Cryptonomicon

My four-star rating will likely puzzle those friends of mine who have had to listen to me piss and moan about this novel for the past six months. My progress as a reader was, shall we say, embarrassingly slow. (In Stephenson's defense, I tended to put his novel aside after every 200 or so pages and read other things; the book actually moves pretty swiftly considering its size.) But the four-star rating is sincere: I did enjoy this very much, for the most part, and I intend to at last read n  Snow Crashn and maybe even finish The Diamond Age, which I abandoned sometime back in the late nineties.

Though this novel is set in the past (and in a present that is quaintly a decade old now), it's by definition a science fiction novel: Ideas and things over people. This one's about a specific process of change in science, and not so much about people save as means of displaying certain ideas at work or in development. (There are some characters who almost achieve a fully rounded quality--Goto Dengo!--but that's not really all that surprising given a thousand pages of storytelling, is it?) So most of this is Stephenson fictionalizing scenes about the development of the information age, essentially saying, "Isn't this incredibly cool?" And it almost always is cool.

And funny.

Stephenson's voice has a kneejerk hyperbolic quality to it that works on a glib, superficial level. His gift for over-the-top metaphor is pretty much consistently astounding and amusing. Even if that same quality of voice never for a moment involves the reader of the reality of this world and it's people. No, the prose is all about braininess and exhibitionistic flaunting of research, ad nauseam, and so what? That's as good a reason to read as any, and this is almost always a good time.

While I never quite felt any of the characters were exactly well-developed outside of their erections and ability to compute, say, the proximate coordinates of a cherished family heirloom, the combined group of characters here give us the most fully fleshed out portrayal of geekitude in literature. Seriously, this is an unparalleled examination of what it is to be a geeky guy in the late twentieth--the love of data and things and problem-solving; the sheer befuddlement in the face of women and their irrational ways; the needlessly-complicated-and-by-the-way-accidentally-insightful manner of apprehending the world that defines several generations of bespectacled men. (It begins in this novel with Waterhouse and Turing and so on and ending with Randy but encompassing even characters such as Shaftoe, who while ostensibly more of a typical man and an a!c!t!i!o!n! hero, is still pretty much free from quaint qualities such as empathy, so women remain mysterious beings who control the world by virtue of their ability to literally screw with men. Sex is a power before which every Stephenson character loses his shit.) (That this is true of most people in the real world doesn't make its universality in a novel an okay thing.)

Of course, the above doesn't much matter in what is essentially a comic novel. Stephenson makes noises about more serious topics (stopping the evilness of war, a potent disgust about the horrors we visit on our fellow humans, etc), but this is just a long caper/heist novel--long on capering and short on import.

But fun! I just wish it hadn't been quite so damned long.

Look, this isn’t really a novel.

Huh. Is there an echo in here?

I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because I knew that it would take a while. This past week was probably not the best week to read it—then again, would there have been a best week? I got lots of programming done on my website while avoiding this book, though.

This book is ostensibly about codes and code-breaking. I’d liken it to The Imitation Game, except I also have managed to skip that one somehow—and anyway, Alan Turing and Bletchley Park feature much less prominently here. Rather, Cryptonomicon follows a fictional friend of Turing’s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius codebreaker. Waterhouse serves in the American armed forces during World War II, where he breaks codes (duh) and gets involved in other unlikely shenanigans. Stephenson develops this plot in parallel with one set in the present day (which is to say, 1999, which is, gosh, 18 years ago now). Lawrence’s grandson, Randy, ends up interacting with the descendants of many of the other characters from Lawrence’s story, as he and a friend try to set up a data haven off the coast of the Philippines.

That’s ostensibly the plot, but like I said, this isn’t really a novel and the story isn’t really a story. It’s more of a loose narrative framework around which Stephenson erects pages-long diatribes on coding, computer science, mathematics, and other very nerdy stuff. It is much like his later efforts of n  Anathemn and Seveneves, which are more about the philosophy of mathematics and how humanity might adapt to life in space, respectively, although of the three novels this one might have something most recognizable as a plot.

I’m not afraid to admit to skimming large portions of this novel. It’s not necessary to … experience … every word of Cryptonomicon to follow it. The connections among the characters are fairly heavy-handed, with Stephenson giving the reader plenty of opportunities to notice a familiar name, symbol, or meme showing up in a different place and time. Additionally, I can tolerate the fairly frequent tangents Stephenson has his characters go off on to explain one mathematical or cryptological concept or other; I’m less tolerant of how this spills over into the descriptions of simplest actions. Randy can’t possibly open his car door, no—this occasions nothing less than three meaty paragraphs on the manufacture of his car and the way the angle of the car door makes Randy think about a line of Perl code he wrote back in his university days. Perl, by the way, is a script people often use on UNIX….

Seriously, this book is not a well-edited, well-paced, well-plotted adventure. It’s Neal Stephenson making shit up about guys named Lawrence and Randy so he can tell you all the cool computer things he knows.

And to his credit, he manages to often be entertaining while doing so. For the most part, I enjoyed the segments that follow Lawrence. The role of code-breaking in World War II, and its concurrent stimulation of the invention of electronic computing, is an interesting subject that is often overlooked in historical treatments of that time. In addition to explaining how certain code systems worked and how the Allies broke these codes, Stephenson also takes the time to show us, rather than merely tell us, how encrypted communications were essential to the war effort. Moreover, he also points out the difficulty of breaking codes in wartime: you don’t want the enemy to know their codes are broken, because then they will change to a different code. So you have to throw them off the scent, so to speak, and create fake reasons for why you knew what the enemy was going to do. I don’t know how accurate this is to actual activities during the war, but it’s a fun corollary thought experiment to the whole activity of intercepting and reading enemy messages.

There’s also a fair amount of humour in here. I liked the highly fictionalized, summarized communiques between Bischoff and Donitz. I liked the portrayal of Colonel Comstock’s preparations for a meeting with Lawrence, girding himself and his team as if they were about to go into an actual battle.

Similarly, although I was less enamoured of the present-day plot and characters, I still like the general ideas. Stephenson was ahead of the curve when it came to talking about cryptocurrencies and even data havens. These ideas seem almost saturated, old hat here in 2017—but I imagine that in 1999, when the Web was still kind of a space for hackers and academics and military types, it was all cutting edge. Stephenson makes a strong case that there are different types of heroism, and that having a strong technical background can be just as valuable as being able to fight or being educated in a scholarly field like law.

I just wish that I didn’t have to wade through so much dull or outright dumb stuff to get to the good bits of this book.

This is the third book in a row I’m dragging for having a rubbish depiction of women. Honestly, people, it isn’t hard, but let’s go over the basics again so we stop screwing this up.

Maybe you should have women as main characters? There are very few named women characters in this book. Most of them exist as sexual and romantic interests for the men, who are the main characters.

Maybe your women should exist for reasons other than sexytimes? Amy Shaftoe is the closest we get to a female main character in this book. She is not a viewpoint character. She does not have an appreciable arc. She has an illusion of agency, but this is largely undermined by her purpose to exist as a manic pixie dreamgirl for Randy. Stephenson seems to confuse “strong female character” with “does lots of physical stuff/wears a leather jacket/I must imply that she might be a lesbian at least five times”.

Maybe you should stop being creepy? Cryptonomicon is super male-gazey in about every sense of the term. The narrator constantly mentions how much Lawrence or Randy need to masturbate, have sex, or otherwise ejaculate before they can “focus”. The male characters from both time periods make sexist remarks, talk about women, look at and objectify women, etc., in ways that are boorish and chauvinistic and stereotypical. There are more examples of this than I can count or possibly mention here. At one point, Randy and Avi are discussing a lawsuit directed at their fledgling company. Avi compares the lawsuit with a mating ritual, saying that their company is a “desirable female” and the lawsuit bringer wants to mate with them, and this is his way of posturing. Later in the novel, Randy spends a few pages mulling over how some women are “just wired” to want to be submissive to men, and that’s why Charlene ended up leaving him, because of course as a computer god, his brain can’t possibly be wired to understand little things like social cues. (It’s actually amazing, in a way, how Stephenson can manage to perpetuate stereotypes against both women and male nerds at the same time.)

It’s gross, is what it is. In any other book it would be bad enough. What really bothers me about its presence in Cryptonomicon is how it compounds, and has perhaps even influenced, given its age and status in the genre now, the portrayal of technologically-adept/minded folks (call them nerds, geeks, hackers, whatever). Young women interested in cryptography deserve to read a story about cryptography without constantly seeing the few female characters in the book objectified or reduced down to “biologically, women want to submit and have sex!” Young men shouldn’t see this kind of behaviour rationalized or played for laughs; they shouldn’t receive the message that nerds are somehow “programmed” to be socially awkward and therefore it’s OK to be creepy and male gazey all the time.

So Cryptonomicon is a book with a bunch of good bits too few and scattered among less good or downright weird and gross bits that I didn’t much appreciate. The mathematical, code-breaking parts of this book are good—really good. But, I mean, I kind of wish I had access to an abridged version with just those parts? Because wading through the, say, 80% of the book that isn’t those parts is just not worth the effort.

Honestly, so far the best depiction of mathematics in fiction I’ve come across is n  The Housekeeper and the Professorn, which doesn’t only depict math but also humanizes it intensely. (And before you ask, no, I haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but I certainly plan to steal—uh, borrow—a copy lying around school one of these days.) Cryptonomicon tries to be a math nerd’s wet dream, but Stephenson’s insistence on mentioning his male characters’ wet dreams just doesn’t work for me.

n  n

I'm shocked by the critical acclaim this book received in the sci-fi category but I suppose even a turd can float. Two stars is really pushing it. Maybe a star for the number of laughs I got per 100 pages. This is the work of a technically inept egomaniac. He does have some technical background (he drops Unix hints and anagrams the name of a supposed deity who dies and then later comes back w/ no explanation??) However, it's not enough “savoir faire” for any of the content to make sense. It might sound dangerous to some but just plain stupid to computer geeks such as myself. It's obvious that this is not his first book by the way that the author is allowed to recklessly abandon the main plot (or any of the 4 sporadic narratives) for 70-100 page tangents. If he hired a first yr EE student to clarify some basic principles, snipped about 500 pages and got some ritalin, this book might be tolerable. Like many technical books or movies, I was utterly disappointed.

Why did I continue? First, it was a gift and I would feel ungrateful if I didn't give it a fair chance. Secondly, there are many alternating plots that the reader would naturally be led to believe that the lives of these men parallel each other in a different time and place. If you like mysteries, you can almost imagine how these people are related. This would have made the book entirely more interesting. But then nothing. I finished the book and whipped it across the room. Later, I skimmed the last half of this 900+ PAGE SLEEPER to see if there was an overlooked morsel of evidence that made all these separate lives connected which would have made all of the silent pain and suffering from that book worth something. Nothing. Exactly what I got from the book: nothing.

It's obvious that author Stephenson does lots of diligent study that shows in the works of his novels. He discerns the complicated and transforms it to his novels. 7 of 10 stars

Neil Stevenson, at the time of writing this novel, is a visionary who predicted end-to-end encryption, in which payment for housing and communal services from anywhere in the world is our routine. In 1999 - a year before the millennium, twelve years before the big date, twenty-three before "here and now". And it turned out to be much closer to reality than the Chiropractor's pizza car from Avalanche or the nanotechnology of the Diamond Age.

Every creator has one decade in which he creates the best of what he is potentially capable of, for Stevenson these are the nineties: "Avalanche", "Diamond Age", "Mercury", "Cryptonomicon" - every book is a masterpiece. Among other things, the novel has become one of the peaks of postmodernism, then this essentially feuilleton era is rolling down.

At the same time, an adventurous action movie with war, fights, treasure hunts, amorous adventures of heroes, and complex multi-layered multifaceted intellectual prose. Strikingly modern in terms of the Internet, information security, the culture of cancellation and the absurd hyper-tolerance of today's society.

Стать мостом
Через год, вместо того чтобы идти в банк и говорить с человеком, вы просто запустите эту программу из любого места в мире.
Нил Стивенсон поры написания этого романа провидец, предсказавший сквозное шифрование, в режиме которого оплата ЖКХ или покупка билетов в кино из любого места в мире наша обыденность. В 1999 - за год до миллениума, за двенадцать лет до биг-даты, за двадцать три до "здесь и сейчас". И это оказалось куда ближе к реальности, чем пиццамобиль Хиропрактика из "Лавины" или нанотехнологии "Алмазного века".

Вещь из лучшей поры писателя. Если верно, что у всякого творца выпадает одно десятилетие, в которое он создает лучшее из того, на что потенциально способен, то для Стивенсона это девяностые: "Лавина", "Алмазный век", "Ртуть", "Криптономикон" - всякая книга шедевр. Кроме прочего, роман стал одним из пиков постмодернизма, после которого ничего столь же сложного и одновременно увлекательного в жанровых рамках не создано. Дальше эта фельетонная по сути эпоха закатывается.

"Криптономикон" одновременно авантюрный боевик с войной, драками, поисками сокровищ, амурными похождениями героев, и сложная многослойная многоплановая интеллектуальная проза. Поразительно современная в том, что касается интернета, безопасности информации, культуры отмены и абсурдной сверхтолерантности сегодняшнего западного общества.

Действие романа разворачивается в двух временных пластах: Вторая Мировая и условно наши дни, в немыслимом количестве пространственных локаций от полюса до экватора. В фокусе внимания нечто тайное, загадочное, скрытое, и весьма ценное. Что-то, что необходимо найти самому, как можно лучше спрятав от противника. В материальном выражении и для наглядности это золото, серебро, антиквариат - да целые коробки, набитые деньгами. Но главный предмет интереса все-таки абстрактная информация, владеющий которой, как известно, владеет миром.

Герои вне Системы. Назвать их борцами с ней, я бы не рискнула, но им удивительным образом удается демонстрировать отсутствие вовлеченности в требующее хождения строем правое дело, под знамена которого мобилизованы. Мозаичная, фрагментарная структура повествования до конца не позволяет составить сколько-нибудь связной картины. Большинство вопросов так и остаются открытыми. Множество сюжетных линий не то, что обрываются, но уходят в никуда, истончаются до полного исчезновения. Что, странным образом, не вызывает у читателя отторжения: парабола радуги или моста, обеспечивающая максимум в центре и спад к периферии (интереса, внимания, желания досконально во всем разобраться).

Ключевым элементом повествования становится шифр "Понтифик", кроме прочих значений, имеющий буквальный перевод "строитель мостов". И таки да. Стивенсон строит мосты от всего ко всему, а параболическая структура книги заодно уж связывает ее с другим постмодернистским шедевром, "Радугой тяготения" Пинчона.. Два главных героя "Криптономикона": Уотерхаус и Бобби Шафто, словно бы персонификации двух сторон личности Слотропа - предельно стимулированный интеллект, используемый для решения изначально нерешаемых задач, и особое свойство попадать в безнадежные ситуации, из которых, тем не менее, удается выйти с положительным балансом.

Оба романа подвергают серьезной ревизии уровень отвращения, который готов воспринять читатель, далеко выходя за рамки стандартов девиантности. В обоих за жанровым микстом из военного, шпионского, любовного, этнического романов, необычайно высокий уровень наукоемкости. Оба демонстрируют поразительный интерес к прикладной и академической лингвистике. Семантика, структурные связи, проблемы языкознания во всех возможных вариантах. Стоит также упомянуть фигуру Вечного Жида, играющего важную роль в общей космогонии. У Пинчона это Пиг Бодин, у Стивенсона Енох Роот.

Резюмируя: крутейшая книга. Безумно интересная, невероятно динамичная, пронизана тонкой иронией - никогда не бывает смешно до уровня уахаха, но понимающая улыбка к концу чтения даже мимические мускулы лица наособицу закрепляет (это не для красного словца, сейчас вспомнила остров Йглм и щеки сами собой сложились в привычную конфигурацию, от которой немного даже больно, как с непривычки от физической нагрузки).

А теперь для имеющих уши есть аудиокнига, которой роскошное чтение Игоря Князева придает дополнительного (на случай, если кому не хватало) блеска и обаяния.

This was a LONG but fascinating story in which the reader learns a lot about cryptography, the Second World War, and nerd/geek subculture. I thought it could have used some editing and didn’t really find the plot started to move until after page 300, but still it was well-built with hundreds of literary references (I especially appreciated the one to Bleak House by Dickens.) I liked the 3 protagonists and felt that he did a good job having multi-dimensional female characters (albeit with supporting roles and not in the main cast.
Only small issue, is Enoch Root like Duncan Idaho and just never dies? I thought he died in a boat with Bobby and Lawrence around page 400 but then he shows up again near page 850. I didn’t quite understand that. Nonetheless, excellent speculative fiction!

Fino's Neal Stephenson Reviews
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I am FINIIIIIISHED! I thought it didn't have an ending! I thought Neal Stephenson kept sneaking to my house and inserting more pages in the back while I was asleep! I thought he would never be appeased until I begged him to stop with a deck of cards, morse code and a wide variety of pleading looks!

This is a massive boy book. A MASSIVE boy book. It's got overwhelmingly male characters, and they do really boy things, like coding, and shooting things, and drawing logarithmic graphs about the last time they masturbated. I kept being surprised that I could open this book and it didn't immediately smell overpoweringly of old canvas and sweat. And I say this in the most endearing way, generally speaking - the characters in this book have no idea, none at all!, that I am not One Of Them, so I got to romp about with the best of them, messing about with submarines and mid-nineties hacker politics.

I should probably tell you at this point, that two of my favourite things as a mid-teenager were vintage pen-and-paper codebreaking and rambly adventure stories, so I was in my element. This book is very exclusive in many ways and I am sure that in any other context I would get the rabbit in headlights look of someone who knows they're about to be accused of being a fake geek and who doesn't know *quiiite* enough what they're talking about to put those (wholly ridiculous) accusations to rest - but as it was, for most of the time I was reading this, it was me and my comfy chair and my knitting and the printed word of Neal Stephenson, and I could slot myself into that narrow band of intended audience and roam around at my leisure. This book is a boy book, and while I was reading it, I was a boy. Which is a cack-handed way of saying that I am a nerd and I don't get to talk about polyalphabetic ciphers you break with frequency analysis and a pad of graph paper very often, and Cryptonomicon made me feel as much at home as I could possibly have wished for. Which is nice.

It's also a cack-handed way of saying I feel, in some way, like I shouldn't have felt at home? It was so chock-full of Tech Men and Soldier Men and Men Who Do Things Despite Slash For Their Womenfolk, that I genuinely felt like I was empathising on the wrong side of the divide at some points. Like I was having to sneak in and pretend I had a metaphorical moustache. Very odd. Ladies of Goodreads, is that a thing you understand? Men of Goodreads, when you read something very female led, like say Jane Eyre, or Rebecca, or whatever it is you emancipated chaps read these days, how do you feel? I've rarely felt that this strongly (*cough*Gorky Park) it was very odd. At any rate I am interested by how/how strongly this manifests itself in other people.

Back to the book! It's an info-dump; there is almost more info-dump than plot. Some of it I knew already and that was comforting, some of it really fired me up for playing with numbers a bit more. While I've been reading this book, I've been occasionally meeting a friend who's teaching me the basics-and-then-some of statistics, and I get the same feeling from that of channeling my enthusiasm into something practical, something that someone else is excited about as well. I liked the info-dump.

It starts off really slowly. There is basically no plot for probably the first two-fifths; certainly the first third. It is full of inside references and totally devoid of beginning, middle or end. If this bothers you, don't read it. It bothered me, for a while - that's why I put it down and came back a few months later. Or that's one of the reasons. The other reason is that it's NINE HUNDRED PAGES LONG AND NEAL STEPHENSON IS STILL TALKING.

In the end, I put it aside often, but always came back. There are very few books I can say that about, and of the others they were almost entirely written by Frenchmen. This book is not like those books. If you ask me, it's worth having a go at, and if you get 60 pages in and go cross-eyed at the tiny font, don't worry. You won't have missed much, and it's a nice place to come back to. I might even read it again, but it probably won't be for a while. A long while.

This is my third Neal Stephenson book. You could say I'm a fan of his work. You would be correct in such a statement. But, this is not for everybody. His writing style is dense and there is a great deal of information being presented to you. More so than the intricate nature of the information is the fact that, sometimes, the author will take you down a bizarre side track that will actually make you sit there and think about what you just read. If this doesn't seem like something you'd enjoy-then skip out on Neal Stephenson. This is a large book and if you're not down to go through some really fascinating ideas that may have not much to do with the plot, then I'd not even bother.

Now for the rest of you that don't mind utterly bizarre side tracks and very high end ideas that actually require you to think (how solitaire can be used an encryption algorithm) and form concepts in your mind-then you will love this dense work. What is it about?

There are two time frames where the story takes place, one being during World War II and the other in "modern" (1990's?) times. The cryptography WW II story has to do with the famous minds of Dr. Turning and Dr. Waterhouse who broke the German and Japanese codes. It then becomes a story about the founding of the NSA and in the modern timeline it is a story about building a "Crypt" to store information that governments can't break into. How does this all flow together?

The lynchpins are the families who keep appearing- the Shaftoes, the Waterhouses, the Goto's, etc. The story jumps back and forth between World War II and current. The families have changed in that the current generation are the grandchildren of the ones described in World War II. More than that I will not say. It's hard to explain such an amazing plot and I shouldn't. Discover it for yourself.

The Marine Shaftoe, the Japanese Army Goto Dengo and the priest Enoch Root are the best characters in here..but there is a lot in here.. just a taste includes Nazi German U-boat commanders, hidden gold, angry Filipino rebels, Japanese Army units, U.S. Marines, Douglas MacArthur, a scary venture capitalist known as the Dentist, an unbreakable cypher as well as various and sundry different side tangents (the equation for optimum masturbation was funny)-well you're starting to see why Neal Stephenson can be a Love or Hate thing. Me? I love this.

One of the more unique books and minds out there. Finishing one of his books feels like the end of a day in undergrad- having studied multiple subjects and beginning to grasp that they might all fit together after all. If this seems too tedious then yes skip this book. If this seems fun-then do what I did and take your time and read this savoring every new thought you come up with. NS has a very dry wit and it shows. I truly enjoyed this book and am now a Neal Stephenson fan for life. I appreciate intelligent books and this certainly qualifies.