I got halfway through this 900 page book and said to myself, “This is going to be one of my all time favorites.” The plot takes place in two time periods: World War II and in the late 1990’s when this book was written. It’s been described as historical fiction AND science fiction. I couldn’t at first understand how this book could be considered science fiction until later in the book I realized one of the characters popped up in both stories 40 years apart and he didn’t age.

Some of the encryption methods described were over my head but I had a good idea what was going on anyway. I spent hours as a kid doing cryptograms in the newspaper. Usually if I could decrypt the 3-letter word “the” I could then figure out the puzzle. Some of the puzzles were more difficult and I got a real sense of satisfaction when I could solve them.

A few of the things criticized by other reviewers didn’t bother me. For instance, I loved Stephenson’s digressions. One of my favorites was the description of a character in the 1990’s having his wisdom teeth removed. The author’s dry humor throughout had me laughing out loud.

Another (female) reviewer criticized the caveman attitude the male characters had about sex. Apparently if men confuse sex with love they are despicable. Give me a break. I am a 65 year old woman so have some experience under my belt and can say this is just the way most men are and will not change until humankind experiences some kind of evolutionary metamorphosis. Speaking of males, I adored the character Bobby Shaftoe. He is the most manliest of manly men I have ever encountered in my reading.

Some reviewers wrote that this isn’t Stephenson’s best book. This makes me happy. This is the first of his books I’ve read. I now have many more books of his to enjoy.

This is porn for math majors.

Many books have a narrow target audience. There are books written for Catholic theologians, bored housewives, children between the ages of 8.75 and 9 years old, and so when I picked up Cryptonomicon, I was sure I had found the book written for an engineer who works daily with big data.

Unfortunately for me, I am a woman. And this book was not written for someone who likes women.

Our story has three main heroes, Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse (who are WWII participants), and Randy Waterhouse (Lawrence’s descendant). We are also introduced to America Shaftoe, Bobby’s granddaughter, but as she only exists to be virginal and desirable, she really doesn’t count as a main character. The story weaves back and forth between our three plucky heroes as they save the world, ejaculate excessively, and preach that a college education is something the liberal elites cooked up to keep the true innovators down.

Every single main character has a similar internal monologue. All go on wildly long, multipage thought-spirals ranging from ejaculation (and yes, I read more about semen in this book than in my high school health class), Capn Crunch cereal, and pipe organs that do nothing but show us that the author has one idea of what a protagonist should be. If it hadn’t been for the convenient chapter breaks before switching POVs, I would truly have struggled to differentiate between Larry, Randy, or Bobby. They all think the same, they all speak the same, and they all want to fuck the same types of women: quiet, pure, and beautiful.

Let’s take a momentary break from the review to appreciate the writing of our intrepid author: “He pours the milk with one hand while jamming the spoon in with the other, not wanting to waste a single moment of the magical, golden time when cold milk and Cap’n Crunch are together but have not yet begun to pollute each other’s essential natures: two Platonic ideals separated by a boundary a molecule wide. Where the flume of milk splashes over the spoon-handle, the polished stainless steel fogs with condensation. Randy of course uses whole milk, because otherwise why bother?”

How about another quote: “Trapped in a window seat during a short and choppy flight, he had never made it out to the lavatory, so he goes to one now and pees so hard that the urinal emits a sort of yodeling noise.”

And finally, my favorite: “Then he pumps something like an Imperial pint of semen—it’s a seemingly open-ended series of ejaculations, each coupled to the next by nothing more than a leap of faith that another one is coming—and in the end, like all schemes built on faith and hope, it lapses…”

Ah, how wonderful. Maybe another just for good measure: “Horniness begins at zero at time t = t0 (immediately following ejaculation) and increases from there as a linear function of time. The only way to drop it back to zero is to arrange another ejaculation.”

Now, you might be wondering, if Neal Stephenson writes men this way, maybe he hates men and not women! Oh, you’d think that, except that every female character apart from Amy Shaftoe are barely footnotes in the tale and simply exist to pop out enough babies that Randy Waterhouse and Amy Shaftoe are able to exist.

As for Amy? Her character was truly fully realized when she berated Randy for not fighting with her and trying to apologize for yelling at her. You see, Amy wants to be yelled at. Any woman who doesn’t like being yelled as, such as Randy’s evil ex, aren’t the ones that you settle down and marry. Amy is not like the other girls. You see, she’s desirable and sexy and can kiss incredibly well, but she’s also a virgin. You can also verbally abuse her. Everyone’s dream!

Now, onto my final complaint with this disastrous novel. For a book supposedly based on cutting edge mathematics, it is exceptionally anti-education. Larry Waterhouse, our hero who fails out of college, invents the digital computer and RAM. Randy’s ex-girlfriend is, and is surrounded by, narcissistic college professors, unable to recognize Randy’s genius. The true mastermind, Turing, is barely mentioned apart from a deeply boring chapter or two in the beginning.

That’s when it hit me. This book is NOT for a university educated engineer who works in corporate America analyzing data. This book is for the college dropout, who instead of looking inwards for their failures, decided to blame others. They were not failures, they were the true geniuses who the evil, liberal professors did not understand. This book is wish fulfillment for that type of reader, and with that in mind, everything made sense to me.

So, if you are a well-adjusted adult who does not feel a slight distain for every woman you meet, this book isn’t for you. However, if you are a repressed genius who would only be a billionaire if your awful professor didn’t force you to write essays about why ethics are important in engineering, you’ll have a ball.

TLDR: This book is crypto-bros distilled down onto the page. And much like a crypto-bro, didn’t know when to shut the fuck up.

0/5 stars. Neal Stephenson, may whatever gods you believe in have mercy on your soul.

This is a failure on several levels.

Firstly, I did that This American Life offer with Audible so I could try it for a few weeks and get a free book out of the deal.

First off, Audible isn't particularly good. Though one credit generally will get you a book a month, their definition of a book can mean the first 4th of a Stephen King novel. You also lose all access to these DRM encrypted files when you drop the service, so I doubt I'll be keeping it.

The second issue is that the version of "Cryptonomicon" has a disingenuous label that you might miss if you're not paying attention. It's not unabridged, it's "unabridged excerpts", where certain chapters are summarized in a few sentences. So yeah, it's basically abridged, and severely so. It's like saying something is non-toxically poisonous.

I could forgive all of these things if the book were better.

My interest in Neal Stephenson springs almost entirely from "The Diamond Age" which I thought was a great, ambitious novel. His knack with science fiction is amazing. The trouble is "Cryptonomicon" is more or less set in the real world.

I like many books written by nerds. I like many books written about nerds. Until now I didn't really think about the fact that I don't like books written by nerds about what nerds are into.

The book is split between nerds in World War Two and nerds in the 90's, between nerds discussing cryptology and Turing Machines and nerds discussing cryptology and computers.

There's an entire chapter on a character using a library to program a realistic system to deal with how many calories people burn from eating within the main character's roleplaying game. Not an aside, not a paragraph, a chapter.

Of course the discussion of fantasy roleplaying, unix programming, complex communications microwave towers and router systems all take a backseat to the mind numbing discussion of cryptology. I dislike solving word jumbles, so this almost erotically detailed discussion of code breaking and the math involved left me cold and alienated.

I've accepted all of these elements in other forms before without minding at all. I read Neuromancer for god sakes, but most sci fi discusses these topics while exploring a bigger issue or for the sake of advancing the plot. In "Cryptonomicon" all this nerd fodder is just sitting there posing like a centerfold for the Asperger crowd.

I got about halfway through the audiobook before an extended conversation about ethics and routers ultimately killed my patience. This book is some of the most masturbatory nerd porn I've ever read.

I'll probably pick up other Neal Stephenson books, but I'm going to have to start reading the first chapter to make sure it in no way resembles this.

Cryptonomicon is a 50 year retrospective on how the flow of information affects history, with particular emphasis on the evolution of the modern day telecommunications networks that we all depend on. Along the way, Stephenson raises prescient questions about the ownership of those networks and the privacy of individuals who utilize them, eerily predicting the current policy controversy in the United States over encrypting data - with private companies trying to meet public demand for increased privacy from snooping agencies like the NSA and government actors on the opposite side who run around yelling national security and insisting that backdoors and keys be given to their agents to track down and prevent “terrorism.” And all of this at a time in history when most people still used dial up internet and smart phones as we know them today were 8 years in the future. (And yes, I’m aware that smart phones existed in the consumer market prior to Apple’s release of the first iPhone, but I’m taking that as a jumping off point that popularized and normalized the technology that we consider a “smart phone” to be today.) But these seems overly simplistic to me too. It’s also a spy novel. It’s an international business thriller in the vein of Rising Sun. It’s a treasure-seeking adventure story. It’s a story about paranoid hackers. It’s a conspiracy thriller. It’s...everything.

While the opening lines of this review may make Cryptonomicon sound like an abysmally boring essay on international economics and government regulation of telecommunications infrastructure, it’s not. Stephenson’s tone for the most part remains a wry sort of flippancy that seems at odds with the seriousness of his subject matter. The closest approximation I can make is that he’s sort of a hacker Joseph Heller. Maybe if Vonnegut had a received a PhD in mathematics or computer science instead of studying a more practical subject like mechanical engineering, this might be the type of novel that he’d write. The tone begins to break down in the last tenth of the book, when a lot of the ironic humor seems to mysteriously vanish. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse sort of loses his absent-mindedness and becomes a shrewd actor in a conspiracy that becomes central to the wedding of the two timelines (one centered around the life of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse during the Second World War, with occasional jaunts into the lives of some supporting characters like Sgt. Bobby Shaftoe, the other centered around the grandson of LP Waterhouse - Randy in 1999) in a way that I find inexplicable. He starts off pretty much clueless, with an almost autistic inability to have what society deems "normal” social interactions. He's oblivious and focused only on problems that interest him. By the end of the novel, he’s a savvy orchestra master capable of manipulating individuals by knowing them in ways that he seemed incapable of noticing before, and we lose a lot of the bumbling humor and uncontextualized internal observations that made him unique and quirky to begin with. The evolution of several of the other characters seems much more realistic, and perhaps because of the length, I didn’t really notice any significant moments of change until the ending forced me into a sort of retrospective.

This is a monumental work of precision prose, but the plot is somewhat of a mess. Fortunately for Stephenson, it’s entirely possible to lose yourself in the narration. If it’s at all possible for a story to emerge out of a collection of brilliant, but diverse asides, this is it. The thread of the two narratives are frequently buried by Stephenson as he embarks on several page long odysseys exploring everything from the genesis of the Greek pantheon of deities, the basic construction of safe-cracking equipment, the derivation of a function designed to identify the optimum time for critical thinking both pre- and post-coitus and the relative efficacy of different methods of ejaculation, social and cultural observations tied to the evolutionary teleology of homosexuality, various explorations of cultural phenomena common to East Asian cultures, oh, and of course - the basics of cryptology. Stephenson is relatively easily and enthusiastically distracted when topics of interest emerge out of the narrative fabric of the story he’s trying to tell. The upshot is (at least for the first 700 pages), you don’t really mind these asides. They’re fascinating and told with a contagious sort of enthusiasm that is absolutely engrossing. Stephenson is an insanely genius polymath and puts every facet of his interest and intellect to work sharing with you the catalog of his knowledge.

Not only is the prose carefully considered and constructed, but it seems that great care was given to the interaction and overlapping of the two timelines (1940s and 1999) with a parallel structure built up that was subtle and very impressive. While such structures can seem contrived, in Cryptonomicon they add to the sense of mastery. There are no direct correlations and only thoughtful readers will notice thematic or symbolic overlaps in the lives of LP Waterhouse and his grandson, or, for that matter, in the lives of Bobby Shaftoe and his son Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe. For example, Stephenson might cut from a narrative chapter focused on Goto Dengo, a Japanese army corps of engineers type, constructing what he believes to be a crypt for the Emperor Hirohito (but turns out to be a vault for stolen war gold) as Japan begins its plummet to defeat after the Battle of Midway to a chapter focusing on Randy’s Epiphyte Corp’s construction of a secure and totally encrypted data vault for the storage of a next-gen crypto currency. It’s clever, and leaves the impression that quite to the contrary of appearances, Cryptonomicon is almost absurdly thoughtfully crafted.

I honestly can’t see how his book is categorized as science fiction. It’s absolutely historical fiction. It’s nerdy and full of science (complete with real math equations! Shame on you popular science books for eschewing them and their explanations.) and technology. Sure, the technology involved might have seemed cutting-edge in 1999, but it was widely available to people with the proper financial resources. Reading it just over a decade later makes a lot of the technology utilized by the characters in “the present” seem quaint. More often, when reading through, I felt myself wondering whether or not it was possible for that era’s technology to do the things it was doing in the story rather than the possibility of such tech existing in the first place. My only guess is that some dumb publisher looked at the equations and saw real explanations for how computers work and it gave him a headache. I also don’t know where this book’s imposing reputation comes from aside from its length. You don’t have to be a mathematical or scientific genius to grasp where Stephenson is going with the narrative. In fact, I’d argue that you’d be better served by a broader knowledge of the historical context of the story (the events of the Second World War) than by a broader technical knowledge of computers. Everything scientific or mathematic is thoroughly and simply explained - the historical allusions are not. It would probably be impossible to gain a full appreciation of how intricately Stephenson has embedded his narrative into a real historical context without knowing the history very well.

The story has some very exciting moments and very vibrant historical personalities like Alan Turing and Douglas MacArthur grace parts of the narrative. The events are suitably engaging and mysterious, the characters hilarious, and the narrative fascinating. I did begin to feel that in the last couple hundred pages, it overstayed its welcome a bit. Aside from an aside on the Greeks and a recontextualization of Plato’s Cave parable by Enoch Root and Randy Waterhouse toward the end, the asides started to frustrate me. By that point, I’d pieced together where things were going and I was eager for Stephenson to get on with it. It made me impatient and probably less appreciative of the narrative than I was when I first took up the book. All-in-all, this book is well deserving of its place on numerous “Best of” lists and is one of those novels that should be required reading for geeks of various stripes - from math geeks to history geeks, there’s something here for everyone.

4.5 stars because of the plot slowdown at the end, but honestly, the narrative is so good and long sections so eminently quotable with well-turned phrases and observations that on its merits alone, the novel gets 5.

This book felt a lot like Neal Stephenson trying to channel Thomas Pynchon. Maybe it's because the last two Pynchon books I've read had the same settings as the storylines in this book, but the joint characteristics of overshared micro-details, serendipitous run-ins with major historical figures, and poorly-calibrated tangents were strong. Unfortunately, I don't think Stephenson got close to Pynchon's level of writing.

There were definitely some things I enjoyed, including a significant dose of cryptography and cryptographical history. Additionally, Stephenson's uncanny ability to predict the future is showcased at length, as he basically explains the purpose and value of Bitcoin through his characters. Of course, this was written nine years before Bitcoin was a thing, and there's even a (somewhat flippant) theory on Twitter that Stephenson is Satoshi Nakamoto himself. There's also a fun obfuscated Perl program, and a few nuggets about grep and the like. Not to mention Stephenson bringing in another person who would be much more famous now than then: Bruce Schneier provides an appendix on a cryptographic theory used in the book, five years before his blog started and even before he coined the term "Security Theater."

While I've enjoyed a lot of Stephenson's work in the past, it just felt gratuitously over-wrought here; most of the book I was just counting down until it was done. The book could have been cut by 50% and retained its storyline and cryptographical detail. There was also a little more bizarre stereotyping and uncomfortable pigeonholing than I would have liked – the few and poorly-written female characters were especially grating. I would hope that a similar book written now would strive to be a little more aware of those issues.

In general, I can't really recommend this to anyone; if you're looking for great Neal Stephenson, choose Diamond Age; if you're looking for a book on cryptography in fiction... I'll let you know if I find one.

Where do I even begin with this monster of a book? Well, let's start with the fact that its a horribly written piece of literature. It is bursting of convoluted stories, twisted description and inorganic conversations. The limited technical knowledge of the author leads to fakeness present throughout all the branches of the story. The mixture of real historical figures such as Alan Turing and completely fictional places such as "Kinakuta" is just a major confusion at best. Jumping around different time periods and storylines after every chapter just doesn't add anything, except more confusion. The author often jumps into random stories/conversations with zero context and tries to be educational but makes a complete mess of the narrative. The amount of sexism is frightening for a book published in 1999. In my view, the best way to describe the book is as an essay of an 8th-grade nerd who wrote it quickly just before the deadline and never read it a second time.

To be fair, there are some very well written and interesting parts (such as Goto Dengo in the jungle or during the tunnel building) which could have made for a brilliant normal-sized book. Unfortunately, these moments are rare considering the length of the book. I still cannot believe the stellar reviews and "literary significance" of this complete garbage...

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

A must-read

Eins der Bensten Bücher die ich kenne. Es erstaunt mich bei jedem lesen / hören aufs Neue, wieviele Querverbindungen es in dem Buch gibt. Alleine schon das Porzelanmuster "Lavender Rose" hat mehr Implikationen als man glauben möchte.

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

Género. Ciencia-Ficción.

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

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

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

It was a dense challenging read I had my reservations about at first, but it turned out to be quite impressive and eventually won me over. While not as complex as Infinite Jest, this is one of those books that require some real attention on your part, especially when it comes to technical jargon and connecting the dots between timelines. Still, Stephenson effortlessly mixes them with captivating events, rich with dry humor that had me chuckling for its entirety so that even the pretentious parts were quite delightful and not a turn-off. The sprawling narrative that switches between past and present characters also kept things fresh and did not ruin the flow as I thought it might. The scope of the novel and the way it all conjoins towards the end was satisfying, especially for Randy's POV which I wasn't initially a fan of, but it all comes together nicely in the second half. Some of my favorite chapters involve Lawrence and Shaftoe, (Ram, Courting, and Metis to name a few) and I think it's safe to say it's one of the funniest books I have ever read, mainly due to the narration style. But it occasionally gets quite dark as well, so that you are suddenly caught off guard.

The 'cameos' of historical people were great, although I'm unsure why it's considered Science Fiction over Historical. While it's not an all-time favorite, I don't have many complaints to list, but for the sake of nitpicking, I would say it had a few lulls occasionally with random tangents that went nowhere, but they never overstayed their welcome in my experience. Certain female characters in the novel are not as fully realized as their male counterparts, which can feel like a missed opportunity given how detailed the rest of the cast is. Towards the end,  the return of Andrew Loeb as final antagonist was a comical surprise since he's not a direct presence in the main narrative and I can see it being an abrupt ending for some people. The passage of time can be hard to distinguish as well but ultimately, none of these bothered me too much. Overall, a fantastic read that you may not be able to binge, but if you like the humor and find it rewarding to connect the dots, definitely stick with it. 4.5 ⭐