Cryptonomicon

Cryptonomicon is mostly spent see-sawing across a half-century divide of two generations between World War II and the late 1990s. Its central topic is cryptology, and it was written when one could still be idealistic about cryptocurrency. It is an enormously long novel made up of short, single-sitting chapters, and it includes such apparent digressions as a gratuitous Penthouse "reader's" letter (365) and a functional Perl script (480).

My favorite chapter was certainly "Organ" (569 ff.), which built on the running conceit that the electronic computer had been inspired by the programmability of a pipe organ. But it also punned on the organ of generation belonging to 1940s viewpoint character Lawrence Waterhouse, whose libido takes show more center stage for most of the chapter. It offers hilarious notions regarding a global Ejaculation Control Conspiracy, and supplements this theory with a walk-on character's paranoia about the Bavarian Illuminati's engineering of the well-tempered musical tuning system as a medium for subliminal corruption.

Cameos by historical figures, including Alan Turing, Ronald Reagan, and General MacArthur, are handled amusingly. Although Stephenson's acknowledgments page disclaims any supposition that the book is a roman à clef regarding his own family, there are certainly some other characters and businesses given new names to insulate our actual world from their fictional deployment. For reasons I can't quite fathom, for example, he calls the Linux operating system Finux.

The ubiquitous use of present tense, general narrative sprawl, and conspiracy theorizing all reminded me of the work of Thomas Pynchon, and in particular Gravity's Rainbow. (Pynchon later tried out a hacker yarn of his own in Bleeding Edge as well.) Although Stephenson is published as a genre author, I think the comparable Pynchon books are actually more science-fictional than Cryptonomicon.

I have read other reader reaction that took issue with the end of this book. I didn't find it weak or dismaying at all, but I think the last five chapters (after "Return") need to be read as denouement, or they will suffer the appearance of anticlimax. show less

Very possibly Stephenson's best book, and certainly part of it if it is taken as a component of The Baroque Cycle.

Like the cycle itself, this worries away at a "how did we get here?" question, but where Stephenson's later approach was to look at the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries for the birth of modernity -- in science and technology, in monetary and economic matters, in how we treat authority -- this is much closer to home, running a late 20th Century dot com boom narrative and a World War Two narrative in parallel, and taking cryptography (and, by extension, the entire computing revolution) as its unifying theme: the networking of the planet, chronicled in Stephenson's classic Wired article, "Mother Earth, Motherboard" is show more intertwined as well.

It showcases Stephenson's talents for what Frye calls "Menippean satire" -- a lengthy narrative where digression (among other things) is a structural element. It is fascinating, funny, and engrossing.

As a simple novel, as is common with Stephenson, it has structural weaknesses (principally, the action doesn't so much have a conclusion as just a simple stopping point). If one steps back and views it not as a novel but as a Menippean satire, this isn't an issue -- many such works are either unfinished or deliberately are open-ended (consider Tristram Shandy and The Tale of A Tub as extreme cases).

From a 2016 vantagepoint, it looks charmingly and naively optimistic: the idea that the Powers That Be would allow a secure data haven to be established as one is here looks like something out of another world: but it looked possible to many people at the time. Part of the appeal of the novel now is that it captures the excitement of the first internet boom in a way that few other works do. show less

Stephenson has given us a Homeric scaled work. It is so lengthy that I had to skim whole chapters. His men-women relationship depictions are primitive to the point of being juvenile and an irrelevance. Maybe the author had in mind as his main audience young nerdish males, possible NSA recruits. Yet, this tale is brilliant, informed, laced with playfulness when it gets into crypto logy; the workings of lawyers, Marines, spies, and engineers; the Pacific of World War II, especially in the Philippines; the early history of the computer and the perils of starting up a IT company. Counting its imperfections the book is carried through by its vigorous spirit and by the successful weaving of many amazing stories into one grand one. One is show more excited and enriched by the connectedness of the stories, the world, the generations, history.

Quotes: (pages 287-288) “On the prairie, those flint arrowheads can be found lodged in every sort of natural matrix: soil, sod, the mud of a river bank, the heartwood of a tree. Waterhouse has a talent for finding them. How can he walk across a field salted, by the retreat of the last glacier, with countless stones, and pick out the arrowheads? Why can the human eye detect a tiny artificial form lost in nature's torn and turbulent cosmos, a needle of data in a haystack of noise. It is a sudden, sparkling connection between minds he supposes. The arrowheads are human beings broken loose from humanity, their organic parts perished, their mineral forms remaining---crystals of intention. It is not the form but the lethal intent that demands the attention of selfish mind. It worked for young Waterhouse, hunting for arrowheads. It worked for the pilots of the airplanes that hounded U-553 this morning. It works for the listeners of the Beobachtung Dienst, who have trained their ears to hear what is being said by Churchill and FDR on what are supposed to be scrambled telephones. But it doesn't work very well for crypto. That is too bad for everyone except the British and the Americans, who have devised mathematical systems for picking out arrowheads amid the pebbles.

(page 506) “' I can provide secure lines of communications, which is the sine qua non of any secret conspiracy,' says Rudolf von Hacklheber. 'We will use full strength uncrippled version of the same cryptosystem that I invented for Goring. Bischoff can be our man on the inside, since Donitz wants him so badly. Sergeant Shaftoe can be---'
'Don't even say it, I already know,' says Bobby Shaftoe.
He and Bischoff look at Root, who's sitting on his hands, staring at Rudy. Looking oddly nervous.
“Enoch the Red, your organization can get us to Manila,' von Hacklheber sats.
Shaftoe snorts 'Don't you think the Catholic Church has it hands sort of full right now?'

(page 736) “'Once again,' Attorney Alejandro says, 'we looked to America. Our friend, our patron, our big brother. You are familiar with the expression Ninong? Of course you are, I have forget you spent a whole lotta time here.' Randy is always impressed by the mixture of love, hate, hope, disappointment admiration, derision that Filipinos express towards America. Having actually been apart of the United States at one point, they can take digs at it in a way that's usually reserved for lifelong US citizens. The failure of the United States to protect them from Nippon after Pearl Harbor is still the most important thing that ever happened to them. Probably just slightly more important than MacArthur's return to the country a few years later. If that doesn't inculcate a love-hate relationship...'
...Whenever Filipinos slag America in earshot of an American, they usually try to follow it up with some really vile observation about the Nipponese, just to put everything in perspective.” show less

What I realised about halfway through this is how much Stephenson's books hearken back to Tristram Shandy. They're just full of digressions, tangents, musings, lectures, yarning, meandering, and though it's all been hammered into something that has roughly the shape and outline of a novel, where the plot occasionally breaches the surface like a whale, or a pod of whales, or comes charging out of the chop like Mpby headbutting the Peaquod, it is still, essenatially, a whole bunch of stuff about history and technology and culture scattered across the second world war and the dot com boom in an intergenerational saga with distinctly libertarian vibes that gives it a sort of quaint vaguely Golden Age innocence, like psychohistory, trying to show more impose intellectual rigour on chaos and wrest a bit of hope out of horror. show less

This book was quite a read, and I really liked it a lot. Then again, put Alan Turing in any story and I will probably feel very enthusiastic about it.
While over a thousand pages, I didn't feel like I was wading through any filler chapters. In my experience every page was either dedicated to character development, explanation of a (cryptographic) concept or progressing the story. While I spent almost 4 months reading Cryptonomicon, it never felt like work, which can often be the case with such large books. It did sometimes look like the story was being led around so that Stephenson could cram in another cryptography concept, which did make the main story feel superficial at times, but in my opinion the strength of this book lies in these show more concepts, so it rarely bothered me.
What did bother me was Randy "Freaking" Waterhouse.
At first, Randy gets built up as the ultra rational nerd-hero, which I quite liked. Even the slightly misplaced rant he gives at the pretentious friends of his girlfriend was quite amusing and did indeed illustrate the disconnect that exists between humanities- and computer-science people. But not long after that Randy goes off the rails. One of the main annoyances was relating éverything to computers, coding, etc. Like atheism as being devoid of having a kind of Unix-handbook. Combined with his view on the women in his life, Randy gets thoroughly annoying towards the middle of the book.
Given that more of his characters do not view the world in the same way, I guess I don't think Stephenson holds the same view, but my annoyances with Randy did deter from my enthusiasm about this book somewhat.
The only other thing that was somewhat disappointing was the absence of Elizebeth and William Friedman, whom I had recently read about, but this is hardly a criticism.
All in all, I really liked this tome and I am actually very curious towards the Baroque Cycle. Also, after reading Snow Crash, I was hardly enthusiastic about Neal Stephenson, but this book was very impressive and I do not doubt that I will be reading more of his books. show less

I think I found my heroin.

Make no mistake, this is not a book for everybody. this is one of those books. One of those books where all the plot important stuff is localized to five chapters randomly distributed through the pages. One of those books where you need to get an epub version just for the sake of a ctrl-f function. One of those books that doubles as an encyclopedia for whatever kind of other universe the author lives in.

And I loved it.

Reading this book is exhilarating despite the lull in plot because it is in the incredibly precarious position of turning into a complete fucking joke. And yet is never does. Reading this book is fascinating because of the near conspiratorial way you need to thread all meaningless threads into show more a complete whole. Reading this book is engaging because it's such an honest look at more than just technical nonsense about number theory and cryptology, but the mind and inner workings of Stephenson himself.

Again, this is not at all for everybody. Every single negative review down below in this section (well not every one) is right on the money. It's way too much about a bunch of nonsense. That's why I love it. show less

I think I found my heroin.

Make no mistake, this is not a book for everybody. this is one of those books. One of those books where all the plot important stuff is localized to five chapters randomly distributed through the pages. One of those books where you need to get an epub version just for the sake of a ctrl-f function. One of those books that doubles as an encyclopedia for whatever kind of other universe the author lives in.

And I loved it.

Reading this book is exhilarating despite the lull in plot because it is in the incredibly precarious position of turning into a complete fucking joke. And yet is never does. Reading this book is fascinating because of the near conspiratorial way you need to thread all meaningless threads into show more a complete whole. Reading this book is engaging because it's such an honest look at more than just technical nonsense about number theory and cryptology, but the mind and inner workings of Stephenson himself.

Again, this is not at all for everybody. Every single negative review down below in this section (well not every one) is right on the money. It's way too much about a bunch of nonsense. That's why I love it. show less