Arrgh! I don't remember a book that I both liked and didn't like this much!

Alright, a quick intro snipped from Amazon:

"Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties. "

Whew!

Stephenson takes 918 pages to spin his yarn and in the end I enjoyed most of the ride but I wondered what was the point. After 918 pages, that's not a good thing.

Pros:
1) It's a long book. If you like to settle down to a long book, this will do.
2) There is a strong pro-libertarian theme running throughout.
3) Some of his writing is quite good, entertaining, thoughtful, fun, thought provoking, well done.
4) He puts out some ideas that are really sharp. His discussion on Athena between Root and Randy got my little hamster wheels turning inside my head. He does this a few times.
5) Math. Not much but he uses actual math. And it fits with the story.
6) Cryptography. He uses actual cryptography and it also fits with the story.


Cons:
1) It's a freaking long book. If you like your books to be in the 200 - 300 page range, give this one a pass.
2) It just... ends. All the characters suddenly lose all the depth and charm Stephenson had imbued them with and it just stops. I think he should embarrassed that 900 pages weren't enough to end this in a satisfactory manner.
3) Was there a character not obsessed with sex? No? Right, right, I come from a Puritan background where I was beaten for having impure thoughts, but still, sex was a constant theme for just about every single character. It got really tiresome.
4) Potty mouths. The lot of them.
5) Sometimes his writing just sucked. Flat out bad. I wondered if he eschewed an editor.
6) Bobby Shaftoe's death. At the start of the scene where he dies, I thought "This would be the worst possible place to have him die after all the crap he went through" and, of course, he dies. Lamely.

So do I recommend this book? No, not really. It has some stellar moments, mired in dross. If you still want to read it, well, caveat lector.

DNF @ pg 300.

What a relief it is to have packed this one in!

(IDK why so few readers haven't given it 1*, but now I'm afraid to.)

I'm not super concerned with plot. I'm kinda of the belief for example that DFW basically almost never told a story. Infinite Jest is a bunch of snapshots on a timeline back and forth in which next to nothing happens: he creates expansive moments and unpacks how the characters feel, and the fascinating progression of these layers of detail or flowing explanations is what makes his teeny tiny drops of plot acceptable. It's rare that an author trades so much of one crucial element of fiction for hi-concept and gets away with it.

Gravity's Rainbow- what would you call that? Overplotted, maybe? Each page is dense with layers and layers of resonance of history and mythology and fact. The fun is in trying to stay afloat of the story with Pynchon shunting you off at every possible corner. It's rare that an author trades so much of one crucial element of fiction for hi-concept and gets away with it.

So what is Stephenson doing? He doesn't really have a plot, he doesn't really care if I understand his info-dumps, he's not really slowing moments down and unpacking them like DFW, nor is he creating layers of density like Pynchon. He's just listing shit and spewing facts and showing off. Any snotty teenager with too much time on his hands and a bunch of textbooks by his side could shit out this kind of prose.

I enjoyed the Diamond Age muchly, but the Diamond Age was filled with enthusiasm for a future technology, built an imaginary world and had a plot, and where it faltered- and it did so a lot- were the digressions. Cryptonomicon is a kind of all-digression attempt at showboating where the reader is disdained all over upon while Stephenson tries to outdo Heller and Pynchon.

But this is just what happens when a text doesn't resonate with you and you don't know why. A writer will have to break or adhere to whatever rules necessary in order to develop their authentic style, and that will please or displease whoever. Anyone who enjoyed this book could likely tell me all the above too, but they'd add "And that's why it's great!" This is what does my nut in about lengthy book review threads in general- if a text doesn't resonate with me, it isn't really mine or the writer's fault, it's just a mismatch. He and I can no more tell you why I wasn't grabbed than you could tell me why you were. But no one really did anything wrong. So let's read on :)

I'm an English major. I've read a lot of books. This one, is -- hands down -- my favorite modern fiction novel. I've read it twice, recommended it to others, and I'm sure I'll read it again. There is so much to appreciate here.

It is a semi-historical adventure, so there's something for fiction and non-fiction fans.

The writing is justly verbose at times, and conversationally abrupt at other times. In essence, you find yourself wholly in the minds and bodies of the characters while reading every scene.

The literary quality of the writing is top notch. Although, Stephenson's writing is a little easier to appreciate if you're a bit of a geek. There is a lot of mathematical / historical / technological jargon -- and some really fantastic war stories.

Multiple timelines multiplied by multiple plot-lines make it a slow and tricky read, but I kind of cherished that. I hate feeling like I've read a good book too fast.

If you can stay with it, the way that Stephenson ties up the stories in the end is exciting and brilliant.

I think most would agree that this book sets itself apart from Stephenson's other works. I don't expect him to achieve this quality again (in my opinion, he hasn't), but I can always hope.

I mean, FINE, okay, this is one of the most engrossing books I've ever read. I don't really mean "best" or "best-written", necessarily. I mean, it's a messy sprawling epic that's almost too clever by half and full of hilarious characters and history just-so tweaked to accommodate them and also pure unadulterated geekiness. So it's not really for everyone but boy did I lap it up and then eat my huge slices of humble pie for everyone in my life that's been bugging me to read it for about four years.

I do have a couple small tiny niggling complaints, and one of them was the massively inbred dynastic mindfuck that was the generational split between mid-century and modern. I mean, are there only five families on the planet that had any effect whatsoever on the latter half of the 20th century? Neal Stephenson seems to think so! It's clever, I mean, in an Aureliano Buendia, Great Men History sort of way to see the same quirks and traits and consequences of history revealing themselves in the microcosm of a few generations of a few families. But I didn't necessarily need to be hit over the head with it, NEAL.

That said, though, I can't think of a family I'd rather find myself marooned in the seas of literature with than the Waterhouses or the Shaftoes, so.

Also I had a love/hate relationship with the lectures that Stephenson felt was his god-given right to slam smack in the middle of a scene because he just feels like you HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS NOW and you do, so I struggled against enjoying the lectures because I'm a nerd and I like learning things and hating the lectures because I love fiction and I hate great big long swathes of explanatory text slammed into a character's mouth. It's all very Giles.

But I mean, if you know the book you know these are sort of tiny complaints in the face of the awesomeness of Stephenson's humor and imagination, his passion for these, let's call them archetypes of humanity that he's wrapped around history and technology and ideas. In a way, it's what I always hated about Rand that somehow works brilliantly when Stephenson does it. Huh.

My friend Stuart's reading this and I stupidly started spoiling one of the best lines in the book (it pops up as Shaftoe's motto) and he was mildly irritated with me. Fortunately for him, he is vastly smarter than me so while he was quite generously acting annoyed he was probably thinking to himself, "Maybe one day I will spoil math and engineering and the details of Riemann zeta functions for Conrad." Now I'm rereading it out of sympathy and it's even better than I remembered.

Anyway, while I haven't yet approached the implosion that I know is coming toward the end, I am really even more impressed at the catholicity of Stephenson's concerns than I was the first time I read the book. He has insightful things to say about information theory, natch, but also Tolkein, postmodern literary criticism (OK, he's a little reactionary about this, but he's also right), the wisdom of joining the Marines, childrearing, Filipino architecture and urban planning, facial hair (can you tell I love Randy's diatribes about Charlene?), Ronald Reagan, the assassination of Yamamoto and associated dilemmas of cryptanalysis, Papuan eating habits, the 90s networking bubble...

If you don't like writers who have something interesting to say about everything, I don't know why you read. If it bothers you that Neal Stephenson uses his characters as mouthpieces to voice his well-considered opinions on everything from the prospects of economic growth measured against the likelihood of revolution in the Philippines, for example, to the details of Japanese tunneldigging, then you might as well settle in with your Danielle Steele and be done with it. Stephenson knows a lot about everything, and that's unusual and should be treasured. As a stylist, he's no Hemingway. His stories have beginnings and middles but the ends are usually catastrophically bad. So what? He reveals enough about his subjects that you usually leave his books behind with the feeling that your brain is now fused in a slightly different way. And good for Neal Stephenson, and good for us.

*Re-reading this book, started early January 2009

Note: This review is from my blog, circa 2005.

I finished reading Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson about a week ago. It took me over a month to finish, not because it wasn't great and exciting, but because it was 937 fucking pages long!

I have to say that Neal Stephenson is one of the most interesting and unique authors I have come across in some time now. The book had three main characters/story lines, and each of them had it's own strongly independent voice, yet strung together with a unifying, sardonic edge. I don't think I'll bother much with plot summary, as it was very complex and spanned the course of at least 60 years and about 10 different countries. What I really loved about it was that the three main storylines that all seem so separate at first, come together over the course of the novel through family ties, etc, but are unknown to the modern characters because of war time secrecy, among other things. I have never studied WWII in much depth, but this book brought it all to life extremely vividly and from perspectives I have never read about before. Although this book was in the science fiction section (probably because of the author's other novels) it is definitely more of a history novel. For instance, it had real historical figures as characters, such as Alan Turing in close relation to one of the main characters. Not only is it interesting from a historical war-time perspective, it is also extremely nerdy in its math and cryptographic details...not to mention computer programming and the history of how the modern computer came to be invented as a result of WWII cryptologists needing to break codes. Although the majority of the characters are fictional, I do think that most of the historical elements are well preserved and not too overly exaggerated. However, I am no expert.
Basically, I couldn't put this book down, in spite of its weight. ;) The story was compelling, the characters multi-dimensional and interesting, and the locations and events intriguing.

Also, in the original hard back edition that I got from the library, there are a large number of typographical/grammatical errors that many have speculated to be a hidden code! Not that anybody has broken it...I'd give my left toe to know what Mr. Stephenson is hiding in that book.

Reading this book was a lot like riding in a car that steadily picks up speed and then stalls out. I wanted to like it a great deal more than I ended up doing.

I would be trucking along, really getting into it, starting to get eager about turning the page and finding out what was going to happen next, and then...some reference to "hairy-legged academic feminists" or the "Ejaculation Control Commission" or "those things women always say to manipulate men" and my enjoyment would come to a screeching halt.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

3.5 Stars
I loved the beginning of this story filled with codes, mathematics and other nerdy ideas. Neal Stephenson is quickly become a favourite author with his quipped smart narratives. That being said, this one was too darn long. If this had been shorter, it would likely be an absolute favourite.

One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt to boil the story down to its essence.

During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japanese and German codes, and his job is to keep them from realizing how successful the Allies have been by faking events that give the enemies reasons other than compromised codes to pin any losses on. Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe had to leave behind the woman he loves in the Philippines when the war broke out in the Pacific and after surviving some brutal island combat, he finds himself assigned to a unit carrying out dangerous and weird missions that seem to have no logical goals.

In the late ‘90s, Waterhouse’s grandson Randy is an amiable computer geek who has just co-founded a small company called Epiphyte that has big plans revolving around the booming Internet in the island nations of southeast Asia. As powerful people with hidden agendas begin showing an interest in Epiphyte’s business plan, Randy hires a company in Manila owned by former Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe to lay an underwater cable. That’s just a sideline for Doug and his daughter Amy who primarily work as treasure hunters. When they make a startling discovery, it links the personal history of the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes to a lost fortune in Axis gold.

That makes it sound like a beach thriller or airplane read by someone like Clive Cussler, right?

But I didn’t mention all the math. And code breaking. And the development of computers. And economic theories. And geo-politics circa 1999. And how it was ahead of the curve about personal privacy. And it’s about a thousand pages long. And there's some other stuff, too.

Plus, Neal Stephenson doesn’t feel the need to conform to anything close to a traditional three act narrative structure. He’s also often the writing equivalent of Clark W. Griswald in the movie Vacation since he’ll cheerfully divert his readers four short hours to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth.

Sprinkled among all this are appearances by real historical figures like Alan Turing and Douglas MacArthur. So what you get is a book that should be a mess of infodumps and long tangets that ultimately don’t have anything to do with the story. And quite frankly, the ending is kind of a mess, too.

So whenever I read criticism of Neal Stephenson, I shrug and concede that there are many things about the guy that should make me crazy as a reader. However, the really odd thing is that he doesn’t. I’ve pretty much loved every book of his I’ve read despite the fact that I could list his literary sins at length.

What’s great to me about Stephenson is that it’s so obvious that he loves this stuff. When he takes up a whole chapter laying out the mathematics behind code breaking, it’s his enthusiasm for the subject that helps carry my math-challenged ass through. He’s not giving us elaborate histories or explanations because he did the research and wants to show off, he’s doing it because he’s a smart guy who is excited about something so he can’t help but go on at length about it.

The other factor that redeems him for me is his sense of humor. No matter how enthused Stephenson is, it’d still break down in the delivery if he didn’t pepper his books with some hilarious lines. Sometimes even his long digressions are done solely in the interest of delivering the funny like a parody of a business plan that includes gems like this:

“Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.”

It’s also easy to overlook how these seeming digressions help build the entire story. When Randy is trying to retrieve some of his grandfather’s papers from an old trunk, he gets embroiled in his family’s attempts to divvy up his grandparent’s belongings. Since the family is made up of academics a whole chapter becomes a description of a mathematical formula based on an x-y grid laid out in a parking lot that allows family members to place items according to both sentimental and economic value while Randy has to try to find a way to diplomatically claim the papers. There’s no real reason for this scene, and it could have been cut entirely or boiled down a few lines about a family squabble. But the whole chapter is funny and tells us a great deal about Randy and his background by putting him in this context. It doesn't accomplish anything else plot wise, but it’s the kind of scene that makes this book what it is.

Even as a fan of the way he works, I still wish Stephenson could tighten some things up. The goals of Epiphyte and Randy shift three or four times over the course of the novel, and the drifting into and out of plots gets very problematic late in the game. It also seems like Stephenson had a hard time determining exactly who the bad guys in the 1999 story should be.  The stuff with Andrew Loeb, a litigious asshole who once drove Randy into bankruptcy, showing up as an arrow shooting/knife wielding attacker wearing a business suit in the jungle at the end seems to come out of the blue since he’s really only appeared in flashback form before that. Even though he's the lawyer suing Epiphyt there aren't any scenes directly showing him in action except for Randy viewing him from a distance during the raid on their server. And while most of the book seems to operate under the idea that the rich dentist is the main threat to Epiphyte, he suddenly tags out and a Chinese guy that we’ve only seen as a slave during WWII is revealed as the hidden hand behind it all very late in the book, yet we have no present day scenes with him.

I should also note that although this is billed as a sci-fi novel as well as being nominated for and winning some prizes like the Hugo and the Locus, it really isn’t. There’s one small supernaturalish element that gets it that reputation, but I’d call it historical-fiction if I had to put a genre on it.

Even though this is a book that really shouldn’t work, the great thing about it is that it mostly does, and it’s just so damn clever at times that I can’t help but admire Stephenson.

Related material: The Baroque Cyle is the follow-up/prequel to this that delves even further into the history of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe familes. These are my reviews to the three hardback editions, but those were such kitten squishers that it was also broken up into a longer series of paperbacks.

Quicksilver

The Confusion

The System of the World

Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming says, that any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. (Including Common Lisp, added Robert Morris)
Lisp, to qoute L. Peter Deutsch, can make you realise that software could be close to executable mathematics.

Cryptonomicon is surprisingly similar to the previous paragraph, both as an analogy to the book, and for the useless use of computer-based qoute, just for the sake of it.

To start with, this book is way.... too.... long.

Just way too long. No real way of getting around it.
Cryptonomicon fails to carry its own weight, even if it didn't have so much of it.
It *is* a page-turner, which is good, seeing as it has so much of those, but more because there is very little actual content. Rather than drawing you in, it lets you drift over; instead of using the breadth of scope to mean something, it really doesn't.

The 2 WWII parts are more of a time-line rather than a story, and the third part, the actual story, is very weak, and no real connections other than some obvious ones, that is, don't expect any last minute golden thread that will tie it all.
There is a lot of fanfare around and in the book, and there's a whole lot of research thrown in for good measure, but there isn't much of a point, where you surface out of a 10 page description that is painstakingly detailed, with as much story in it, as if you took a break and went to read an encyclopaedia. Other such detailed descriptions include a 5 pager about the cars going in or out, a pornographic description of cereal eating, each of those gives the reader no added value other than to be impressed by the writer's way around words, which a good editor would've red-marked away had this been a debut piece.

Characteristics is shoddy, which is amazing for such a large novel. With 1100+ pages in paperback, some character development is expected, but characters here rarely act, and mostly react, being moved from place to place by the circumstances and the background characters that appear and disappear, without any excuse than the sake of pushing the plot forward, toward a very dull and, strangely enough, rushed, ending, which is not ever partially a conclusion and is an ending simply because the book ends there, leaving many threads hanging in mid-air. The only glimpses the author allows us into the mind of the characters is when a mathematical, military, or technological problem is in need of being solved. Other than that, there is a lot of inner monologue, but hardly any glimpses into the actual "inner" parts, resulting in characters moving from one state of mind to another with little to no reasoning.

This is a book that haven't decided whether it wants to be "techy" or about technology, resulting in parts "for the layman" and parts that demand some knowledge in computer tech to understand.
This is a book that attempts to tell us a lot, which is basically how good is the author in finding yet another meaningless, but semantically cool, metaphor.

This is a book that might've been, minus about 400-500 redundant pages and plus about 100 pages to close the remaining threads, a fun, intelligent read. At current state, its a smart-alek, overly self-important, and hardly elegant.

Disclaimer: Had Mr. Stephenson been more skillful in his prose/characterization/writing in general, I would not have paid nearly as much attention to the following issues. I read a lot of old dead white guy type literature, and am pretty forgiving so long as it's good. If it isn't, well, this happens. That is all.

Do not be fooled by the static nature of the star count above. If I had my way, it would be a roiling maelstrom of a typhoon crashing into lava, erosion and explosion steaming and spilling into a chemical equilibrium of monstrous proportions. It would be a much more appropriate way of symbolizing that there were parts of this that I loved immensely and others that still cause my vision to go red whenever I think on them for too long. However, as that is not a possibility without my use of GIFs to illustrate my point (Two words: Never. Ever.), you'll have to take my more long-winded approach to the matter.

Mr. Stephenson is the type of character that, if allowed onto a college campus, should be kept safe and locked away in the mathematics department. The physics department is a possibility, and computer science perhaps, maybe even biology, but the decreased removal from reality present in these areas increases the risk that this individual poses. This isn't a man you want teaching a history class or, god forbid, one of literature. Unless the literature class is completely devoted to math fiction (Or is it fanfiction? Not sure about that one), because every so often something gorgeous happens.

n  If he would just work with pure ideas like a proper mathematician he could go as fast as thought. As it happens, Alan has become fascinated by the incarnations of pure ideas in the physical world. The underlying math of the universe is like the light streaming in through the window. Alan is not satisfied with merely knowing that it streams in. He blows smoke into the air to make the light visible. He sits in meadows gazing at pine cones and flowers, tracing the mathematical patterns in their structure, and he dreams about electron winds blowing over the glowing filaments and screens of radio tubes, and, in their surges and eddies, capturing something of what is going on in his own brain. Turing is neither a mortal nor a good. He is Antaeus. That he bridges the mathematical and physical worlds is his strength and his weakness.n

And that is the closest Mr. Stephenson gets to melding together beautiful prose with stunning mathematical dexterity. If he stuck with that, this review would much more positive, and probably a lot shorter. But, since he didn't, let us continue.

Now, there are multiple categories of anger-invoking pidgeonholing, enough that I feel that pidgeonholing the categories themselves would best convey the point of it all.

First off, Race:n  

Randy figures it all has to do with your state at mind at the time you utter the word. If you’re just trying to abbreviate, it’s not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that’s different.

nNo. No. No no no no no. Did I stutter? No. It doesn't matter what the utterer's mindset is, period. What matters is the context of the utterance, the horrible history of its usage and the culture that it denigrates. So sorry that the word 'Japanese' is too long and difficult for some people to say/type/convey to another person for long periods of time, but they're going to have to deal with it. Their personal convenience doesn't matter in the slightest.

Second, Religion:n  

In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy uncomfortable, but here it seems like the only appropriate thing to say. Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an atheist come up with? Yes, the organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces of rotten meat. So what?

nI don't know if this is supposed to be satire, and I don't care. The message is bad enough, as once again, lack of spiritual beliefs is being confused with lack of morality/sympathy/empathy/what have you. Some may not believe this, but the human race is perfectly capable of acting decent and, dare I say it, humane towards its fellow beings, without religion. Amazing, isn't it. Moving on.

Next, Women:

I wish I was joking when I say that there is too much material for me to possibly convey in this review without pushing the limits of absurdity. So I will condense it into some bullet points.

One: There is a popular maxim in this book that holds women to be an effective means to an end of ultimate manly productiveness. Not only that, but women for some reason are completely aware of this, and manipulate men accordingly via controlling the rates of fornication permitted to those with a Y chromosome. Yes, because that's all there is to sex, isn't it. Love is just some barter system of producers and consumers, and any notion of emotional connection or meaning beyond it is a lie propagated by the chemicals seething in your body. Now, the latter half of that last sentence is biologically sound. I would hope that everything that came before it is some kind of ridiculous satire, but if it is, Mr. Stephenson's writing did not seem to think so.

Two: The definition of the words SEXUAL ABUSE and RAPE was expanded to include pursuit of relationships where 'power imbalance' is denoted by differences in economic status and/or physical capabilities in defending oneself. Again, I wish this was satire, but its delivery made it highly unlikely. And even if it was satire, it's not in the least bit funny or ethical to make light of rape culture in such a fashion. If the recent events of Steubenville and its aftermath haven't made that clear, nothing will.

Three: And we couldn't possibly finish off this whole debacle without a good old fashioned Men are from Mars Women are from Venus spiel. In the author's own words, those who put a higher priority "on having every statement uttered in a conversation be literally true" vs "People who put a higher priority on social graces". Then you get the typical longwinded 'it's not you it's me' excuse, and finally:

n  "What I'm saying is that this does set me apart. One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he's socially inept—because everyone's been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment."
"Which is still kind of pathetic."
"It was pathetic when they were in high school," Randy says. "Now it's something else. Something very different from pathetic."
"What, then?"
"I don't know. There is no word for it. You'll see."n

Hint: The word you're looking for lies on the long scale that ranges from "close-minded" to "bigoted asshole". Take your pick.

Finally, your Miscellaneous:

n  …the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability.n

Atheists are not in charge of anything, and in fact are one of the most hated demographics in the US. Look it up. Also, don't you think those who have to build up from scratch would be a little more adaptable than, say, the user manual types who are still squabbling over a particular patch of verses regarding a certain sexuality? A demographic that Mr. Stephenson made repeated efforts to proclaim that he was okay with, coincidentally. The thing about being a 'nice guy', no one's going to give you a cookie for pointing it out. That's not how it works.

In addition, if the phrase 'politically correct' was replaced with 'respects those who are different despite lack of understanding of their cultural heritage', and seen as less of a political theory pertaining to the liberals and more of a methodology of encouraging greater social well-being, the world would be a better place. And there would be less theories like the one in this book running about, which states that the only way to avoid Holocausts is to make sure the victims get proper guerrilla training. Very reminiscent of the current debacle over gun control.

But anyways. tl&dr version: Mr. Stephenson is your typical white male nerd that resides in the US. Smart in his specific field, little bit racist, little bit misogynistic, and screws up any attempt to try and claim otherwise. The prevalence of this attitude would've chopped the stars down to one, but he did write a 900+ book filled with some pretty interesting mathematical acrobatics and WWII business, so that added a star to the final result.

Raz, keď zo mňa bude 130-ročná starenka, príde za mnou nádejná lokálna influencerka spraviť menší rozhovor: "Aby si mladí viac vážili, teta," zahučí mi do ucha, "čo všetko pre nás vaša generácia obetovala."
"Jáj moja," spľasnem rukami a dám sa do spomínania a keď už deckám porozprávam všetko o tom, ako som pašovala knihy cez tretiu svetovú a kde som sa schovávala pri prvom celosvetovom výpadku Internetu, nazrie lokálna influencerka nenápadne do poznámok. "A teta," odkašle si, "ešte nám povedzte, ako to bolo v tom dvetisícdvadsiatom roku."
Prestanem štrikovať a zamyslene nakrčím obočie. "Dvadsiaty, dvadsiaty...to mi nič nehovorí, srdiečko."
"Ale veď teta," zatvári sa influencerka trochu netrpezlivo, "ten pamätný dvadsiaty rok..."
"Jaaaaj," rozleje sa mi zrazu po tvári bezzubý úsmev. "Dvetisícdvatsiaty! Už viem!"
Influencerka s maskérkou si vydýchnu a ja sa opäť dám do štrikovania." Dvetisícdvadsiaty," zopakujem s pohľadom upreným kamsi do diaľky. "To bol ten rok, kedy som objavila Neala Stephensona."