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.

“Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.”



The story takes place in two periods:

One during world war two......
a group of World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures.

The second period is in the late 1990's, during the start of the internet boom. A group of computer experts and technology innovationists, use cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology in order to……..
Hmmm......Not so clear…..
Find gold?
Create anonymous Internet banking using electronic money?
Improve their love life and financial situation?
Entertain themselves intellectually by solving mathematical and technical problems?
Improve the world?



Both the stories/periods are connected in various ways:
Some of the later characters are descendants of the previous era characters.
The later characters are involved in various enterprises that are related to events that are described in the WW2 part of the story.
Both the early and later era characters are mathematicians.


The story is rich with expressions, information and narrative related to the mathematical issues it deals with.
It mentions and describes many mathematical issues and examples related to the story, and goes into excessive details related to the hardware and mainly software that the characters use. As a person with background both in math and computers, I found it interesting, others who have less interest in this field of knowledge are probably better off skipping these detailed descriptions.

Altogether, the book has a very nerdy flavor, which is expected as most of the main characters are computer and mathematical experts.

Both the plot and the characters are well developed (well, some of the characters), and I found the reading experience exciting. Things always happen, and if not, there are interesting issues that are explained in detail in an entertaining way.

The prose style is very technical, including technical descriptions of day to day phenomena. This is part of the charm of the book:

"Blood seeps out of tiny, invisible painless cuts on Randy’s face and neck for ten or fifteen minutes after he has shaved. Moments ago, that blood was accelerating through his ventricles, or seeping through the parts of his brain that make him a conscious entity. Now the same stuff is exposed to the air; he can reach up and wipe it off. The boundary between Randy and his environment has been annihilated."

There are cases when this type of writing did get a bit on my nerve, and there were some cases where the plot did not really make sense (too many coincidences or decisions that were made or not made to benefit the plot)


The book is both amusing and thrilling. I am not sure it is for anyone, but if you are not afraid of technology and the length of the book, you should give it a try.

Some more nice quotes…..I tried to pick the short ones:

“Enoch...why are you here?
Why has my spirit been incarnated into a physical body in this world generally? Or specifically, why am I here in a Swedish forest, standing on the wreck of a mysterious German rocket plane while a homosexual German sobs over the cremated remains of his Italian lover?”


“It appeared that way, Lawrence, but this raised the question of was mathematics really true or was it just a game played with symbols? In other words—are we discovering Truth, or just wanking?”

“Of course, the underlying structure of everything in England is posh. There is no in between with these people. You have to walk a mile to find a telephone booth, but when you find it, it is built as if the senseless dynamiting of pay phones had been a serious problem at some time in the past. And a British mailbox can presumably stop a German tank.”

“...the insects here see you as a big slab of animated but not very well defended food. The ability to move, far from being a deterrent, serves as an unforgeable guarantee of freshness.”

“Even though he grew up in churches, raised by church people, Waterhouse (as must be obvious by this point) never really understood their attitudes about sex. Why did they get so hung up on that one issue, when there were others like murder, war, poverty, and pestilence?”

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

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

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

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.

A fun and wondering yarn. Neal would benefit from an editor to streamline some of his digressions, but unlike Gravity's Rainbow, this WWII historical fiction's tangents are entertaining. Overall I think this book asks too much from the reader, but if you find yourself with fifty hours of downtime, this isn't a bad way to fill it.

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

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

And funny.

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

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

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

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

2015 reread: In World War II, Bobby Shaftoe is a Marine, and Lawrence Waterhouse is a cryptographer. In the present, Randy Waterhouse is part of a tech start-up in the Phillipines. How are the two threads linked, other than by the mysterious Enoch Root?

Okay, so this kitten squisher is a lot more complicated that but after 1200+ reviews, it's hard to come up with teasers some days.

As noted above, this was not my first time reading Cryptonomicon. I first read it when it was published, way back in the bygone days before the world moved on. When it popped up for $1.99 on one of my cheap-o emails, I snapped it up.

This mammoth tome is classified as science fiction but could easily be looked at as historical fiction since the sf element is minuscule. Neal Stephenson weaves together multiple plot threads, three during World War II and one in the present day, and produces a fine tapestry of a novel.

On one hand, you have Randy Waterhouse, part of the Epiphyte corporation, a start-up dedicated to creating a data haven in the Phillipines. On the other, you have the converging tales of a Marine named Bobby Shaftoe, a cryptographer named Lawrence Waterhouse, and Goto Dengo, a Japanese engineer. As diverse as the elements are, Stephen manages to bring everything together. Eventually.

I was an apple-cheeked young lad when I first read this, back when the internet was still new to most of us. Now, as a curmudgeon 15 years older, I still enjoyed reading it quite a bit. Despite my usual intolerance for digressions, and this book has many, I found it hard to put down for long. The bits of history, cryptography, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch all held my attention.

In the years between my first read and this one, I'd forgotten how hilarious this book can be at times. Lawrence Waterhouse is a bit like Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory, only less likely to have the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis if he were a real person.

Funny how some things never change, though. My gripes the first time through were my gripes this time. While I enjoyed the journey, the writing could have been tightened up a bit. I felt like Stephenson was driving around looking for a free parking space when there was already one pretty close to the door. Also, a part near the ending, which I will not spoil here, came out of left field and felt tacked on, unnecessary, and kind of stupid. Also, I maintain that Stephenson hasn't written a great ending since Zodiac. Other than that, I thought the book was pretty great. Four out of five stars.

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

This is an award-nominated historical novel techno-thriller mashup by Neal Stephenson, published in 1999, nominated to Hugo in 2000 (lost to A Deepness in the Sky. It was 3rd both in nominations and final voting, with A Civil Campaign being the 2nd one) and won Locus Award for Best SF Novel. It can be described as a computer geek dream novel, which appeared just before the dot-com crash and which discussed cryptocurrencies years before the general public heard about Bitcoin and the like. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for August 2023 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.

This is a really large book, 42 hours of audio and 918 pages of the first edition hardback, big enough so that several translations were published as three and even four volumes.

I usually outline the starting setting, but because the book’s narrative weaves together multiple storylines spanning different periods, from before World War II to the late 20th century, I guess it is better to list the characters. Some of these characters or their relatives appear in the author’s later works, so they are a part of a specific universe. So, let's take a closer look at some of the characters:

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst who studied with Alan Turing and met Einstein. For most of the novel, he works for the Allied forces during World War II, helping to break Axis codes. He is an archetypical intellectually driven, socially awkward genius.
Randy Waterhouse is Lawrence Waterhouse's grandson and represents a more contemporary, tech-savvy version of a geek. He is a computer programmer and entrepreneur, and his character showcases the intersection of intellectual prowess with the emerging world of technology. He is also socially inept, but he understands that it is a drawback and tries to adapt.
Bobby Shaftoe is a Marine during World War II, and his character is an anti-thesis for geekiness: he embodies physical strength, toughness, and resilience, a Rambo version of WW2. He isn’t perfect, and he has brains, not only brawl.
Goto Dengo is a Japanese soldier in World War II, who became Shaftoe’s friend just before Pearl Harbor, when both Japanese and US troops stayed in Shanghai. He represents a different cultural perspective, not only as a soldier but as a poet and an engineer.

The novel is great in parts where it explores themes of cryptography, technology, and the impact of tech on society. While the book primarily focuses on themes related to cryptography and technology, it also delves into the lives and personalities of several key characters. It also gives a wealth of real historical figures and events as well as some slightly disguised/fictionalized, like there is Electrical Till Corp, which is IBM in all but name, or there is a version of Operation Mincemeat. The overall plot is heavily influenced by Libertarian thought.

It is definitely the work of its times and shows how in just a few decades SFF fandom may change: while "Cryptonomicon" doesn't necessarily stress masculinity as a primary theme, it, like much older SF, has most of the characters white, male, heterosexual. There are a lot of depictions of young men's sexual urges and the need to ‘lose some steam’, but all women in the book are more objects than persons, needed to move a plot. Also, there is a criticism of extreme cases of political correctness, like in the following two pieces:

1.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn’t it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese—in the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your state of 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.

2.
“So,” Randy continued, “to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D.”
“Oh. I see,” Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. “So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology.”
The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck.
“I’m not sure what a technocrat is,” Randy said. “Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?”
“You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that book,” Kivistik said. “The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I mean by technocrat.”
“I went to a public school,” Randy said. “And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated.”
Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. “And your family?” Charlene asked frostily.
Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. “My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college.”
“And his father?”
“A mathematician.”
Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed.
“I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language, maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. “No one in my family has ever had much money or power,” he said.

I personally am interested in both major themes of the book like WW2 history and 90s hackers, as well as minor ones, like RPGs, trading card games, and theosophical discussions, so for me, the book is great, even if it definitely has flaws and therefore can bore or anger (quite reasonably) some people.

It's perhaps not fair to review a book that I didn't finish reading, but I found this to be so poorly written, so painfully boring, so self-indulgent on the part of the author, and with such laughably sophomoric dialog and characterizations, that I couldn't resist blowing one final raspberry at Mr Stephenson's clown-car of a book. No doubt he is an author with a lot on his mind, and "computer" science fiction is a nice change of pace, but he's not got the chops to pull off such a long and intricate book without the help of a good editor with the guts to tell him when he's sucking.

I took my sweet time with this one, and I am glad I did. The ambition here is sky-high, and Stephenson masterfully transforms it into a captivating and profoundly resonant journey. The characters' odysseys through time and space are not just entertaining but downright emotional. Just the sheer volume of WWII trivia I picked up makes this a worthwhile experience. This book offers a dazzling narrative, heart-racing action, delightful dives into philosophy, history, math, and cryptography, all topped off with a gut-wrenching finale. Easily one of Neal Stephenson's finest works.