "The Confusion" and "The System of the World." They are the only works I know that combine the "swashbuckling adventure" of 17th Century, mercenary adventurers, the development of the sinews of modern business and finance, English, French, Dutch and German court and society, Pepeys, Hook, Newton, Wren and the Royal Society, the American colonies, including Harvard and M.I.T, the original usage of "redneck," India, Egypt and Japan, etc. etc. I have some familiarity with many of these subjects and found no significant issues. Stephenson creates believable characters and places them in appropriate historical context. I think it is a natural for ET members who have not previously found it. I found it a compulsive read at around 2400 pp for all three volumes. We had just moved from L.A. to northern Arkansas. The wife was a little annoyed. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
You are probably familiar with Frank Herbert's excellent Dune series, similarly "completed," but you may be unfamiliar with an older S.F. author, A.E. van Vogt and his Null-A series. Van Vogt was a Holocaust refugee living in L.A. and active in the 40s and 50s. He was a popularizer of the works of the Polish semanticist Count Alfred Korzybski, who developed what he called "non-Aristotelian logic" or Null-A. "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-aristotelian Systems and General Semantics" is available on Amazon. "The map is not the territory" is perhaps his most widely known statement. I used to employ these concepts to confound uncomprehending managers by informing them that they were applying either-or logic to both-and situations. (This scarcely does justice to Korzibski!) What I find particularly interesting and ironic about the Null-A books in todays context is that they developed the theme of a persecuted minority possessing extraordinary abilities who understood that their lives, individually, were less important that the survival of their kind. Today's suicide bombers come to mind. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
