Cryptonomicon

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

This is a good 300-page story wrapped up in 960 pages of word vomit. I only made it to page 250 and I just can't keep going. This book is too tedious and full of unnecessary details - for example, there are about 6 pages dedicated to talking about a guy walking from his hotel to his office - and that's it, the entire purpose of the chapter is to describe his walk. There is no reason to use 6 pages to simply say "Randy walked to his new office and got sweaty along the way". There is also a ridiculous amount of pages on really detailed math discussions - it was just too boring (and I'm good at math, doesn't mean I want to read 10 pages about how an algorithm was developed to break a cipher). I had a similar problem with one of Stephenson's other books Seveneves - it spent way too much time on orbital mechanics and not enough time on the story. I really want to like this author but I can't stand his excessive descriptions and details that don't contribute anything to the plot.

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.

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.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an epic cross between science fiction and historical fiction. It involves Nazis, Japanese, and WWII, and the interesting field of cryptology and cryptocurrency, code breaking, computers, and gold.

I read the audiobook. The plot is so descriptive and intense that one loses sense of it at times when reading with breaks. The narration, in itself, is excellent.

I have made a mistake by not consuming the printed word for this title, so I would want everyone reading this review to actually read this book and not rely on the audio version. I understand it is lengthy, but this is the only way to truly recognize the sheer brilliance of this work by the genius Stephenson. I am definitely going to read his next book (whichever I pick next) and not listen to it.

My rating partly reflects the bad experience I had with the audio book version, and in no way completely reflects the book an its contents.

An amazing and massive story of code-breaking during WWII and establishing a data haven in the present. Great characters, an intricate plot, and the most hilarious and ironic narrative voice ever, this was a definitive work for the erudite, info-dump loving Stephenson. There are so many self-indulgent tangents on esoteric lines of geek trivia, but this is an integral part of the author's voice. Though one would think a 910 page story would drag, I found myself increasingly drawn by the interweaving stories, and was sad when it came to an end. A wild and unique story unlike any other!

This book came highly recommended by many friends and reviewers, and I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson based on Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. It did not disappoint. I will soon tackle the next door-stopper he wrote, Anathem, before someday taking on the imposing Baroque Cycle.

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...

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.