In an alternate eighteenth-century Europe devastated by alchemical
disaster, Sir Isaac Newton and his able assistant, Benjamin Franklin,
confront enemies who seek humankind's destruction
Sir Isaac Newton's discovery of philosopher's mercury in 1681 gave rise
to a remarkable new branch of alchemical science. Forty years later, the
world stands poised on the brink of a new dark age . . .
England is in ruins, crushed by an asteroid called to Earth by the very
alchemy Newton unleashed. France is in chaos following the long-delayed
death of Louis XIV. Cotton Mather, Blackbeard, and the Choctaw shaman
Red Shoes set sail from the American colonies to investigate the silence
lying over the Old World. And in Russia, Tsar Peter the Great, now host
to the evil entity that kept the Sun King alive, seizes a golden
opportunity for conquest as he marches his unstoppable army across a
devastated continent.
Meanwhile Newton and his young apprentice, Ben Franklin, hide out in
Prague, awaiting the inevitable violent collision of all these disparate
elements--human and demonic alike--while a fugitive Adrienne de Mornay
de Montchevreuil pursues the secrets of the malakim and her own role in
their conspiracy to obliterate humankind.
The second volume of the Age of Unreason series, Greg Keyes's masterwork
of alternate history, A Calculus of Angels brilliantly expands the
scope of the world he introduced in Newton's Cannon as an
unforgettable cast of historical heavyweights collide on a different
Earth where magic and science coexist.
