Neal Stephenson's debut novel is an epoch-making masterpiece that hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. It really was a great story, well-told. I'm glad I slogged through but I would really only recommend this book to people who like to know how things work, to the last detail. I mean, that's Neal Stephenson for you. The characters were great and fully developed. I found myself rooting for almost everybody, good guy or bad, and I suppose there's something to that as well. Just because someone is ostensibly on a side you are not on, doesn't mean they aren't on your side.

reread this one again after rereading Baroque and as in the earlier review below, I liked it but not as much as the trilogy; mostly for the same reasons

(original review in 2008)
I read this in inverse chronological order of publication, so after The Baroque Cycle to which it shares ideas, and characters' families and I have to say that while engaging and with numerous remarkable moments, it is not as good as the Cycle. Maybe because despite having a math background I have very little interest in cryptography or hacking while the beginning of calculus and the first stabs at constructing a "Theory of Everything" in the System of the World are of much more interest to me.

Also not surprisingly considering that the Cycle has 3000 pages its characters are considerably more developed, considerably more "real" than the ones in Cryptonomicon.

Still a superb novel and highly recommended.

Just re-read this for the first time, and it's still one of my favorites. This book is geek-heaven: cryptography, world war II, code-breaking, nazi gold, and modern day internet beginnings all tied together in one masterful story.

It also was largely lost on me, and I suspect many of my generation, that the second world war was won - or at least greatly accelerated - in great part due to the fact that we had cracked the German and Japanese codes. Learning more about the efforts of Bletchley Park, and Dr Alan Turing and huffduff and cribs, etc was fascinating.

I think the funniest part of the book is the page where Stephenson actually graphs out how productive Waterhouse is when he has recently had sex (very productive) and when he hasn't (not very productive).

The code-breaking and cryptography is not stuff I know a ton about, as modern day programmers largely don't have to worry about that stuff, but it's a good reminder to think about, as we don't have it on our brains nearly enough. Avi & Randy's paranoia and tendency to encrypt everything from their hard drives to their emails may be overkill, on the other hand, it also may be wise. I remember getting email from people who used public/private keys to encrypt their email before, but not in the last 5 years. Maybe we should request that Gmail Labs add that!

If there was a theme to this book, it's that cryptography is everything. It defined the second world war, and it also defines the modern internet. Information is king - not large caches of gold.

Way too much math. I'm sure it's brilliant, but I couldn't hack it.

At the start of the year I set myself a small personal task to read Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow and Cryptonomicon; three books I considered to be complex. Infinite Jest was by far the longest, requiring steely determination, patience and an iron will to keep going; Gravity's Rainbow was a mind fuck and probably the most challenging piece of literature I've read in my three decades and compared to the two aforementioned behemoths Cryptonomicon was easily the most accessible of the three. Don't think this is a breeze because it isn't and rather than patience what you need is concentration plus having previously read Anathem and Quicksilver helped when it came to understanding his complicated mathematic stuff.

Geekfest aside this is a great story about Nazi war gold and code breaking.

2.5 Stars

The redeeming quality of this book is the Stephenson snark that I first came to love with Snow Crash. But overall there was so much jumping around with the story that my interest waned way too often and it was waaaaay too long with the entertaining parts sprinkled far and few between.

I was expecting this to be more of a sci-fi but it would be much more accurately described as historical fiction.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is a lengthy historical fiction set during both World War II and the late 1990s with much of the action taking place in the Philippines. In the 1940s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, colleague of Alan Turing, is hired by the U.S. Navy to help break Axis codes. Meanwhile, Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, who's too enthusiastic and courageous for his own good, doesn't realize that his troop's job is to make it look like the U.S. hasn't broken the codes, but just happens to always be in the right place at the right time.

Waterhouse and Shaftoe know each other only superficially, but their descendants, who've noticeably inherited some of their traits, meet in the 1990s storyline. Randy Lawrence Waterhouse is a systems administrator who's trying to set up an electronic banking system in the Philippines. There he meets Doug and Amy Shaftoe, a father and daughter team who are doing the underwater surveying for Randy's Internet cables. Randy and the Shaftoes eventually realize that they share a secret heritage and together they set out on a massive code-breaking treasure hunt.

The plot of Cryptonomicon is clever and elaborate, sometimes exciting (e.g., most scenes with Bobby Shaftoe), frequently funny (such as when Ronald Reagan interviews Bobby Shaftoe, and when the Waterhouse family uses a complicated mathematical algorithm to divide up the family heirlooms), and always informative.

Neal Stephenson's fans know (and love) that you can't read one of his books without learning a lot. Predictably, Cryptonomicon is chock full of information. If a character walks past a bank in China, you can bet you're in for a lecture on Chinese banking. If he sees a spider web dripping with dew, you'll be taught how spiders catch their prey. Character backstories are used to teach us about the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe or the familial habits of the Filipinos. In Cryptonomicon there are many pages that think they should be in a textbook on computer circuitry (and some that actually admit they belong in Letters to Penthouse). There are three pages devoted to a doctoral dissertation on facial hair and shaving fetishes, and another three pages of instruction on the proper way to eat Cap'n Crunch.

These divergences interrupt the plot and make the book much longer than it needs to be, but you just can't help but forgive Stephenson (or to at least smile and shake your head knowingly as if he has some sort of uncontrollable yet endearing pathology), when you see him poking fun at himself for this very thing. In one scene, Bobby Shaftoe thinks he's in "HELL'S DEMO" when he's forced to listen to someone "explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy." Though the lecture causes Shaftoe to hallucinate, the reader still manages to learn something about the Wehrmacht Nachrichten Verbindungen while being thankful to realize that Stephenson knows he has this "issue."

It's easy to tell that Neal Stephenson loves to do research and loves to impart the knowledge he's gleaned, or ideas he's thought up, and it's hard to criticize him for this, especially since it's all done in his clever, colorful, and entertaining style, even if it's not always relevant to the plot. And sometimes these infodumps can really set a scene. Here's a very short example:

"The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins. It is the smell of War."

Stephenson also delights in creating quirky similes:

"Like the client of one of your less reputable pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes..."

Though I skimmed a few of Stephenson's longer tangents, I was nevertheless entertained by the clever plot of Cryptonomicon. I read the novel in two formats. One was Subterranean Press's signed limited edition which was printed on thick glossy paper and embellished with new artwork by Patrick Arrasmith, several graphs, and even some perl script. My Advanced Review Copy of this book weighs 4 pounds (and it was only paperback -- the published version is hardback). I also listened to MacMillan's audiobook read by William Dufris. I'm sure Cryptonomicon was not an easy book to read out loud, but Dufris did an amazing job, even actually sounding like Ronald Reagan during the Reagan interview.

Cryptonomicon won the Locus Award in 2000 and was nominated for both the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards that year. Pretty big accomplishment for a book that's not even science fiction. For readers who haven't tried one of Neal Stephenson's books yet, Cryptonomicon is a good place to start.

-Bajo múltiples disfraces de géneros y subgéneros varios se esconde aquí la novela de aventuras de toda la vida.-

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. Las vidas y peripecias de varios personajes relacionados de diferentes formas durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial se conectan con las de otros en el presente con la criptografía, el desencriptado y diferentes modalidades de protección de la información como nexo común. Libro originalmente publicado en un único volumen pero publicado en tres en varios países en alguna de sus ediciones, que en el caso de España se llamaron “Criptonomicón I: El Código Enigma”, “Criptonomicón II: El Código Pontifex” y “Criptonomicón III: El Código Aretusa”.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

One of the best books ever written, Neal flawlessly weaves two timelines, multiple story arcs, history, mathematics, and computer theory... All with a great sense of humor and gripping storyline. I still think about a mathematician graphing his horniness in a formula. Priceless!

It's Stephenson. It's didactic. It's verbose. It's massive. It's 900 pages, at least 200 of which are pure research vomit, thinly disguised as dialogue. Yet for all this, very readable. And it appears Neal finally figured out how to end his huge, sprawling stories in a satisfactory, even elegant manner. (It took Stephen King all the way until The Dark Tower to manage it, so don't think I'm belittling the achievement.)

Four stars! I'm glad I read it, I learned a shit-ton of stuff I never thought I'd care about, and it was enormously entertaining. It didn't absolutely fire my imagination the way Snow Crash and The Diamond Age did, yet it's obviously the work of a writer who has matured since he wrote those books.

Now I need a nap.

This was my first Stephenson book. Crytponomicon is quite long, my printing is 800 (somewhat large) pages, which is a quite high aim, esp. considerd the technical themes (burdens) of the book. Unfortunately Stephenson fails terribly.

Being a cryptonerd and in general more technically interested then average, I really looked forward to reading it when I got it as a gift. However the technical side of this book is rather bland, bad researched, and does little for the story other than perhaps sound impressive, but mostly feeling nerd-pompous or out of place. The word plays are especially horrible, at about the same level as the weekly (translated) Donald Duck comics we get here in Norway. The book is riddled with very thinly veiled references to Hacker Culture. There is also a painfully stupid parody of Welsh (Qwghlmnian), which could easily have been rivaled by a 12-year old's school paper graded D. I have never ever seen worse in a published work.

The book does not really give anything on the other areas. The main characters (only men) are both unlikable and unbelievable stereotypes. Other hard critics have given good write-ups. Historical characters are not portrayed in a believable way, and are often woefully inaccurate, and not at all within feasible fictional bounds. The book is too long and goes on and on about tangents and tasteless descriptions of about everything the characters do, which turns out to be not that much considering the length of the book. The ending is possibly its weakest point.

This is one of the poorest books I have ever read. A good editor might have salvaged it by cutting about 500 pages, mostly with the technical stuff, which did the book no favours. The information-haven theme could have been explored much more, and was the only really interesting theme of the book. Unfortunatly this wasn't very much featured. This book is mostly about obnoxious shallow nerds going about their business. I did finish it, but only because it was a gift, and I had heard much great stuff about Stephenson, but there was none of it in this book.

Would not recommend to anyone.

This is porn for math majors.