• (hreview version 0.2)
• (Reviewed on 21 February 2009 by Anthony Bailey)
• product

Size matters, here. The Baroque Cycle is something of an epic, at around one million words long. (Workings: its three books end on page numbers 916 + 815 + 886 = 2617 pages * 45 lines/page * 10 words/line = 1.12Mwords, then round down some whitespace.)

The trilogy is a "behind the scenes" saga spanning fifty years of scientific and economic alchemy, featuring characters from the pages of history but centered on three of their peers whose tales escaped the official record.

In many ways this is the 17th/18th century version of the same author's more contemporary Cryptonomicon, with which it shares the above approach, plenty of adventures colored by cryptography and computation, and more. However, I found its sprawling scope resulted in less value per page: its three books contain only a little more gold in total than Cryptonomicon's one.