Truly cosmopolitan account of the very earliest dawn in what might (with good will) seem a timid but global Enlightenment. In addition to unfamiliar vignettes from, say, the Chinese, Japanese, or Russian empires, the book features interesting portraits of proto-intellectuals like Aphra Behn & Pierre Bayle. ( )

"Books to Write By" by Stuart Mayne

In the previous column I discussed the importance of voice in SF fiction. In this column I'm treading the boards at the opposite end of the novel building hall. World building is vitally important to the success of your story or novel. World building needs to be broad in its structure and inclusive in its detail. You will get a great feel for what is ahead of you if you read 1688 – A Global History by historian John E Wills (ISBN 1-86207-482-8). The book has been around for a few years, published in 2002 by Granta, and distributed by Allen & Unwin in Australia, but the scope of its reference is staggering. This book has rightly been compared to A Thousand and One Nights; it sweeps the reader around the world, through the year 1688, reflecting the diversity, splendour and strangeness of human society. You couldn't ask for anything better if you are building a world from scratch: all the major and diverse societies of our world and how they interact with each other, if at all, in one narrative. This book will help you analyse a world held together by the invisible threads of human communication and interaction.

Reading history often feels disjointed --we focus on one event, or one culture, without considering the wider, global view of which it is part. Wills' book is extremely fresh in that it attempts the opposite: it's a historical snapshot of 1688, with stories from all over the world, and the result is almost fantastic: Pirates, samurais, Sor Juana, Newton, Louis XIV, the Dutch East India Company, they're all here, and they were all there, living through the same days and years.

The book loses strength near the end, and it's too forgiving of religiousness, considering the number of wars and deaths it caused even in just that one year. Still a good read. ( )

I loved the idea of this book: it reminded me of something I once heard Jonathan Spence describe in a lecture, that there is a moment between 1575 and 1700 where the entire world is linked in a new way, but that for the most part, Western Europe is not really dominant over this new world-system. Exploring that moment through the prism of a single year seems like a fantastic idea. I'm also very partial to a more microhistorical, cultural-history take on world history. For all of that, however, this book just doesn't quite gel together as well as I expected it to. I'm not sure why. It may be that Wills just doesn't give it enough structure, or that the writing is less engaging that it needs to be, or that his selection of narratives from 1688 ends up feeling like one damn thing after another as opposed to some golden thread of connections. ( )

http://tamaranth.blogspot.com/2005/04... ( )