This book took me over a month to read, with a couple of short books sandwiched in between. It is not a good sign for me when I need to take two breaks to finish a book. However, this is not a book that I can dismiss regardless of whether I like it. I have several friends who love Cryptonomicon to bits and they are smart, discerning readers. I remember when I finished reading Twilight I was kind of glad that I didn't think it was very good. Had I found it to be an amazing classic I would have no credibility left among my peers. With Cryptonomicon the problem is the opposite, I am kind of disappointed that even though I like some of it, on the whole I don't particularly care for it. Still, better to be accused of being a philistine than to write a dishonest review just to be up with the Joneses eh?

Cryptonomicon is a hard book to synopsize, I feel nonplussed just thinking about how to describe the basic plot in a few sentences (so I won’t). The novel is set in two timelines 1942 and the present (or the 90s, the “present day” at the time the book was written). There are several narrative strands that gradually intertwine toward a single ending. The book is also hard to categorise, part historical fiction, part thriller, some element of cyberpunk, a bit of romance and (thankfully) a substantial amount of comedy.

This novel seems to be more character driven than the other Stephenson books that I read*. The central characters are quite well developed and are generally interesting and likable but unfortunately I could not invest in their adventures. I think this has more to do with the plot they are embroiled in rather than any deficiency in their development. The structure of the book is quite complex and there does not seem to be much in the way of momentum in the pacing, it also seems to be somewhat incohesive. The frequent switches in narrative strands made it difficult for me to remember what each character is up to the previous time they appear.

On the positive side the book is often very funny, the main saving grace as far as I am concerned. Lines like this just crack me up

n  “You know what this is? It’s one of those men-are-from-Mars, women-are-from-Venus things.” “I have not heard of this phrase but I understand immediately what you are saying.” “It’s one of those American books where once you’ve heard the title you don’t even need to read it,” Randy says.n

I laughed out loud quite a few times while reading the book. On the whole I find it to be well written, with some wonderful turns of phrase, another factor that prevent me from giving up on it. Some of the cryptography and hacking scenes are also fascinating.

Of the four Neal Stephenson books that I have read Cryptonomicon is the hardest to get into, and even by the end of the book I still wasn't really into it. It is clearly too good to dismiss out of hand and I always admire Neal Stephenson for aiming his writing toward an intelligent readership; I am not sure I can claim to be a proud member of his target demographic but kudos to him for respecting his readers. Regrettably this book turned out to be one of those "good but not for me" books. I wouldn't like to dissuade anyone from reading it, but I can't honestly recommend it either. If you are interested but doubt I suggest you read a few more reviews and decide for yourself whether it seems likely to appeal to you. I suspect you never know until you actually try it though.

*In order of preference: Snow Crash, Anathem, The Diamond Age and Cryptonomicon.

I read this book and I really liked it.

I liked the book a lot, but things about it have made me develop a whole speil. The story was great, interesting historical/thrill fiction. But! He could have easily cut a good 1/3 out of the book and it would have been fine. Mr Stephenson loves taking a long way around to describe things, and to compound the problem, his characters like to take the long way around to say things too. So you have this recursive loop of masturbation.

For example in one chapter the characters are trying van eyc phreaking, apparently this is using an antenae to read the signal off of monitor cables and such to get an image. This is fine, but rather than having the characters do it, see it works, and have it established as plot point later, he decides to give us 8 pages of what is on the computer. An interesting piece about the origins of fetish, but it has nothing to do with the book. The whole book was full of this stuff. I just wanted to yell shut the hell up and get on with the story!

Also if there is a clever way of saying something he goes out of his way to do it, for example he calls sunburns, radiation burns. While true, it doesn't come off as clever, just one of those science geek things where they wink and whisper, "Most people don't know sunight is radiation! hehe we are smart!" Granted he assumes that the reader is in on the joke, but it still bugged me.

Which is all too bad, I liked the storyline a lot, it was interesting, the way he went from WWII to the present was nicely done. His descriptions of how crypto and counter crypto both then an now were interesting as well.

I was talking to another friend of mine about this and he agreed only about another one of his books, Snowcrash, i think, and he summed it up as, "I get it, nanotech is cool, now move on with the story."

In game terms this is like playing a game of titan, it takes forever, you have fun while you are playing but you never want to play again.

-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/...

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.

Эпоха у нас такая, что перегруз информации транслируется по всем каналам, и предпочитаемой литературной формой давно стали «цитаты Раневской» и демотиваторы, а предпочитаемой формой потребления движущихся картинок — анимированные гифы. Клипы Ю-Тьюба — это длинно, досматриваются до конца сильно не все, а статусы Фейсбука считаются «лонгридом», если в них больше одной строки, и оставляются «на потом». Последние дни как бы уже настали.
При всем при этом, как ни удивительно, все постепенно свыклись с мыслью, что телесериал — это просто длинный роман: иногда бульварный, не всегда, прямо скажем, гениальный, но неизменно с продолжением, публикуется в газетных подвалах долгих вечеров. Работы и мозговых усилий на просмотр даже самой презренной жанровой шняги тратится столько же, сколько на изучение классиков марксизма-ленинизма или толстых томов модернистов.
А тут вам другой интересный пример взаимопроникновения жанров: книга в формате телесериала (напомню, что такого бума их еще не было, когда она писалась). Сценарий этого сериала мог бы написать Пинчон, но не написал, поэтому приходится довольствоваться тем, что есть. Короткие эпизоды, не весьма тщательно проработанные характеры, киномонтаж, сюжетные арки, отступления и вставные новеллы, флэшбэки и флэш-форварды — все, как мы в последние годы привыкли. Сериальность — вообще богатый литературный жанр, и он, понятно, не одни ж там мексиканские мыльные оперы. В «Радуге», с которой «Криптономикон» часто сравнивают, Пинчон, видать, тоже что-то подобное делал — задолго до того, как это стало модно, — но этим, некоторыми приемами да некоторым родством натуры сходство этих романов и ограничивается.
Шедевр (как все говорят) Стивенсона — вполне увлекательная одномерная линейная развертка на занимательные темы. Тексты же вообще существуют в диапазоне от нуля измерений до энного их количества, но это тема для диссертации какого-нибудь литературного тополога: Бекетт, например, может быть представлен в виде точки, у Пинчона измерений явно четыре, ну и так далее… К огромному количеству книжной продукции такая метафора вообще неприменима, как мы знаем.
Анализировать или описывать «Криптономикон» без толку, мы и не будем — читать его вполне, конечно же, стоит, как стоит смотреть качественный телесериал. Жаль одного — что он пошел по пути экстенсивного накопления целей квеста / ядра заговора. Точка притяжения тут — не просто золото, а очень много золота. Это мило само по себе, но как-то банально.

A must-read

A masterpiece of humor, history and cryptology.

Cryptonomicon was both totally hilarious and brilliant. This was hilariously written in a sort of hybrid style of P.G. Wodehouse and Vonnegut. Stephenson adopts a tone that completely undermines the drama of WWII and weakens it to a charade run by very few players who are trying to win the battle of information: decryption. It's a story about the power of sheer intellect and nerdiness and how it was what really won the (somewhat fictionalized) war and how the same nerds are the ones who are protecting our data today. The story is told over large swathes of time (1940-50s and then the 1990s during the early internet age) and has dozens of settings around the world. The characters (Shaftoe, Waterhouse and Randy) are all totally flawed, brave, brilliant and lovable.


I think this was an entirely self indulgent work for Stephenson. He clearly is extremely knowledgeable about decryption, coding, engineering, mathematics and many other disciplines. For this reason, the book runs a little long. It didn't have to be 900 pages to tell this story. I think some editor came along while he was writing, tapped him on the shoulder and said "Neal, time to wrap this thing up". I thoroughly enjoyed the ride but not everyone will. You can probably clock out at about two hundred pages if you're not into it. If you are, this is a wholly unique book and worth your time.

2.5 Stars

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

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

I'm an English major. I've read a lot of books. This one, is -- hands down -- my favorite modern fiction novel. I've read it twice, recommended it to others, and I'm sure I'll read it again. There is so much to appreciate here.

It is a semi-historical adventure, so there's something for fiction and non-fiction fans.

The writing is justly verbose at times, and conversationally abrupt at other times. In essence, you find yourself wholly in the minds and bodies of the characters while reading every scene.

The literary quality of the writing is top notch. Although, Stephenson's writing is a little easier to appreciate if you're a bit of a geek. There is a lot of mathematical / historical / technological jargon -- and some really fantastic war stories.

Multiple timelines multiplied by multiple plot-lines make it a slow and tricky read, but I kind of cherished that. I hate feeling like I've read a good book too fast.

If you can stay with it, the way that Stephenson ties up the stories in the end is exciting and brilliant.

I think most would agree that this book sets itself apart from Stephenson's other works. I don't expect him to achieve this quality again (in my opinion, he hasn't), but I can always hope.

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

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.

"Over and over again we see the pattern of the Titanomachia repeated—the old gods are thrown down, chaos returns, but out of the chaos, the same patterns reemerge.”
- Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon



I didn't like it as much as Anathem or Snow Crash, but like those two Stephenson novels Cryptonomicon has a large cult following, and was on the bleeding edge of a lot of ideas only starting to bubble up in 1999.

Stephenson's prose can go from poetic to obnoxious pretty fast and the tone of this novel was sometimes kinda ridiculous, but ignoring a couple big things that I generally rolled my eyes at -- I loved the novel. It moved, was moving, and came together very well at the end.

Think of this novel like a REALLY good war thriller (Red Storm Rising) that runs with three or four distinct story lines and about a dozen characters that jumps to another storyline every 6-1o pages. So even when a storyline was dragging a bit, soon I was flipped into another zone that I enjoyed a bunch. It is also a fantastic historical war novel, focused on cryptography during WWII. So, it kept reminding me of other historical novels of WWII. It seeemed a bit like Wouk's The Winds of War (except this book was strictly focused on areas mostly ignored by Wouk). Finally, it was a well-paced gernational/family novel (see Roots or The Godfather).

Anyway, it is a good book to read during the 2017-2018 boom (and perhaps bust) of cryptocurrency, since the 1997 portion of this novel deals A LOT with the establishment of a cryptocurrency (NOT a blockchain encrypted currency). Supposedly Paypal's founder Peter Thiel used to require his employees to read Cryptonomicon. It might be a myth, but if so, it is a good one.