Executive Summary: If you're a computer or math geek, this book is a must read. If you like geeky humor mixed with world war 2, and random side tangents, this might also be a book for you.

Audio book: I listened to the unabridged audio book by William Dufris. This is the first that I have listened by him. While he didn't do distinct voices for all the characters he did do some as well as a few accents. His German accent was particularly good.

The audio suffers a bit from being unabridged, but thankfully in only a few places. I imagine the book has a bunch of white space/different font for some of the these parts where codes are written out, but Mr. Dufris is forced to read everything out and it can be a bit tedious.

This is my only relatively minor complaint. For a 42+ hour book, this occurred very infrequently.

n  Full Reviewn
This book has been on my to read list for a long time. Snow Crash is one of my favorite books. While this book is more historical fiction than sci-fi (and certainly not cyberpunk), it has the same geeky humor that I loved in Snow Crash so much.

The book has two time periods: The 1940's starting shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the mid-late 90s.

There are several point of view characters for the 40's timeline, but the primary one is Lawrence Waterhouse, an often misunderstood and awkward mathematical genius.

Waterhouse gets blown off by Einstein but becomes friends with Alan Turing. He eventually is put to work breaking codes of both the Japanese and later the Germans during the war.

Meanwhile in the "present" Randall is Unix Guru working with his friend Abby to set up their next business venture in the Philippines.

The other point of view characters include Goto Dango, a Japanese soldier, and Bobby Shafto an American soldier. Their stories augment the main narrative of Waterhouse's.

This book has several tangents, including one on beards and another on bicycles. Many of his tangents turn ordinary thinking into mathematical equations. I found most of them interesting if not amusing, but they are of little importance to the story, so I can see people complaining of the excess in what is a rather lengthy book.

The stories of the two timelines eventually converge in a way that wasn't very apparent to me until about the midway point or so.

I really enjoyed the book, although I'd be happy with some follow-up as I was left with several questions, though mostly minor ones.

Most of my questions relate to the historical accuracy of many events in the story. People like Alan Turing were quite real, as was his involvement in the British efforts to break German codes during the war. There is work involving the Enigma, but the names of the Japanese codes appear to have been changed, as well as replacing several of the people involved with fictional characters.

At some point I hope to find/read a non-fiction book (or books) on the breaking of codes in World War 2, and I am now fascinated by it.

An enormous collection of novels - a spy thriller, and a military farce, and a comparative history (of Showa Japan, Churchill Britain, Roosevelt America, the pre- and post-Marcos Philippines), and an oral history of computing, and a modern legal psychodrama, and a family saga of three large dynasties. And a divisive book:

1) It is extremely focussed on men and masculine mindset - guts and brutality, mathematical facility, mind-numbing horniness, how shit works, emotional impermeability, pride in being a stereotype. (Scroll down to see reviews reacting in highly exaggerated ways to this fact, with either horror or delight.)

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time... there might be a third category... [Waterhouse] speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he's already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you'll join in. Which no one ever does.

On the wonder and absurdity of social etiquette:

n  The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy. And yet, despite all of this, not one of those bodies makes a single sound during the sultan's speech.n

Half of this is an accurate portrayal of 40s gender politics, half a defensive reaction to contemporary blank-slateism. I don't think it's a malign kind of masculinity, though there are only a couple of female characters who don't have at least peripheral or inverted sexiness - if you can't handle that I'd avoid it. A good point to bail out would be the bit where Waterhouse models the effect of masturbation vs sex on his cognition as a periodic timeseries. I'm very hard to offend, but the constant use of "females" got to me, by page 400.

n  Randy stares directly into the eyes of the female customs official and says, "The Internet." Totally factitious understanding dawns on the woman’s face, and her eyes ping bosswards. The boss, still deeply absorbed in an article about the next generation of high-speed routers, shoves out his lower lip and nods, like every other nineties American male who senses that knowing this stuff is now as intrinsic to maleness as changing flat tires was to Dad. "I hear that’s really exciting now," the woman says in a completely different tone of voice, and begins scooping Randy’s stuff together into a big pile so that he can repack it. Suddenly the spell is broken, Randy is a member in good standing of American society again, having cheerfully endured this process of being ritually goosed by the Government.n

2) It is also a partisan in the Arts vs STEM "culture war". (In fact Stephenson is often dismissive of all academia - "grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research".) One of the most important scenes in the book shows a lone techie clashing with a self-appointed jury of stereotypically appalling critical theorists: they speak nonsense about an objective matter, he correctly calls them on it, they cover him in ad hominem bulverism until he gives in. It's not without nuance: his champion in the fight Randy is later shown sulking and reliving it and admitting his own pettiness:

n  “I strenuously object to being labeled and pigeonholed and stereotyped as a technocrat,” Randy said, deliberately using oppressed-person’s language maybe in an attempt to turn their weapons against them but more likely (he thinks, lying in bed at three A.M. in the Manila Hotel) out of an uncontrollable urge to be a prick.n

3) There are a lot of coincidences, much more than the novelistic baseline. Characters meet Atanasoff and Turing and Reagan and MacArthur. (A Nazi submarine captain makes a sneering reference to a bureaucratic nightmare being something out of "that Jew Kafka". I thought this was an absurd anachronism, but looking into it, the Nazi could easily have read him, but could not have made the reference to a Brit and expected it to stick. English translation of Das Schloss in 1930 but it didn't take off until after the war.) This is cute/trite on its own, but I find it helpful to imagine Stephenson looking down at history, selecting a particularly interesting sub-graph from the population

4) There are lots of info-dumps. Large sections of this are indistiguishable from nonfiction. ("This pause is called the horizontal retrace interval. Another one will occur...") People seem to hate this, but it is fine since it's done through aspie characters who absolutely do talk like that.

5) It has a lot of pulpy Feats, fuck-yeah setpieces which fiction this good usually foregoes. Tropical headhunters; escape from a collapsing mineshaft; cryptocurrency in the 90s; tactical blackface; drinking and lolling with your Nazi captors; etc.

n  It would be an idyllic tropical paradise of not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and deat each other and use human heads for decoration.n

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It's easy to miss the uniting theme, and thus call it "not a novel" or whatever, because it only unmasks on p.791. It is Ares v Athena, rage v cunning, politics v engineering, normies v geeks, law v ethics, conflict v mistake, local maxima v the search for the global. This overloaded binary is embodied in Andrew v Randy, the Dentist v Avi, Rudy v Göring, All of Japan v Dengo.

Now, it suits me to have litigious bastards and culture-warriors be the inheritors of Ares, of mindless destruction. But it would be silly to think that the stakes are comparable between the plot strands: it's WWII vs the Struggles of Some Cool Crypto Entrepreneurs. But Stephenson is obviously not equating them, and might be pointing out that stakes are now in general lower, even when you're up against contemporary gangsters.

Another giant theme is the emergence of one new masculinity, beyond the taciturn physical hero: the geek. This is the "third category" above. (Is this really that new? Isn't it just the Scholar?)

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Misc notes

* Waterhouse seems to be taking Bill Tutte's space in history and seizing it for America but ok.

* Bobby Shaftoe is the noblest junkie character I've ever seen - ingenious in his pursuit of morphine, but slightly more keen on Marine honour than on it.

* I was not expecting Stephenson to use converting to Christianity as the symbol for Dengo leaving sick ultranationalism behind. Compassion and liberalism are far larger and better than the Christian launchpad they happened to use, after all.

* Relatedly there's his preference for cute family-values Christianity over postmodern critical theory:

n  To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy’s fundamental metaphor for just about everything), the post-modern, politically correct atheists were like people who had suddenly found themselves in charge of a big and unfathomably complex computer system (viz, society) with no documentation or instructions of any kind, and so whose only way to keep the thing running was to invent and enforce certain rules with a kind of neo-Puritanical rigor, because they were at a loss to deal with any deviations from what they saw as the norm. Whereas people who were wired into a church were like UNIX system administrators who, while they might not understand everything, at least had some documentation, some FAQs and How-tos and README files, providing some guidance on what to do when things got out of whack. n

* Some surprisingly deft notes on kink and the exogenous/preconscious nature of sexuality, in the bit where they're spying on Tom Howard.

* This line accurately portrays the mindset of certain wizard types like Turing:

n  It is exciting to discover electrons and figure out the equations that govern their movement; it is boring to use those principles to design electric can openers.n

though it is discreditable and nongeneralisable to hold.

* I learned a lot of words.

* There are dozens and dozens of depictions of Japanese war crimes before we get any note paid to the horrendous suffering of the Japanese troops. But after that it is suitably even-handed in its tragedy. One of the saddest sentences I've ever read: "They are strafing the survivors".

* Root is a tech determinist about the war - the Allies won because their tech was better, end-of. I seriously doubt historians would go with this.

* I struggle to fit Root into the world. His death and reappearance is the only magical element in the entire thing (coincidences aside), and clashes with the main bloody theme. I am toying with the idea that Root is a collective name like James Bond, but I suppose it'll just be some switcheroo bullshit.

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There's a lot wrong with it - it's about twice as long as it needs to be, the gender stuff is overdone, it is intentionally annoying to its outgroup, succumbing to 'conflict theory', and none of its antagonists (Loeb, the Dentist, Wing, Crocodile) are fleshed out despite him having 900 pages of opportunities for fleshing them - but it's grand, clever, full of ideas, funny, full of great setpieces, and foresaw a couple of things about our decade.

My friend Stuart's reading this and I stupidly started spoiling one of the best lines in the book (it pops up as Shaftoe's motto) and he was mildly irritated with me. Fortunately for him, he is vastly smarter than me so while he was quite generously acting annoyed he was probably thinking to himself, "Maybe one day I will spoil math and engineering and the details of Riemann zeta functions for Conrad." Now I'm rereading it out of sympathy and it's even better than I remembered.

Anyway, while I haven't yet approached the implosion that I know is coming toward the end, I am really even more impressed at the catholicity of Stephenson's concerns than I was the first time I read the book. He has insightful things to say about information theory, natch, but also Tolkein, postmodern literary criticism (OK, he's a little reactionary about this, but he's also right), the wisdom of joining the Marines, childrearing, Filipino architecture and urban planning, facial hair (can you tell I love Randy's diatribes about Charlene?), Ronald Reagan, the assassination of Yamamoto and associated dilemmas of cryptanalysis, Papuan eating habits, the 90s networking bubble...

If you don't like writers who have something interesting to say about everything, I don't know why you read. If it bothers you that Neal Stephenson uses his characters as mouthpieces to voice his well-considered opinions on everything from the prospects of economic growth measured against the likelihood of revolution in the Philippines, for example, to the details of Japanese tunneldigging, then you might as well settle in with your Danielle Steele and be done with it. Stephenson knows a lot about everything, and that's unusual and should be treasured. As a stylist, he's no Hemingway. His stories have beginnings and middles but the ends are usually catastrophically bad. So what? He reveals enough about his subjects that you usually leave his books behind with the feeling that your brain is now fused in a slightly different way. And good for Neal Stephenson, and good for us.

One of the best books ever written, Neal flawlessly weaves two timelines, multiple story arcs, history, mathematics, and computer theory... All with a great sense of humor and gripping storyline. I still think about a mathematician graphing his horniness in a formula. Priceless!

Just re-read this for the first time, and it's still one of my favorites. This book is geek-heaven: cryptography, world war II, code-breaking, nazi gold, and modern day internet beginnings all tied together in one masterful story.

It also was largely lost on me, and I suspect many of my generation, that the second world war was won - or at least greatly accelerated - in great part due to the fact that we had cracked the German and Japanese codes. Learning more about the efforts of Bletchley Park, and Dr Alan Turing and huffduff and cribs, etc was fascinating.

I think the funniest part of the book is the page where Stephenson actually graphs out how productive Waterhouse is when he has recently had sex (very productive) and when he hasn't (not very productive).

The code-breaking and cryptography is not stuff I know a ton about, as modern day programmers largely don't have to worry about that stuff, but it's a good reminder to think about, as we don't have it on our brains nearly enough. Avi & Randy's paranoia and tendency to encrypt everything from their hard drives to their emails may be overkill, on the other hand, it also may be wise. I remember getting email from people who used public/private keys to encrypt their email before, but not in the last 5 years. Maybe we should request that Gmail Labs add that!

If there was a theme to this book, it's that cryptography is everything. It defined the second world war, and it also defines the modern internet. Information is king - not large caches of gold.

Arrgh! I don't remember a book that I both liked and didn't like this much!

Alright, a quick intro snipped from Amazon:

"Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."

All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties. "

Whew!

Stephenson takes 918 pages to spin his yarn and in the end I enjoyed most of the ride but I wondered what was the point. After 918 pages, that's not a good thing.

Pros:
1) It's a long book. If you like to settle down to a long book, this will do.
2) There is a strong pro-libertarian theme running throughout.
3) Some of his writing is quite good, entertaining, thoughtful, fun, thought provoking, well done.
4) He puts out some ideas that are really sharp. His discussion on Athena between Root and Randy got my little hamster wheels turning inside my head. He does this a few times.
5) Math. Not much but he uses actual math. And it fits with the story.
6) Cryptography. He uses actual cryptography and it also fits with the story.


Cons:
1) It's a freaking long book. If you like your books to be in the 200 - 300 page range, give this one a pass.
2) It just... ends. All the characters suddenly lose all the depth and charm Stephenson had imbued them with and it just stops. I think he should embarrassed that 900 pages weren't enough to end this in a satisfactory manner.
3) Was there a character not obsessed with sex? No? Right, right, I come from a Puritan background where I was beaten for having impure thoughts, but still, sex was a constant theme for just about every single character. It got really tiresome.
4) Potty mouths. The lot of them.
5) Sometimes his writing just sucked. Flat out bad. I wondered if he eschewed an editor.
6) Bobby Shaftoe's death. At the start of the scene where he dies, I thought "This would be the worst possible place to have him die after all the crap he went through" and, of course, he dies. Lamely.

So do I recommend this book? No, not really. It has some stellar moments, mired in dross. If you still want to read it, well, caveat lector.

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson is an epic cross between science fiction and historical fiction. It involves Nazis, Japanese, and WWII, and the interesting field of cryptology and cryptocurrency, code breaking, computers, and gold.

I read the audiobook. The plot is so descriptive and intense that one loses sense of it at times when reading with breaks. The narration, in itself, is excellent.

I have made a mistake by not consuming the printed word for this title, so I would want everyone reading this review to actually read this book and not rely on the audio version. I understand it is lengthy, but this is the only way to truly recognize the sheer brilliance of this work by the genius Stephenson. I am definitely going to read his next book (whichever I pick next) and not listen to it.

My rating partly reflects the bad experience I had with the audio book version, and in no way completely reflects the book an its contents.

it took me a month to get through this book. amazing, considering my usual speed with the written word, but quite true. this behemoth refused to be devoured in my usual hours-at-a-time fashion, nope. more like very high quality cheesecake, in that it's so rich you can only take a few bites before you need to assimilate.

part of the story is about a WWII GI, who happens to be so gung-ho and talented at both completing difficult missions successfully and staying alive at their completion that he gets the dubious honor of being assigned to a squad so top-secret he has no idea what he's doing there. part of the story is about a brilliant but oblivious mathematician (clearly an asperger's syndrome kind of guy) who becomes a codebreaker during the same war. and part of the story is about the computer-programmer grandson of the latter and his infatuation with the tough-as-nails granddaughter of the former. part of it is about codes (both for war messages and for computer programs) and part of it is about war (both physical and digital). all of which makes it sound very dry when it's anything but.

Stephenson's typical doses of randomly-applied hilarity are out in full force here. he does an incredible job of painting the world through the individual voices of his characters...and quite often, those guys are thinking very odd things about very odd situations. the hefty book could have been trimmed by, say, 30% if it left out these random observations, sometimes comical, other times simply beautiful examples of what letters can do in the hands of a gifted wordsmith, but then we'd miss out on things like:

"a red dragonfly hovers above the backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be, like electron orbitals: a quantum-mechanical effect that maybe explains why the insect can apparently teleport from one place to another, disappearing from one point and reappearing a couple of meters away, without seeming to pass through the space in between. there sure is a lot of bright stuff in the jungle. randy figures that, in the natural world, anything that is colored so brightly must be some kind of serious evolutionary badass."

no, i'm not recommending it to everybody. it's long and meandering and insanely technical in many places. but yes, i am gushing about it. it's lovely.

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

Neal Stephenson likes to throw weird shit together and see if it sticks. The more recent his book, the more likely it is to resemble a schizophrenic's curio cabinet. Your average Phillip Pullman will add a little wacky trepanning to his fantasy trilogy for that refined edge of esoteria.

Meanwhile, Stephenson will have an exiled member of Italian royalty who works in 'demolition real estate' and knows Escrima thanks to an intense trepanning session with Horace Walpole, Duke Orford. Which I believe is an accurate summary of the next William Gibson book.

One man's premise is another man's plot.

I liked it better when Stephenson used the bizarre as a spice to flavor a driven, exciting story. Though spices may make a dish delectable, they aren't palatable on their own; you need some meat. I guess what I'm saying is: who the fuck wrote Snowcrash and when will he write something else?

“I apologize if my limbic system has misinterpreted your gesture of emotional support.”

My husband insisted I’d like this massive novel largely about code breaking and war, and I was very hesitant. I do like military novels, but computer stuff is really not my specialty. Yet, I loved this dual-timelined, multigenerational story for its humor and quirk. Bobby Shaftoe has earned a spot in my favorite literary characters list.

At 42+ hours, this was quite the audio investment, but the narration is fantastic!

Now an all time favorite book, though I'm definitely a little bit crazier than when I started reading it... Review to follow.