One day I went out shopping for a book. My list of unread, prepurchased titles sat neatly in a stack by my disused fire-place and none of them set me alive with anticipation. I don't know what I wanted really, but I had a vague idea that there was a black book with numbers on the front that was a New York Times bestseller, and I quite fancied something clever related to code breaking or numbers. So I hopped on the subway, rode into Union Square and strolled over to B&N on 17th street and found what I was looking for on a Paperback Favourites table. I read the description, and the first few pages and decided it was good and worthy of purchase. That book was Cryponomicon.

I read the first chapter or so back home on my bed, with tea and toast, and I decided the writing style was tricky, and hard to get used to in terms of rhythm, but I quite liked this tough as nails army guy in the first chapter so I stuck with it.

Stephenson has a sprawling, divergent, off on a tangent way of writing, but there is such pleasure in every aspect of the subjects he explores, and his narrative ambles back over to the central plot points enough that you never feel annoyed or frustrated. If anything you feel a sense of gratitude for his skill and for his curiosity, and the manner in which he imparts complex ideas.

Of all the authors I've ever read, I feel most strongly about Neal Stephenson because he has genuinely enriched my life and broadened my understanding and appreciation for history and ideas.

One of the best scenes in this book follows the story of a Japanese man whose boat is blown up. His comrades are eaten by sharks and he endures hell before the end of his story. It is so vivid and alive and such a wonderful piece of writing. He took a character who could have been a foot-note in the story if he chose it to be so, and made something beautiful. That's why this is a truly great book.

It's probably safe to assume Neal Stephenson is some sort of freakish genius, along the lines of David Foster Wallace or someone. I felt at times while reading Cryptonomicon that I was reading Infinite Jest again, which isn't really a good comparison since the books have nothing to do with one another. Except this is my review and this is how I roll. Both authors can cram an exorbitant amount of information in less than 2000 pages, and to read it all makes ones head hurt, but in a good way. Like you're learning something. Stephenson takes his readers from WWII to the Internet boom of the 90s, discusses cryptography ad nauseum, and seems to know an equal lot about war, math, mythology, computers and technology (both of the 40s and the 90s), the Seattle grunge scene, and Cap'n Crunch cereal. Not necessarily all in that order, and that's leaving a lot out because there's not enough space here to write about it all. (Which is why Stephenson's book is almost 1200 pages long.) Then, for good measure (or maybe to show off?) he even makes up a whole fictional community as well. Jeebus, man! Way to make the rest of us look like a bunch of pansy-ass losers.

I'm not going to even come close to pretending like I understood everything in this book. I suck at math, and I know the basics of computers, and I don't eat Cap'n Crunch cereal, so really the Seattle grunge scene is all I really have any remote knowledge about, but that doesn't really count since I haven't even been there in person. I'm glad I read this because it was a wild read and I didn't hate it while I was reading it, even if it was over my head at times. There were graphs and illustrations and algorithms and stuff to give it some validity, and maybe someone much smarter than me could make sense of it all. As it was I just enjoyed looking at it and pretending I was learning something through osmosis.

This was so much better than Snow Crash or The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, but that's entirely personal opinion. This kind of spy stuff is much more exciting to me and makes more of an impression on me than the other two I've read. I'm sort of nerdily excited to read Quicksilver and the rest of the Baroque Cycle now because I guess it has a lot of familiar character names, but I have no idea if they're as good as this one.

One star knocked off for being insanely wordy. That may be genius, or it could just be overwriting.

*Re-reading this book, started early January 2009

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

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

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

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

n  n
Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.

On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.

While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and became a father. As such these stories became imprinted on my memory as the soundtrack to the happiest period in my life (so far).

n  n    Cryptonomiconn  n is a difficult book for me to review.
In many ways it’s amazing – so why not the give it the fifth star?
In many ways it’s infuriating – so how did it get the first four stars?

Simple answer? It’s too long!

n  n    Crypton  n clocks in between 900-1100 pages, depending on which copy you get – and the story is a rambling beast, full of whimsical tangents, studious digressions, chatty dialogue and endearing anecdotes.

It’s an absolute pleasure to read – I find Stephenson’s writing a joy – but it goes in so many directions at once that it’s too often becalmed in the midst of the telling; any sense of forward momentum is diluted by the all-encompassing approach. Often you’re not sure which way is forward!

For me, this book is the perfect example of the ethos that…
“The journey is more important than the destination.”

I learned from this book. I learned about cryptography, maths, military tactics, history, engineering, business tactics, phreaking, currency, mining, academia, etc. But I also learned how to kick-back and enjoy the journey of a book – to stop waiting for the next plot development point to come along like clockwork.

Months after reading n  n    Crypton  n I came back to Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, the sequel/prequel trilogy to n  n    Crypton  n and I loved it! To enjoy a book properly, I need to be in the right headspace – I need to know what I’m getting into and adjust my expectations accordingly. I didn’t have the right hat on for n  n    Crypton  n – so I really enjoyed it, but still kept having little tantrums that it wasn’t doing what I felt it should. My experience with n  n    Crypton  n helped me develop the right mindset to fully enjoy The Baroque Cycle, and if I didn’t have so many other books on my list, I’d be tempted to go back to n  n    Crypton  n a second time and see if I can now appreciate it more on the second go-around.

This is the book I was mid-way through when I got married. Some people sit up nervously on the night before their wedding – I just read a couple of chapters of n  n    Crypton  n and sparked out. I read this on the flight for my honeymoon (between rounds of mushy newly-wed kisses). I finished it around the pool and on the beach.

In much the same way that n  Blue Marsn will forever be linked with the birth of my son, n  n    Cryptonomiconn  n will always bring to mind, for me, wedding bells and a feeling of glorious happiness.

Bobby Shaftoe, Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence Waterhouse and Enoch Root are all excellent characters – and the affection I feel for each of them is further enhanced by their association in my mind with the love I feel for my darling, bookworm wife.

P.S. Don't mention the lizard.

P.P.S. My only gripe with this book - and it's not even a gripe so much as an observation: Is this actually sci-fi? At all? No? Good. Just so we're all in agreement then.

4.0 stars. I am glad I finally got around to reading this as I had read so many sterling reviews and I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer being two of my "All Time Favorite" novels). While not enjoying this as much as the two aforementioned books, there is no doubt that Stephenson can write and write well. The plot is complex, taking place in two time-lines (World War II and today) that eventually tie together, and containing a myriad of superbly drawn characters.

This is a very long book (over 900 pages) and there were times that the pacing seemed slow (hence the 4 stars instead of 5). That is about the only criticism I can give to this excellent book. Recommended!!!

P.S. I listened to the audio version of this book (just under 43 hours)read by William Dufris and he did an excellent job (for those of you who listen to audiobooks).

Nominee: Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel
Winner: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel
Nominee: Prometheus Award for Best Novel

Look, this isn’t really a novel.

Huh. Is there an echo in here?

I was thinking it had been several years since I last read a Neal Stephenson novel, but it turns out to be just under a year. I borrowed Cryptonomicon from a friend’s mother, because it’s truly not on that I’m a mathematician by training yet haven’t read the most mathematical Stephenson work. I put off reading it for a few weeks, because I knew that it would take a while. This past week was probably not the best week to read it—then again, would there have been a best week? I got lots of programming done on my website while avoiding this book, though.

This book is ostensibly about codes and code-breaking. I’d liken it to The Imitation Game, except I also have managed to skip that one somehow—and anyway, Alan Turing and Bletchley Park feature much less prominently here. Rather, Cryptonomicon follows a fictional friend of Turing’s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, who is a genius codebreaker. Waterhouse serves in the American armed forces during World War II, where he breaks codes (duh) and gets involved in other unlikely shenanigans. Stephenson develops this plot in parallel with one set in the present day (which is to say, 1999, which is, gosh, 18 years ago now). Lawrence’s grandson, Randy, ends up interacting with the descendants of many of the other characters from Lawrence’s story, as he and a friend try to set up a data haven off the coast of the Philippines.

That’s ostensibly the plot, but like I said, this isn’t really a novel and the story isn’t really a story. It’s more of a loose narrative framework around which Stephenson erects pages-long diatribes on coding, computer science, mathematics, and other very nerdy stuff. It is much like his later efforts of n  Anathemn and Seveneves, which are more about the philosophy of mathematics and how humanity might adapt to life in space, respectively, although of the three novels this one might have something most recognizable as a plot.

I’m not afraid to admit to skimming large portions of this novel. It’s not necessary to … experience … every word of Cryptonomicon to follow it. The connections among the characters are fairly heavy-handed, with Stephenson giving the reader plenty of opportunities to notice a familiar name, symbol, or meme showing up in a different place and time. Additionally, I can tolerate the fairly frequent tangents Stephenson has his characters go off on to explain one mathematical or cryptological concept or other; I’m less tolerant of how this spills over into the descriptions of simplest actions. Randy can’t possibly open his car door, no—this occasions nothing less than three meaty paragraphs on the manufacture of his car and the way the angle of the car door makes Randy think about a line of Perl code he wrote back in his university days. Perl, by the way, is a script people often use on UNIX….

Seriously, this book is not a well-edited, well-paced, well-plotted adventure. It’s Neal Stephenson making shit up about guys named Lawrence and Randy so he can tell you all the cool computer things he knows.

And to his credit, he manages to often be entertaining while doing so. For the most part, I enjoyed the segments that follow Lawrence. The role of code-breaking in World War II, and its concurrent stimulation of the invention of electronic computing, is an interesting subject that is often overlooked in historical treatments of that time. In addition to explaining how certain code systems worked and how the Allies broke these codes, Stephenson also takes the time to show us, rather than merely tell us, how encrypted communications were essential to the war effort. Moreover, he also points out the difficulty of breaking codes in wartime: you don’t want the enemy to know their codes are broken, because then they will change to a different code. So you have to throw them off the scent, so to speak, and create fake reasons for why you knew what the enemy was going to do. I don’t know how accurate this is to actual activities during the war, but it’s a fun corollary thought experiment to the whole activity of intercepting and reading enemy messages.

There’s also a fair amount of humour in here. I liked the highly fictionalized, summarized communiques between Bischoff and Donitz. I liked the portrayal of Colonel Comstock’s preparations for a meeting with Lawrence, girding himself and his team as if they were about to go into an actual battle.

Similarly, although I was less enamoured of the present-day plot and characters, I still like the general ideas. Stephenson was ahead of the curve when it came to talking about cryptocurrencies and even data havens. These ideas seem almost saturated, old hat here in 2017—but I imagine that in 1999, when the Web was still kind of a space for hackers and academics and military types, it was all cutting edge. Stephenson makes a strong case that there are different types of heroism, and that having a strong technical background can be just as valuable as being able to fight or being educated in a scholarly field like law.

I just wish that I didn’t have to wade through so much dull or outright dumb stuff to get to the good bits of this book.

This is the third book in a row I’m dragging for having a rubbish depiction of women. Honestly, people, it isn’t hard, but let’s go over the basics again so we stop screwing this up.

Maybe you should have women as main characters? There are very few named women characters in this book. Most of them exist as sexual and romantic interests for the men, who are the main characters.

Maybe your women should exist for reasons other than sexytimes? Amy Shaftoe is the closest we get to a female main character in this book. She is not a viewpoint character. She does not have an appreciable arc. She has an illusion of agency, but this is largely undermined by her purpose to exist as a manic pixie dreamgirl for Randy. Stephenson seems to confuse “strong female character” with “does lots of physical stuff/wears a leather jacket/I must imply that she might be a lesbian at least five times”.

Maybe you should stop being creepy? Cryptonomicon is super male-gazey in about every sense of the term. The narrator constantly mentions how much Lawrence or Randy need to masturbate, have sex, or otherwise ejaculate before they can “focus”. The male characters from both time periods make sexist remarks, talk about women, look at and objectify women, etc., in ways that are boorish and chauvinistic and stereotypical. There are more examples of this than I can count or possibly mention here. At one point, Randy and Avi are discussing a lawsuit directed at their fledgling company. Avi compares the lawsuit with a mating ritual, saying that their company is a “desirable female” and the lawsuit bringer wants to mate with them, and this is his way of posturing. Later in the novel, Randy spends a few pages mulling over how some women are “just wired” to want to be submissive to men, and that’s why Charlene ended up leaving him, because of course as a computer god, his brain can’t possibly be wired to understand little things like social cues. (It’s actually amazing, in a way, how Stephenson can manage to perpetuate stereotypes against both women and male nerds at the same time.)

It’s gross, is what it is. In any other book it would be bad enough. What really bothers me about its presence in Cryptonomicon is how it compounds, and has perhaps even influenced, given its age and status in the genre now, the portrayal of technologically-adept/minded folks (call them nerds, geeks, hackers, whatever). Young women interested in cryptography deserve to read a story about cryptography without constantly seeing the few female characters in the book objectified or reduced down to “biologically, women want to submit and have sex!” Young men shouldn’t see this kind of behaviour rationalized or played for laughs; they shouldn’t receive the message that nerds are somehow “programmed” to be socially awkward and therefore it’s OK to be creepy and male gazey all the time.

So Cryptonomicon is a book with a bunch of good bits too few and scattered among less good or downright weird and gross bits that I didn’t much appreciate. The mathematical, code-breaking parts of this book are good—really good. But, I mean, I kind of wish I had access to an abridged version with just those parts? Because wading through the, say, 80% of the book that isn’t those parts is just not worth the effort.

Honestly, so far the best depiction of mathematics in fiction I’ve come across is n  The Housekeeper and the Professorn, which doesn’t only depict math but also humanizes it intensely. (And before you ask, no, I haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime but I certainly plan to steal—uh, borrow—a copy lying around school one of these days.) Cryptonomicon tries to be a math nerd’s wet dream, but Stephenson’s insistence on mentioning his male characters’ wet dreams just doesn’t work for me.

n  n

DNF @ pg 300.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Neal Stephenson's most magnum of his opuses. "Cryptonomicon" is a thousand-plus page book that incorporates WWII code-breaking, South Pacific battles, mathematics, hidden treasure, modern-day computer hacking, and it still manages to throw in an adorable love story. Immensely readable, wildly fascinating, and hilariously strange, Stephenson writes like James Michener on a steady diet of speed, Froot Loops, and "The X-Files". Fans of Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut will enjoy.

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

2.5 stars?

If you are really into mathematics or a cryptography enthusiast, this is the book for you. There are pages devoted to solving physics problems. I skimmed those. TL;DR. Thankfully, Stephenson is a good writer and wrote amusingly of other things too. Also, if you are an Alan Turing fan, he is an influential character in this novel and you maybe would read it for his presence.

This book, for me, was an awful lot of reading for very little joy. I'm not enamoured of WWII novels, nor am I a fan of mathematical equations and graphs in fiction, so this was a poor choice for me and I only slogged onwards because it was part of my list of popular science fiction and fantasy titles. And I stubbornly wanted to know the ending. I was engaged enough to want to sort out how the descendants of the men who participated in the war finally resolved things. I confess to being underwhelmed by the finale.

For the right reader, this would be an excellent book. I believe people who enjoyed Gravity's Rainbow might also like this.

Book number 419 of my Science Fiction & Fantasy Reading Project.

What an incredible novel, and well worth a reread every few years! Pure Stephenson, after his satirical science fiction phase, with Cryptonomicon being a bit more grounded in reality yet taking the hacker epic genre as far as it can go... And at the same time, a grand historical fiction yarn.

Techie treasure-hunting businessmen in the present overlapping with geeks during World War II inventing the digital computer, I mean how great is that?

However, as the rereads get further and further away from the 1999 setting the aging does start to show. By this I don't just mean the technology. Sure, for example, the video file thing is conspicuous and this is way before smartphones. And it's not necessarily the author's fault that the Philippines sadly didn't turn out as predicted. But that's not the point. If anything, for taking place in the 90s the novel is remarkably prescient on how important the internet has become in everyone's lives. What was new then, like email, is written matter-of-factly enough that much of the dialogue and storytelling fits in fine even after twenty years.

Unfortunately, and I hate to be the guy to say this but I simply must, it's the politics which have aged worst. There's a certain kind of faith in high-tech libertarianism, that young computer geniuses always know better than stuffy old bureaucrats, which comes across as very naive these days. Worst of all is the whole global 'second-amendment' moral of the story, the plan to give everyone in the world means to fight guerilla warfare because that would have stopped the holocaust or something, it seems like a terrible recipe for disaster today. (Like, Israel is mentioned in glowing terms at one point in the book, but if they really made the HEAP wouldn't Palestinians be one of the best examples of those who would use it to start an uprising?! The specifics are not explored at all, just the vague idealism, very libertarian.)

Moreover, Stephenson occasionally displays a sense of humor which goes for politically incorrect for the sake of being politically incorrect. Maybe it was cutting edge then, now it can come across as mean-spirited trolling. There's even a long conversation about which gods which civilisations worship, which is either a brilliant take cultural values or a borderline-racist oversimplification.

Uch, and the male-female dynamics. My top criticism of the book would have to be the focus on hacker everyman Randy Waterhouse, who overanalyzes everything and is the hero of the story despite not being that interesting, and his endlessly dragged on "relationship" with cool gal Amy Shaftoe. I get it, I really do, he's nerdy and takes a long time to build up the confidence to just ask her out... and then it's goes on and on all over the planet for hundreds and hundreds of pages because then Stephenson gets to share all his (sure at times quite fascinating) theories. But come on. With a bit more perspective, one realizes that Randy is kind of lame. The huge essays on male-female dynamics ultimately only amount to the main character's banal issues. There, I said it.

Okay I got my complaints out the way, and I still totally stand by my original 5-star rating because a hell of a lot of this book is still incredible! So many Big Ideas, so much to reflect on. The private digital currency part, wow, that may really go somewhere. (You obviously know what I'm talking about, right?)

And the World War II scenes are absolutely timeless, wouldn't change a thing. Which is roughly two-thirds of the book. The adventures of Lawrence Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe, so bloody cool. You'll come away knowing more than you ever thought you could about the Pacific War, military livelihood, spying, encryption, and war gold in Southeast Asia.

Everybody must read Cryptonomicon at least once, no matter the flaws, because it is awesome.

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