This second book of a groundbreaking sci-fi series introduces an alternate earth where powerful Threads can alter reality as we know it. After almost a year, the gate between worlds has opened again, and through it Darwin Lloyd hears the anguished screams of Teresa, the love he left behind. He returns to her world--one where quantum Threads can change or control reality and ordinary people can do extraordinary things. But nothing is as he had left it. The Threads, though still plentiful, no longer respond the way they once had. Groups of Threaders must work together to perform even the simplest of tasks. Yet the Qabal continue to grow and create Skends to do their bidding. With the changes, war has returned to the world, pitting the Qabal against the Threaders of SafeHaven and Forsyth. With the weakened Threads and the increase in Skends, SafeHaven is losing. Darwin's return is greeted with hatred by some, and worship by others... all for the same reason. He changed the world by turning off the Source. Darwin needs to find Teresa, and reverse what he has done before the Qabal take away everything he loves about world he has entered.

The third and final book of the Quantum Empirica sci-fi series explores an alternate earth where powerful Threads have the power to alter reality as we know it. Scarred and disfigured, Darwin Lloyd travels the country with Teresa, trying to find a life without Threads--quantum strings that can change or control reality. His only real skill in the new reality he helped create is the Dance, passed on to him by Baila as she took his ability to use Threads. But time doesn't stand still. Though SafeHaven and Forsyth have control of the QPS, the machine Darwin and his dad built and the reason the Threads exist, and the remnants of Salem and the Qabal are building an army to take it back. With another brutal war looming over him, Darwin will have to make a decision that may change his and Teresa's lives forever.

Now in paperback, this first book of a new sci-fi series introduces an alternate earth where powerful Threads have the power to alter reality as we know it. Pulled from his world by an experiment gone wrong, Darwin Lloyd is one of the few that can see the Threads—quantum strings that can be manipulated to change or control reality. On an alternate Earth ravaged by war, Darwin is torn between the Qabal and SafeHaven, his only goal to find a way back home and stop the same fate from happening in his time line. Threads—thought of as a gift from the machine he helped his father create—and Threaders are both loved and hated, treated as gods by some and as criminals by others. Out of his element, Darwin must learn how to control the Threads and possibly join the hated Qabal to find the path back to his dad. But Thread use comes at a price. Follow the possibilities and probabilities too far and the human mind shatters, leaving the Threader a mindless, drooling husk. Yet the Thread’s pull is almost irresistible, and a constant battle for those that can see them. In this strange new world, Darwin discovers what he could never find on his own: friends, family, love, a mother he lost years before, and a younger sister he never had.

'Tis done. The world is a most confused and unsteady place -- especially London, center of finance, innovation, and conspiracy -- in the year 1714, when Daniel Waterhouse makes his less-than-triumphant return to England's shores. Aging Puritan and Natural Philosopher, confidant of the high and mighty and contemporary of the most brilliant minds of the age, he has braved the merciless sea and an assault by the infamous pirate Blackbeard to help mend the rift between two adversarial geniuses at a princess's behest. But while much has changed outwardly, the duplicity and danger that once drove Daniel to the American Colonies is still coin of the British realm. No sooner has Daniel set foot on his homeland when he is embroiled in a dark conflict that has been raging in the shadows for decades. It is a secret war between the brilliant, enigmatic Master of the Mint and closet alchemist Isaac Newton and his archnemesis, the insidious counterfeiter Jack the Coiner, a.k.a. Jack Shaftoe, King of the Vagabonds. Hostilities are suddenly moving to a new and more volatile level, as Half-Cocked Jack plots a daring assault on the Tower itself, aiming for nothing less than the total corruption of Britain's newborn monetary system. Unbeknownst to all, it is love that set the Coiner on his traitorous course; the desperate need to protect the woman of his heart -- the remarkable Eliza, Duchess of Arcachon-Qwghlm -- from those who would destroy her should he fail. Meanwhile, Daniel Waterhouse and his Clubb of unlikely cronies comb city and country for clues to the identity of the blackguard who is attempting to blow up Natural Philosophers with Infernal Devices -- as political factions jockey for position while awaiting the impending death of the ailing queen; as the "holy grail" of alchemy, the key to life eternal, tantalizes and continues to elude Isaac Newton, yet is closer than he ever imagined; as the greatest technological innovation in history slowly takes shape in Waterhouse's manufactory. Everything that was will be changed forever ... The System of the World is the concluding volume in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, begun with Quicksilver and continued in The Confusion.