I had some spare time in London a couple of weeks ago when we had a school trip to see The Anderson Project at the Barbican: why not photo-document one of the pivotal locations in The System of the World, the Tower of London?
Possible spoilers ahead!
When reading the rather lengthy invasion-of-the-Tower sequence, I didn’t get a clear mental map of what-went-where inside the Tower, so that was my main focus. On a very dismal, grey day with no direct sunlight I found myself in the ancient fortress complex – it was freezing cold and I didn’t get to spend as much time there as I would’ve liked: my photos and notes, cross-referenced with snippets from the Arrow Books 2005 UK paperback edition, text copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be found in my Flickr space.
Those photos are all tagged as baroquecyclelondon, and it would really be cool if anyone else wanted to Flickr-ise any of the many other London locations of Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and tag them similarly (or maybe just baroquecycle if they happen to be near the Massachusetts Bay Colony of Technologickal Arts…). Perhaps someone might like to document the top of The Monument and the view that Jack would’ve had of the Tower, and tag it?
I guess I was hoping that this could be a visual annotation to TSotW, in much the same way as the Quicksilver Metaweb, but perhaps that’s too grand an ambition. (I’m also hoping that extracting small snippets of text that are, of course, copyright © 2004 by Neal Stephenson, can be considered as fair use.) Any Londoners out there feeling Baroque?
[Edit: forgot to mention that this was slightly inspired by Tantek Çelik and Eric Meyer's obsessively detailed Matrix location Flickr-ing.]
[Edit2: use Google Maps for a great overview of the Tower complex - compare it to the description on page 199.]
