The Baroque Cycle

Does Neal Stephenson scare anyone else? I'm fifty pages in to The System of the World, the third and final book of the Baroque Cycle, and it's just amazing. And rather like reading a history textbook that mated with a science textbook that turned around and shagged a picaresque novel. It's slow, thick going, but Neal is so freakishly brilliant that I can't put it down. I'm in awe of the fact that his brain came up with something this convoluted and insanely detailed.