| Jack Shaftoe | |
|---|---|
| Created by | Neal Stephenson |
| In-universe information | |
| Aliases | King of the Vagabonds L'Emmerdeur Half-Cocked Jack Quicksilver Ali Zaybak Sword of Divine Fire Jack the Coiner |
| Relatives | Bob Shaftoe (brother) |
Jack Shaftoe (also known, at various points, as King of the Vagabonds, L'Emmerdeur, Half-Cocked Jack, Quicksilver, Ali Zaybak, Sword of Divine Fire, and Jack the Coiner) is one of the three primary fictional characters in Neal Stephenson's 2,686-page, Clarke Award-winning epic trilogy, The Baroque Cycle . [1] [2] [3]
Born in 1660 to a poor London family, Jack, the youngest of three half-brothers, becomes a mudlark at the age of five, abandoning this then-common criminal enterprise shortly thereafter when his eldest half-brother Dick is drowned during a failed raid on a Dutch galjoot in the Thames. After several years working as an impromptu assistant to men about to be hanged by Jack Ketch from the Treble Tree in Tyburn, Jack leaves England to become a vagabond in continental Europe. Much of The Baroque Cycle concerns Jack's adventures in (among other ports-of-call) England, France, Germany, Austria, The Barbary Coast, Egypt, India, Japan, the Philippines, and Mexico between the years 1683 and 1714. [4]
In its 2004 review of The Confusion , The Guardian called the character of Jack Shaftoe "magnificent ... a swashbuckling hero with a foul mouth and few morals." [5] The Village Voice has translated one of the more commonly used fictional sobriquets used to describe Shaftoe, l'emmerdeur, as "he who fucks shit up." [6]
Shaftoe is illiterate until his later years and slightly mad, having contracted syphilis at a time when it was still untreatable. Nevertheless, he is depicted by Stephenson as a daring, charismatic, clever, and resourceful man. While he's possessed by an almost pathological impulsiveness, denominated by his brother Bob "The Imp of the Perverse," Jack also exhibits a surprising capacity for loyalty, mercy, and even, at times, mawkish sentimentality.
During the fifty-four years of European history traced by The Baroque Cycle , Jack loves only one woman, Eliza de la Zeur, the rescued harem-slave turned English Duchess/French Countess (though Jack fathers two children in the early 1680s, Danny and Jimmy, by Irishwoman Mary Dolores Partry, who dies shortly thereafter). Jack spends much of the period between 1683 and 1714 either fighting for his life or attempting to earn, from a great distance, the love and respect of Eliza; often these endeavors are concurrent. His late 17th-century/early 18th-century exploits as a street urchin, mercenary soldier, vagabond, errand-boy, merchant, galley-slave, pirate, petty despot, spy, coiner, and terrorist in the employ of King Louis XIV are the subject, in the world of Stephenson's epic, not only of much of the text proper but also of widely popular picaresque novels read by various characters in the story.
Shaftoe is a distant ancestor of a number of characters appearing in Stephenson's earlier novel, Cryptonomicon , including Bobby Shaftoe, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, America "Amy" Shaftoe, Marcus Aurelius Shaftoe, Robin Shaftoe, and presumably the mysterious "Uncle Jack" Shaftoe.
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction. His novels have been categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, postcyberpunk, and baroque.
Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare.
Neal Leon Cassady was a major figure of the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the psychedelic and counterculture movements of the 1960s.
A mudlark is someone who scavenges in river mud for items of value, a term used especially to describe those who scavenged this way in London during the late 18th and 19th centuries. The practice of searching the banks of rivers for items continues in the modern era, with newer technology such as metal detectors sometimes being employed to search for metal valuables that may have washed ashore.
Quicksilver is a historical novel by Neal Stephenson, published in 2003. It is the first volume of The Baroque Cycle, his late Baroque historical fiction series, succeeded by The Confusion and The System of the World. Quicksilver won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for the Locus Award in 2004. Stephenson organized the structure of Quicksilver such that chapters have been incorporated into three internal books titled "Quicksilver", "The King of the Vagabonds", and "Odalisque". In 2006, each internal book was released in separate paperback editions, to make the 900 pages more approachable for readers. These internal books were originally independent novels within the greater cycle during composition.
The System of the World is a novel by Neal Stephenson and is the third and final volume in The Baroque Cycle. The title alludes to the third volume of Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which bears the same name.
Tai-Pan is a 1966 novel written by James Clavell about European and American traders who move into Hong Kong in 1842 following the end of the First Opium War. It is the second book in Clavell's Asian Saga, and the first to feature the fictional Struan family.
The Confusion is a novel by Neal Stephenson. It is the second volume in The Baroque Cycle and consists of two sections or books, Bonanza and The Juncto. In 2005, The Confusion won the Locus Award, together with The System of the World, also by Stephenson.
The Baroque Cycle is a series of novels by American writer Neal Stephenson. It was published in three volumes containing eight books in 2003 and 2004. The story follows the adventures of a sizable cast of characters living amidst some of the central events of the late 17th and early 18th centuries in Europe, Africa, Asia, and Central America. Despite featuring a literary treatment consistent with historical fiction, Stephenson has characterized the work as science fiction, because of the presence of some anomalous occurrences and the work's particular emphasis on themes relating to science and technology. The sciences of cryptology and numismatics feature heavily in the series, as they do in some of Stephenson's other works.
Eliza is a female given name in English, meaning "pledged to God" or "joyful."
"Jipi and the Paranoid Chip" is a science fiction short story by Neal Stephenson that appeared in Forbes magazine's July 7, 1997 issue. It is part of the Baroque Cycle/Cryptonomicon universe.
John Ketch, generally known as Jack Ketch, was an infamous English executioner employed by King Charles II. He became famous through the way he performed his duties during the tumults of the 1680s, when he was often mentioned in broadsheet accounts that circulated throughout the Kingdom of England. He is thought to have been appointed in 1663. He executed the death sentences against William Russell, Lord Russell, in Lincoln's Inn Fields on 21 July 1683, and James Scott, 1st Duke of Monmouth, on 15 July 1685, after the Monmouth Rebellion. Ketch's notoriety stems from "barbarity at the execution of Lord Russell, the Duke of Monmouth, and other political offenders".
Captain Jack may refer to:
Maggie Cassidy is a novel by the American writer Jack Kerouac, first published in 1959. It is a largely autobiographical work about Kerouac's early life in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 1938 to 1939, and chronicles his real-life relationship with his teenage sweetheart Mary Carney. It is unique for Kerouac for its high school setting and teenage characters. He wrote the novel in 1953 but it was not published until 1959, after the success of On the Road (1957).
The Imp of the Perverse is a metaphor for the urge to do exactly the wrong thing in a given situation for the sole reason that it is possible for wrong to be done. The impulse is compared to an imp which leads an otherwise decent person into mischief, and occasionally to their death.
Bobby Shaftoe may refer to:
The Mongoliad is a fictional narrative set in the Foreworld Saga, a secret history transmedia franchise developed by the Subutai Corporation. The Mongoliad was originally released in a serialized format online, and via a series of iOS and Android apps, but was restructured and re-edited for a definitive edition released via the Amazon Publishing imprint 47North, both in print and in Kindle format. Fan-submitted Foreworld stories were published via Amazon's Kindle Worlds imprint.
Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of the American colonies during the early 18th century. He captained the Queen Anne's Revenge, a 200-ton frigate originally named the Concord, and died in a fierce battle with troops from Virginia on November 22, 1718, at Ocracoke Island.
Comstock is a surname of English origin. Notable people with the surname include:
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell is a 2019 speculative fiction novel by American author Neal Stephenson. The book explores mind-uploading to the Cloud, from the perspective of Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a character introduced in Stephenson's 2011 Reamde.
