Cryptonomicon is one of those plotty books, where things happen and then other things happen, which isn't really a knock: some of the best books ever are plotty. Lookin' at you, Count of Monte Cristo. But when you write a book about a bunch of stuff happening, it succeeds based on whether all the things that happen feel like part of a whole - whether all the threads come together. At their best, these books are giant jigsaw puzzles: a successful one is a masterpiece of planning ahead, and authors like Dumas or Hugo take your breath away when you realize how carefully they've set you up.

And Cryptonomicon pulls off that plottiness. Stephenson throws a lot of balls in the air; the story spans sixty years, from World War II to the late 90s, and rounds the globe, from some made-up country near England to the Phillipines, with plenty of stops in between. It's an impressive feat, and I can't poke a single hole in it. Nice work, Neal!

I mean, look, while insight into human nature isn't necessarily necessary in a plotty book, it helps to have some. Dumas and Hugo are wrestling with fate and evil and control; they're asking big questions. You're not gonna learn a whole lot about human nature from Cryptonomicon. There are some cool characters, like uber-Marine Bobby Shaftoe, but basically these are just people who do things.

And it has to be said that Stephenson has little to no grasp on how women operate. He seems to like women - this isn't a misogynist book - I'm just not sure he's met very many of them.

Which kinda ties into why I didn't totally love it all. It's impressively put together, but it's...well, I was reminded of David Foster Wallace very often: same conversational tone, same exceptional technical intelligence - but Stephenson is - how do I say this? - he's just not very cool. Which I know, you're like "Wait, you're comparing someone's coolness unfavorably to DFW? He wasn't cool!" But he was! He wouldn't have said so, but he totally was cool.

Maybe I can say it like this: DFW was a geek; Stephenson is a nerd.

So this is a nerd epic. It succeeds at what it wants to be. I enjoyed it. I didn't love it.

Neal Stephenson performed his usual wizardry in "Cryptonomicon", a very long book that is a sequel to "The Baroque Cycle", which was in fact written later. ("Cryptonomicon" was published in 1999, where the three volumes of "The Baroque Cycle" came out in 2003 and 2004).

"Cryptonomicon" is ostensibly a historical novel. But the genre is really magical realism, although the elements of magic are subtly interwoven into the usually realistic plot. Stephenson creates his special and unique stew of multi-culturalism, deadpan humor, geeky technological details, and multiple times, places, and eccentric characters, along with lots of interesting tangents. As usual with Stephenson's work, the various characters, plotlines, locations, and timelines intersect more and more until they converge. He orchestrates all of this brilliantly and keeps the reader constantly entertained and interested.

The novel takes place in a variety of locations, and most of the characters travel around the world. Many of the locales, although not all of them, are in the Pacific Rim. The locations include various place in the U.S., including the Midwest, Seattle, and San Francisco, Manila, and various other points in the Philippines, Stockholm, London, Washington D.C., San Francisco, Hawaii, New Caledonia, New Guinea, Shanghai; Qwghlm (a fictional Celtic-flavored island, apparently pronounced like "Tagum"); Bletchley Park, the British top secret World War II facility for cryptography and cryptoanalysis; Brisbane, Australia; Kinakuta (a fictional island sultanate in the South Pacific which only figures in the 1990's timeline, although there are tie-ins to World War II); and Japan.

The book interweaves two main timelines. One takes place in World War II, the other in the late 1990's. The book also picks up the tale of two families central to "The Baroque Cycle," the Shaftoes and the Waterhouses. As in "The Baroque Cycle", the Shaftoes are the people of action, and the Waterhouses are the intellectuals.

Note: I'm giving the only (minor) spoiler in this review here. The mysterious(and apparently ubiquitous) Enoch Root also makes his (re) appearance in both timelines. (He appeared and disappeared during "The Baroque Cycle" as well).

The book is quite long--1130 pages--so while listening to the audiobook I often followed along in the eBook version as well in Adobe Digital Editions.

The WW II timeline mainly focuses on the stories of three major characters--Marine Corpsman Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, American cryptoanalyst and mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, and Japanese soldier and engineer Goto Dengo. Of course, in typical Neal Stephenson fashion, all of their lives intersect, as do the two timelines. Shaftoe is a brave and conscientious soldier, a charismatic leader, more of a physical man than a verbal one. He lacks formal education, but has plenty of moxie and street smarts. I'll try to avoid spoilers, but suffice it to say that Sergeant Shaftoe ends up travelling all around the world in his quest to return to Manila. Goto Dengo, a Japanese man who meets Bobby Shaftoe in Shanghai, also spends time in the Philippines, (via New Guinea, like Shaftoe) and once again encounters Shaftoe in Manila. Goto Dengo probably endures more hardship and pain than almost anyone else in the book. Stephenson presents the suffering of war unflinchingly, but in a way that does not make the book less interesting.

There are a few famous historical personalities that show up in the World War II timeline.

Lawrence Waterhouse meets Alan Turing, the famous British cryptoanalyst, at Princeton University before the war, and continues his interaction with him later.

Also, General Douglas Macarthur puts in a (rather comical) appearance in the Philippines.

In the 1990's timeline, the focus is on Randall (Randy) Waterhouse, a Unix geek who is part of a technology startup, Epiphyte (2) on the West coast. Epiphyte (2) plans to start a data crypt in the South Pacific primarily for use in the Philippines. Randy is the grandson of Lawrence Waterhouse. He is primarily interested in computer programming, but becomes progressively more involved in computer cryptosystems. So he ends up travelling a parallel path to that of his grandfather, Lawrence Waterhouse. Randy meets Douglas Macarthur Shaftoe, son of Bobby Shaftoe and America (Amy) Shaftoe, Doug's daughter and Bobby Shaftoe's granddaughter, on multiple business trips to the Philippines. Doug and Amy run Semper Marine, a diving business with a boat named Glory IV after Doug's mother and Amy's grandmother. Semper does some work for Epiphyte. Randy travels far and wide in the course of the book, taking multiple trips for business and personal reasons. Randy survives quite a few major setbacks and run ins with enemies. (I'll skip the spoilers). Of course there is also a huge cast of characters in this timeline, including the dramatis personae of Epiphyte (2), and lots of other colorful people.

Stephenson somehow manages to keep us interested and entertained through a seemingly endless series of plot twists, surprises, people, and locations. That's quite a feat in a book this size. And I always learn about all kinds of interesting things reading his books. For example, I learned a lot about secret codes used during World War II and about modern computer cryptosystems.

Of course, reading a novel of this size and complexity is a challenge. But in this case, it's well worth the effort.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, is to techno-intellectuals as Bryant-Denny Stadium is to redneck college football fans: it is a monument.

According to Stephenson in this very enjoyable, but lengthy book nerds won the Second World War and are keeping global society free from tyranny nowadays.

Weighing in at 1168 pages, this behemoth saddles up to the literary buffet line alongside Atlas Shrugged and War and Peace. How does a book this big get published and how does an author achieve that goal much less make it entertaining, endearing and just plain good to read? By being expertly written by a very talented author, who is also funny, making similes and metaphors that frequently made me smile and sometimes even laugh out loud.

Neal Stephenson comes across like a geeky Jonathon Franzen, blending erudite sci-fi qualities with meticulously crafted characterizations and rolling all into a cocoon of an intricate plot almost as puzzling as the cryptograms that form the foundation of the story. Comprising two related time lines that slowly blend together, Stephenson held my attention, sometimes making it difficult to put the book down.

Like Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon (with a title that is a nod to Lovecraft) works on multiple levels and establishes parallels between times and generations.

Finally, this is an allegory for the information age and brilliantly illustrates that our treasure is where our data can be found.

This book took me over a month to read, with a couple of short books sandwiched in between. It is not a good sign for me when I need to take two breaks to finish a book. However, this is not a book that I can dismiss regardless of whether I like it. I have several friends who love Cryptonomicon to bits and they are smart, discerning readers. I remember when I finished reading Twilight I was kind of glad that I didn't think it was very good. Had I found it to be an amazing classic I would have no credibility left among my peers. With Cryptonomicon the problem is the opposite, I am kind of disappointed that even though I like some of it, on the whole I don't particularly care for it. Still, better to be accused of being a philistine than to write a dishonest review just to be up with the Joneses eh?

Cryptonomicon is a hard book to synopsize, I feel nonplussed just thinking about how to describe the basic plot in a few sentences (so I won’t). The novel is set in two timelines 1942 and the present (or the 90s, the “present day” at the time the book was written). There are several narrative strands that gradually intertwine toward a single ending. The book is also hard to categorise, part historical fiction, part thriller, some element of cyberpunk, a bit of romance and (thankfully) a substantial amount of comedy.

This novel seems to be more character driven than the other Stephenson books that I read*. The central characters are quite well developed and are generally interesting and likable but unfortunately I could not invest in their adventures. I think this has more to do with the plot they are embroiled in rather than any deficiency in their development. The structure of the book is quite complex and there does not seem to be much in the way of momentum in the pacing, it also seems to be somewhat incohesive. The frequent switches in narrative strands made it difficult for me to remember what each character is up to the previous time they appear.

On the positive side the book is often very funny, the main saving grace as far as I am concerned. Lines like this just crack me up

n  “You know what this is? It’s one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.” “I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.” “It’s one of those American books where once you’ve heard the title you don’t even need to read it,” Randy says.n

I laughed out loud quite a few times while reading the book. On the whole I find it to be well written, with some wonderful turns of phrase, another factor that prevent me from giving up on it. Some of the cryptography and hacking scenes are also fascinating.

Of the four Neal Stephenson books that I have read Cryptonomicon is the hardest to get into, and even by the end of the book I still wasn't really into it. It is clearly too good to dismiss out of hand and I always admire Neal Stephenson for aiming his writing toward an intelligent readership; I am not sure I can claim to be a proud member of his target demographic but kudos to him for respecting his readers. Regrettably this book turned out to be one of those "good but not for me" books. I wouldn't like to dissuade anyone from reading it, but I can't honestly recommend it either. If you are interested but doubt I suggest you read a few more reviews and decide for yourself whether it seems likely to appeal to you. I suspect you never know until you actually try it though.

*In order of preference: Snow Crash, Anathem, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.

Aspire for fluency in geek speak? Is "Big Bang Theory" your idea of reality TV? Then I recommend this Moby Dick of nerd novels. Jay Clayton in his bookn   Charles Dickens in Cyberspacen calls this book the “ultimate geek novel” (pg. 204-211) and draws attention to the “literary-scientific-engineering-military-industrial-intelligence alliance” that produced discoveries in two eras separated by fifty years, World War II and the Internet age. That's a good concise summary of the book.

Stephenson writes with a fascinating droll humor that lets the reader forgive him for explaining cryptography and mathematical problems in excruciating detail. This book offers an insight into the world view seen through the eyes of a genius. Everything that might be a beautiful sight or interesting view to others will appear to be an example of hidden intervals or patterns to the mind of a genius.

This is a turn of the century (20th to 21st) book that strives to pattern itself after a 19th Century novel in that the author uses hundreds of words in those locations where a dozen words would be adequate to carry the plot forward. However, the writing is so entertaining that the reader wishes that even more words would have been used. Stephenson repeatedly branches out on multiple subjects in independent essays that could easily be lifted from the book and used with slight editing for a standup comedy routine. However, the comedy routines would probably go over best in a college town where some physicists or mathematicians are present in the audience.

My tech-geek friends read this book over ten years ago, and they all recommended it to me. It wasn't available in audio format at the time, and I didn't want to invest the time required to read a book this big (928 pages, 42 hours audio). So I never got around to reading it. Then about a year ago it became available on Audible.com. So as usual, I've made it through a famous book about ten years after it's been read by everyone else.

I highly recommend readers of this book refer to the Wikipedia article on this book. It explains which characters are fictional and which are historical, and it helps explain the nature of the various story lines within the book.

I can see how this book was even better when read at the height of the dot-com and fiber optic cable bubble. Techie geekie things were newer then, and it appeared that we were entering the utopian age of Aquarius that would lead to perpetual prosperity. Does anyone remember the promises made that the new information age would be free of recessions and business cycles? Since ten years have elapsed since it was published, the reader can detect some signs of the book's age by noticing that there are no smart phones, iPads or iPods (it was the zenith of the CD Walkman era). Windows NT was new then. It was pre 9-11 so the emphasis in the book is on the inconvenience of customs inspections over that of security checks prior to getting on board.

Most of the book can pass as plausible historical fiction. But there are a few Stephensonian inventions that definitely belong in a science fiction novel. Below are some of the imaginative examples:

Qwghlmian -- is a fictional language that allegedly hails from some fictional British islands in the North Sea. It has 16 consonants and no vowels making it nearly impossible to pronounce. To complicate things further, there are two mutually non-comprehendible dialects of the language, Inner Qwghlimian and Outer Qwghlimian. Confusing the mid-glottal with the frontal glottal can, in one instance, completely change the meaning a sentence.

Rocket propelled submarine -- This book has the WWII era Germans advancing in submarine technology parallel with their development of jet engines in airplanes. Supposedly this quiet and new generation of hydrogen peroxide propelled submarines could stay below water for days.

RAM made from plumbing -- A character in this book constructs a digital computer with addressable random access memory (RAM), and it was made from plumbing parts and other primitive stuff. It happens during WWII which was the pre-transistor era, thus he used drain pipes filled with mercury with electrical level sensors that created the binary signals necessary for a functioning digital computer. (If a computer like that were made today, EPA would declare it to be a Federal Superfund Site for toxic cleanup.)

Some quotations I found interesting:

A comparison of atheists and church attendees:
"… 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…. 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…. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability."

A paraphrase of the fine print on a typical investment prospectus:
"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.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business."

The difference between physicists and engineers:
"There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no … sense. … The engineers love … their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists … want to think they understand everything."

Link to Darwin8u's notes:
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/38897...

"Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated—the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.”
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon



I didn't like it as much as Anathem or Snow Crash, but like those two Stephenson novels Cryptonomicon has a large cult following, and was on the bleeding edge of a lot of ideas only starting to bubble up in 1999.

Stephenson's prose can go from poetic to obnoxious pretty fast and the tone of this novel was sometimes kinda ridiculous, but ignoring a couple big things that I generally rolled my eyes at -- I loved the novel. It moved, was moving, and came together very well at the end.

Think of this novel like a REALLY good war thriller (Red Storm Rising) that runs with three or four distinct story lines and about a dozen characters that jumps to another storyline every 6-1o pages. So even when a storyline was dragging a bit, soon I was flipped into another zone that I enjoyed a bunch. It is also a fantastic historical war novel, focused on cryptography during WWII. So, it kept reminding me of other historical novels of WWII. It seeemed a bit like Wouk's The Winds of War (except this book was strictly focused on areas mostly ignored by Wouk). Finally, it was a well-paced gernational/family novel (see Roots or The Godfather).

Anyway, it is a good book to read during the 2017-2018 boom (and perhaps bust) of cryptocurrency, since the 1997 portion of this novel deals A LOT with the establishment of a cryptocurrency (NOT a blockchain encrypted currency). Supposedly Paypal's founder Peter Thiel used to require his employees to read Cryptonomicon. It might be a myth, but if so, it is a good one.

Neal Stephenson likes to throw weird shit together and see if it sticks. The more recent his book, the more likely it is to resemble a schizophrenic's curio cabinet. Your average Phillip Pullman will add a little wacky trepanning to his fantasy trilogy for that refined edge of esoteria.

Meanwhile, Stephenson will have an exiled member of Italian royalty who works in 'demolition real estate' and knows Escrima thanks to an intense trepanning session with Horace Walpole, Duke Orford. Which I believe is an accurate summary of the next William Gibson book.

One man's premise is another man's plot.

I liked it better when Stephenson used the bizarre as a spice to flavor a driven, exciting story. Though spices may make a dish delectable, they aren't palatable on their own; you need some meat. I guess what I'm saying is: who the fuck wrote Snowcrash and when will he write something else?

n  Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mache houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve. n

Neal Stephenson has written an overlong novel focusing on the significance of cryptography both in the world today and the time of World War II. He links the two by using multiple family generations. The predecessors inhabit the early cryptographical universe of Turing and others, dealing with cracking German and Japanese cyphers. The latter family representatives are trying to develop a secure cryptography that will support the creation of a global monetary system, based on gold stashed in the Philippines near the end of the war.


Neal Stephenson - from the LA Times

Stephenson provides considerable payload here, providing details of cryptography then and now, and considerable analysis of gold as the basis for economic structures. He also tells us much about how business is done when global actors are creating the information economies of the future.

There is no shortage of action here. But it is at the expense of character development. To the extent that the players have an inner life, it is radically overshadowed by the external events in which they are involved. The female characters are barely explored here, hardly more than window dressing to the experiences of the men, with considerable emphasis on their looks. This was unwelcome.

Still, I enjoyed the book. It is an engaging read, and worth the trip for the information it conveys.

Review first posted - February 17, 2017

Published - May 1999

PS - I received this book as a gift from a rocket-scientist nephew in 1999. I wrote most of the above back then, but it was not posted until 2017.

=============================EXTRA STUFF

Links to the author’s personal, Twitter, Google Plus and FB pages

Other Stephenson books reviewed
-----2019 - Fall or, Dodge in Hell
-----2015 - The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
-----2015 - SevenEves
-----2011 - Reamde

Though n  Snow Crashn will probably remain my all-time favorite Neal Stephenson novel, Cryptonomicon might take the crown as his best.[†:] As I write this review, I wrapping up my third reading of this novel.

BRIEF ASIDE REGARDING THE TIMING OF THIS THIRD READING: It is probably worth noting my mental state when I cracked the spine on this one for the third time. Stephenson's n  Anathemn had just come out and I could not quite bring myself to drop the cash on the hardcover. But I was overwhelmed with the urge to read some Stephenson. Given the the brutalizing that the U.S. economy was taking (according to the news) right about this time, it therefore seemed apropos to read something that involved economics, crypto, currency, libertarianism (and flaws of same), and safety/security.

END OF ASIDE AND RETURN TO REVIEW THAT IS REALLY MORE LIKE A BUNCH OF RANDOM DISCONNECTED OBSERVATIONS: Cryptonomicon manages to do a good job of not feeling terribly dated even nine years after its release. The cutting-edge laptops in the narrative still seem pretty fancy; the issues all continue to feel pertinent and relevant; the only thing that seems to set it in a particular time is an off-hand reference to "the Power Rangers" pretty late in the story.

Anyway.

It holds together well all these years later and is a great exemplar of Stephenson's hyperbolic style and how well he wields that style for explanatory power as well as humor.

What Stephenson does masterfully here is to create an interesting story for nerds (esp. crypto nerds) that has a thinly veiled coming-of-age sub-text lathered onto a character that we (at first) don't think needs any maturation.

I am talking (of course) about Randy.

If you don't figure this out by the time you get to the "Pulse" chapter then you have some explaining to do. We (the readers, the nerds) are thinking that Randy is a grown-up because we (1; as grown-ups) identify with him at the outset and (2) he has all the trappings of a grown-up such as (a) a beard, (b) a girlfriend of 10 years, (c) a business plan, etc. But the Randy we start with is little more than a bearded child running away from his commitments (i.e., his career as a university sysadmin and his relationship with Charlene (though, given the circumstances described in the prose, citing the latter is probably not fair to Randy) to play with his friends (e.g., Avi, Tom Howard) and their toys (e.g., high-tech laptops, GPS receivers). We get the first hint that this late-stage coming-of-age is going on when Randy shaves off his beard to discover a grown-ups face underneath. From there it's a pretty steady sleight-of-hand unfolding through the narrative which is really quite rewarding. (Hence taking the crown as Stephenson's best.)

Granted, there's so much more going on in the novel than just Randy; we could also consider Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Bobby Shaftoe, Goto Dengo, or Enoch Root[‡:]. But Randy is probably the best place to center.


------
† = At the time of this writing, there is a pretty broad swath of Stephenson unread by Y.T., namely all three in the Baroque Cycle and the brand new n  Anathemn.

‡ = Root in particular fascinates me because (if what I've heard is true an he does in fact appear in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle) he seems to share a few traits in common with Tolkien's Gandalf (doubly interesting because Stephenson's Randy calls Root a "Wizard" in the Tolkien sense), Weis/Hickman's Fizban, Arthur Miller's "Old Jew", etc. I'm thinking that there is a whole taxonomy of characters to explore here of which Root is one.

------

See also:
• 10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Actually Read Them) at io9

Si no me equivoco, debió ser en secundaria cuando jugábamos a crear un código para cifrar mensajes y podernos enviar notas dentro del salón de clases y que en caso de ser descubiertos, quien interceptara el mensaje no supiera lo que estábamos diciendo. Eran códigos extremadamente simples donde solo alterábamos el orden las letras, una a podía ser una r, o una b podía ser un número. Los mensajes eran más bobos aún.

Releyendo Crítica y verdad, de Barthes, releo al respecto de la interpretación que la crítica literaria puede hacer de la literatura, es más, que la misma literatura puede hacer de lo que comprendemos como realidad, de la ficción como otra realidad, ni mayor ni menor que lo que experimentamos cuando estamos conscientes. Simplemente una realidad que apodamos “ficción”.

Esta novela de Stephenson llegó a nuestra biblioteca cortesía de una “recomendación” de Fresán en su artículo New American Cookbook, listado de libros que nos ha dado mucho que explorar, a mi padre y a mí, de la literatura norteamericana de fin del siglo pasado.

Después de meses de dedicarle a ratos lectura a esta especie de Moby Dick de la criptografía, he podido dar fin a una de las mejores novelas que he leído en mi vida, e ignoro qué tando de verdad hay en lo que afirma Charles Yu de que “A person who has recently read Cryptonomicon is temporarily the smartest person on Earth. That’s a fact”, pero sí debo reconocer que me siento muy diferente de cuando comencé la lectura de este librote a ahora que le he dado fin.

No solo ha pasado tiempo en mi vida, y otras lecturas intermedias, no solo he envejecido unos meses, sino que además, he confrontado la lectura de una novela que abarca demasiados detalles en un momento culminante de la historia de la humanidad: la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aunque, más que ese periodo en particular, más bien, mi atención se inclinó por la influencia de la guerra en el progreso de la humanidad.

Uso la palabra “progreso” desde la perspectiva escéptica de Gray, la estulticia de la humanidad ante el conocimiento, ante la “sabiduría” que ha generado en su andar sobre la tierra. Un progreso más bien imbécil e inútil.

“Tanto daño que le causamos a la Tierra”.

“Las bombas nucleares pueden destruir el planeta”.

Patrañas. Al Mundo le importamos todavía menos de lo que nosotros podemos preocuparnos por la existencia de una bacteria.

Criptonomicón viene a ser una lápida inmensa en relación al legado de la humanidad. Sus conocimientos y avances tecnológicos, vienen a ser resultado de el afán de ganar una batalla, una pelea, una guerra. Los países “desarrollados” invierten cantidades demenciales de dinero, esfuerzo, materia prima y recurso humano, en crear nuevas armas y herramientas de destrucción. De destrucción del otro que no soy yo, que no se ve como yo, que no piensa ni cree lo que creo yo.

Una tremenda puñetez.

Ni todo el oro del mundo bajo el Gólgota o en el V-Millennium podrán nunca evitar que catástrofes bélicas puedan volver a suceder. Es el sueño, la utopía de unos pocos. De muchos. Contra los sueños de dominación y control y poder de otros pocos.

Stephenson se las ingenia para escribir una novelota increíblemente amena, entretenida, divertida y para nada tonta, al contrario, hay partes que te exigen todas tus neuronas trabajando; podrías brincar esas partes, pero, entonces, cuál es el chiste. Finalmente, una novela puede ser un mensaje cifrado de algo más. De algo que solo cada lector podrá descifrar, incluso no en una primera lectura, a lo mejor en dos o tres; incluso, puede que no al terminar de leerla, puede que pasen meses, años, antes que tu cabeza, o tu espíritu, tengan la “tecnología” necesaria para descifrar ese mensaje.

No recuerdo haberme encariñado tanto con la trama de una novela, con sus personajes, y medio odiar a unos.

Espero que Bobby Shaftoe me acompañe en más de una batalla. Espero tener tiempo, ojos y vida para leer algo más de Stephenson. Espero poder ser digno de ese río de oro que es la vida.

DNF. Half way through giving up with more than 500 pages into it. I guess I had high expectations. I love reading about math and history especially when they intersect in crypto, and love sci-fi or historical fiction but this has a lot more than that. So many metaphors, similes,and annoying connotations wore me off eventually. It had some good parts but meandered very much too with nothing adding to plot or characters. My first Stephenson, may be I should try Snow Crash, or read Reamde. They are all way too long though.

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