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- 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. 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. 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." 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." (en)
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- 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. (en)
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