News You Can Bruise for 2005 January 2 (entry 0)

Sun Jan 02 2005 21:30 PST: By no popular demand whatsoever, I present the list of Cryptonomicon-Baroque Cycle tie-ins that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere (qv. NYCB passim). Presented in descending order of plausibility. Contains spoilers.

• There are several references throughout Cryptonomicon to the Shaftoes' arrival in America as indentured servants, their escaping at the first opportunity and lighting it for the mountains, etc. I feel kind of lame pointing this out because it's so obvious, but no one else has actually come out and mentioned it, so I will. It's not just the samurai swords in the trunk of the car (though that is the coolest reference).
• This I'm surprised no one has mentioned because it's the most interesting tie-in I found. One of the recurring images in The Confusion and The System of the World is that of a hollow or wireframe globe being consumed in flames (it's even the little logo on the spine of my copy of TSotW). I found that exact imagery used three times in Cryptonomicon. It's used twice in the set piece depicting the death of Admiral Yamamoto:

  The nose of the plane, then, is a blunt dome of curving struts, like the meridians and parallels of a globe... The plane has been parked pointing east, so the glass nose is radiant with streaky dawn, the unreal hues of chemicals igniting in a lab...

  The greenhouse disintegrates around him, the meridians and parallels crumping and rending which isn't quite as bad as it sounds since the body of the plane is suddenly filled with flames.

  It's also used near the end in the scene where Bischoff is escaping his sunken U-boat:

  Bischoff looks back and up, and sees the forward end of the pressure hull turned into a dome of orange fire, the silhouette of a man centered in it, lines of welds and rivets spreading away from that center like the meridians of a globe.

  Its use in the Yamomoto scene is thematically appropriate for several reasons which I could write a whole paper on if I were the kind of person who writes papers instead of weblog entries on this topic. As far as I can tell the Bischoff scene has no reason to use it, except it's very near the end of the book which is where authors traditionally pile on references to the recurring images. So there you go. I think I got all of them because I wasn't looking for them at all and they just jumped out at me, but there might be more.

• There's a correspondence between the sinister Investor in Quicksilver who goes around on a big ol' galleon or whatever, and the sinister Dentist in Cryptonomicon who is an investor and who goes around on a big ol' yacht. There's probably no geneaological relationship between them, though.
• Near the end of Cryptonomicon Randy makes a reference to "Comstock's cabal". In Quicksilver, that Comstock's ancestor was the C in Charles II's CABAL. Coincidence? Probably.