John Brewer is the Eli and Edye Broad professor of humanities and social science at Caltech and the author, most recently, of "A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century." “The ...

Science fiction, says Neal Stephenson, is "fiction in which ideas play an important part." Ideas abound in his 927-page "Quicksilver," the first of the three-volume "Baroque Cycle," set entirely ...