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.

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.

“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?”

Aspire for fluency in geek speak? Is "Big Bang Theory" your idea of reality TV? Then I recommend this Moby Dick of nerd novels. Jay Clayton in his bookn   Charles Dickens in Cyberspacen calls this book the “ultimate geek novel” (pg. 204-211) and draws attention to the “literary-scientific-engineering-military-industrial-intelligence alliance” that produced discoveries in two eras separated by fifty years, World War II and the Internet age. That's a good concise summary of the book.

Stephenson writes with a fascinating droll humor that lets the reader forgive him for explaining cryptography and mathematical problems in excruciating detail. This book offers an insight into the world view seen through the eyes of a genius. Everything that might be a beautiful sight or interesting view to others will appear to be an example of hidden intervals or patterns to the mind of a genius.

This is a turn of the century (20th to 21st) book that strives to pattern itself after a 19th Century novel in that the author uses hundreds of words in those locations where a dozen words would be adequate to carry the plot forward. However, the writing is so entertaining that the reader wishes that even more words would have been used. Stephenson repeatedly branches out on multiple subjects in independent essays that could easily be lifted from the book and used with slight editing for a standup comedy routine. However, the comedy routines would probably go over best in a college town where some physicists or mathematicians are present in the audience.

My tech-geek friends read this book over ten years ago, and they all recommended it to me. It wasn't available in audio format at the time, and I didn't want to invest the time required to read a book this big (928 pages, 42 hours audio). So I never got around to reading it. Then about a year ago it became available on Audible.com. So as usual, I've made it through a famous book about ten years after it's been read by everyone else.

I highly recommend readers of this book refer to the Wikipedia article on this book. It explains which characters are fictional and which are historical, and it helps explain the nature of the various story lines within the book.

I can see how this book was even better when read at the height of the dot-com and fiber optic cable bubble. Techie geekie things were newer then, and it appeared that we were entering the utopian age of Aquarius that would lead to perpetual prosperity. Does anyone remember the promises made that the new information age would be free of recessions and business cycles? Since ten years have elapsed since it was published, the reader can detect some signs of the book's age by noticing that there are no smart phones, iPads or iPods (it was the zenith of the CD Walkman era). Windows NT was new then. It was pre 9-11 so the emphasis in the book is on the inconvenience of customs inspections over that of security checks prior to getting on board.

Most of the book can pass as plausible historical fiction. But there are a few Stephensonian inventions that definitely belong in a science fiction novel. Below are some of the imaginative examples:

Qwghlmian -- is a fictional language that allegedly hails from some fictional British islands in the North Sea. It has 16 consonants and no vowels making it nearly impossible to pronounce. To complicate things further, there are two mutually non-comprehendible dialects of the language, Inner Qwghlimian and Outer Qwghlimian. Confusing the mid-glottal with the frontal glottal can, in one instance, completely change the meaning a sentence.

Rocket propelled submarine -- This book has the WWII era Germans advancing in submarine technology parallel with their development of jet engines in airplanes. Supposedly this quiet and new generation of hydrogen peroxide propelled submarines could stay below water for days.

RAM made from plumbing -- A character in this book constructs a digital computer with addressable random access memory (RAM), and it was made from plumbing parts and other primitive stuff. It happens during WWII which was the pre-transistor era, thus he used drain pipes filled with mercury with electrical level sensors that created the binary signals necessary for a functioning digital computer. (If a computer like that were made today, EPA would declare it to be a Federal Superfund Site for toxic cleanup.)

Some quotations I found interesting:

A comparison of atheists and church attendees:
"… the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz. society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor…. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation…. They were, in other words, capable of displaying adaptability."

A paraphrase of the fine print on a typical investment prospectus:
"Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril — you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
Still reading? Great. Now that we've scared off the lightweights, let's get down to business."

The difference between physicists and engineers:
"There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no … sense. … The engineers love … their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists … want to think they understand everything."

Link to Darwin8u's notes:
https://www.goodreads.com/notes/38897...

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

Raz, keď zo mňa bude 130-ročná starenka, príde za mnou nádejná lokálna influencerka spraviť menší rozhovor: "Aby si mladí viac vážili, teta," zahučí mi do ucha, "čo všetko pre nás vaša generácia obetovala."
"Jáj moja," spľasnem rukami a dám sa do spomínania a keď už deckám porozprávam všetko o tom, ako som pašovala knihy cez tretiu svetovú a kde som sa schovávala pri prvom celosvetovom výpadku Internetu, nazrie lokálna influencerka nenápadne do poznámok. "A teta," odkašle si, "ešte nám povedzte, ako to bolo v tom dvetisícdvadsiatom roku."
Prestanem štrikovať a zamyslene nakrčím obočie. "Dvadsiaty, dvadsiaty...to mi nič nehovorí, srdiečko."
"Ale veď teta," zatvári sa influencerka trochu netrpezlivo, "ten pamätný dvadsiaty rok..."
"Jaaaaj," rozleje sa mi zrazu po tvári bezzubý úsmev. "Dvetisícdvatsiaty! Už viem!"
Influencerka s maskérkou si vydýchnu a ja sa opäť dám do štrikovania." Dvetisícdvadsiaty," zopakujem s pohľadom upreným kamsi do diaľky. "To bol ten rok, kedy som objavila Neala Stephensona."

UPDATE: Oh. I get it. For the child within us all, Stephenson provides a specific genre, beautifully rendered. But he buries it within a generous amount of smart and often hilarious wanking. What better way to tackle this genre than to bury it? Brilliant: a literary trick from 1999 with which to span, and end, the 20th Century. And his "Crypt" invention eerily foretells what we now call the "dark net" (which I know about only because I subscribe to Wired magazine. Honest.) So I've added a star to my original three-star review (I haven't been blindsided by an author in years), which follows:
At heart, this is a treasure story: gold is carefully hidden in the 1940s and fifty years later the search is on. And I like this genre: Clive Cussler's "Treasure" is among my favorite treasure/thrillers. So, yes, Stephenson steps up to the plate and does deliver a huge and often fascinating plot. There are also big ideas and thought-provoking discussions. For example, a character refuses to use the term "addict" and instead uses "morphine-seeking", then explains his reason: the noun utilization of "addict" obliterates an entire person. (And how often are we all guilty of these kinds of labels even if only in thought?) Stephenson is smart, and his opening leap from preset stops of a musical organ to the way computers might work is an interesting discussion. But Stephenson seems to want to strut his stuff, he wants to throw everything in. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but when he throws in the term "quantum physics" for no apparent reason (to me at least) I question his intentions: is he writing to entertain the reader, or just wanking? The author does use this term, then oddly feels the need to explain what the term means. So on the one hand he respects his readers by writing smart, big ideas, then for some reason needs to explain "wanking". Okay, so maybe in 1999 "wanking" wasn't very popular. (The word, that is.) I did like this book, but the wild tangents had me checking out of the story on occasion. And I'm going to read more from this author, as I already have a big, beautiful hardback of "Anathem" here at home on my "to read" shelf.

I am FINIIIIIISHED! I thought it didn't have an ending! I thought Neal Stephenson kept sneaking to my house and inserting more pages in the back while I was asleep! I thought he would never be appeased until I begged him to stop with a deck of cards, morse code and a wide variety of pleading looks!

This is a massive boy book. A MASSIVE boy book. It's got overwhelmingly male characters, and they do really boy things, like coding, and shooting things, and drawing logarithmic graphs about the last time they masturbated. I kept being surprised that I could open this book and it didn't immediately smell overpoweringly of old canvas and sweat. And I say this in the most endearing way, generally speaking - the characters in this book have no idea, none at all!, that I am not One Of Them, so I got to romp about with the best of them, messing about with submarines and mid-nineties hacker politics.

I should probably tell you at this point, that two of my favourite things as a mid-teenager were vintage pen-and-paper codebreaking and rambly adventure stories, so I was in my element. This book is very exclusive in many ways and I am sure that in any other context I would get the rabbit in headlights look of someone who knows they're about to be accused of being a fake geek and who doesn't know *quiiite* enough what they're talking about to put those (wholly ridiculous) accusations to rest - but as it was, for most of the time I was reading this, it was me and my comfy chair and my knitting and the printed word of Neal Stephenson, and I could slot myself into that narrow band of intended audience and roam around at my leisure. This book is a boy book, and while I was reading it, I was a boy. Which is a cack-handed way of saying that I am a nerd and I don't get to talk about polyalphabetic ciphers you break with frequency analysis and a pad of graph paper very often, and Cryptonomicon made me feel as much at home as I could possibly have wished for. Which is nice.

It's also a cack-handed way of saying I feel, in some way, like I shouldn't have felt at home? It was so chock-full of Tech Men and Soldier Men and Men Who Do Things Despite Slash For Their Womenfolk, that I genuinely felt like I was empathising on the wrong side of the divide at some points. Like I was having to sneak in and pretend I had a metaphorical moustache. Very odd. Ladies of Goodreads, is that a thing you understand? Men of Goodreads, when you read something very female led, like say Jane Eyre, or Rebecca, or whatever it is you emancipated chaps read these days, how do you feel? I've rarely felt that this strongly (*cough*Gorky Park) it was very odd. At any rate I am interested by how/how strongly this manifests itself in other people.

Back to the book! It's an info-dump; there is almost more info-dump than plot. Some of it I knew already and that was comforting, some of it really fired me up for playing with numbers a bit more. While I've been reading this book, I've been occasionally meeting a friend who's teaching me the basics-and-then-some of statistics, and I get the same feeling from that of channeling my enthusiasm into something practical, something that someone else is excited about as well. I liked the info-dump.

It starts off really slowly. There is basically no plot for probably the first two-fifths; certainly the first third. It is full of inside references and totally devoid of beginning, middle or end. If this bothers you, don't read it. It bothered me, for a while - that's why I put it down and came back a few months later. Or that's one of the reasons. The other reason is that it's NINE HUNDRED PAGES LONG AND NEAL STEPHENSON IS STILL TALKING.

In the end, I put it aside often, but always came back. There are very few books I can say that about, and of the others they were almost entirely written by Frenchmen. This book is not like those books. If you ask me, it's worth having a go at, and if you get 60 pages in and go cross-eyed at the tiny font, don't worry. You won't have missed much, and it's a nice place to come back to. I might even read it again, but it probably won't be for a while. A long while.

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

It's obvious that author Stephenson does lots of diligent study that shows in the works of his novels. He discerns the complicated and transforms it to his novels. 7 of 10 stars

This is the book that caused me to break up with Neal Stephenson. The premise is wonderful, but it completely fails to deliver. It's overlong, ponderous, and self-indulgent. The entire modern section—fully half of the book—is completely superfluous. It's uninteresting, poorly-written, and terrible science-fiction. (I'm sure it felt cutting-edge to refer to Linux and Windows NT when the book was written, but now it comes off as lame and precious.) The WWII espionage part is legitimately interesting, but only because of the parts that are true; you'd be better off reading actual histories of WWII espionage. "Operation Mincemeat" would be a great place to start.

In summary: don't waste your time. If this book sounds interesting to you, try "Declare" by Tim Powers. It's shorter, better-written, and far more interesting.