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

A Nerd-porn Fiesta: hackers bravely battling through carpal tunnel syndrome; Amazonian bodied virgins falling in love with chubby computer programmers; strangely conflicted weeaboo overtones; more fapping or thinking about fapping than anyone wants to read about; phreaking; the Riemann Zeta function.

Entertaining enough, the analysis of the conflict between Ares and Hera being the highlight of the novel, but a low signal to noise ratio leads to significant data redundancy in a nine hundred page novel. Loses a star when you remember you could have read at least two Elena Ferrante using the same bandwith.

Si no me equivoco, debió ser en secundaria cuando jugábamos a crear un código para cifrar mensajes y podernos enviar notas dentro del salón de clases y que en caso de ser descubiertos, quien interceptara el mensaje no supiera lo que estábamos diciendo. Eran códigos extremadamente simples donde solo alterábamos el orden las letras, una a podía ser una r, o una b podía ser un número. Los mensajes eran más bobos aún.

Releyendo Crítica y verdad, de Barthes, releo al respecto de la interpretación que la crítica literaria puede hacer de la literatura, es más, que la misma literatura puede hacer de lo que comprendemos como realidad, de la ficción como otra realidad, ni mayor ni menor que lo que experimentamos cuando estamos conscientes. Simplemente una realidad que apodamos “ficción”.

Esta novela de Stephenson llegó a nuestra biblioteca cortesía de una “recomendación” de Fresán en su artículo New American Cookbook, listado de libros que nos ha dado mucho que explorar, a mi padre y a mí, de la literatura norteamericana de fin del siglo pasado.

Después de meses de dedicarle a ratos lectura a esta especie de Moby Dick de la criptografía, he podido dar fin a una de las mejores novelas que he leído en mi vida, e ignoro qué tando de verdad hay en lo que afirma Charles Yu de que “A person who has recently read Cryptonomicon is temporarily the smartest person on Earth. That’s a fact”, pero sí debo reconocer que me siento muy diferente de cuando comencé la lectura de este librote a ahora que le he dado fin.

No solo ha pasado tiempo en mi vida, y otras lecturas intermedias, no solo he envejecido unos meses, sino que además, he confrontado la lectura de una novela que abarca demasiados detalles en un momento culminante de la historia de la humanidad: la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Aunque, más que ese periodo en particular, más bien, mi atención se inclinó por la influencia de la guerra en el progreso de la humanidad.

Uso la palabra “progreso” desde la perspectiva escéptica de Gray, la estulticia de la humanidad ante el conocimiento, ante la “sabiduría” que ha generado en su andar sobre la tierra. Un progreso más bien imbécil e inútil.

“Tanto daño que le causamos a la Tierra”.

“Las bombas nucleares pueden destruir el planeta”.

Patrañas. Al Mundo le importamos todavía menos de lo que nosotros podemos preocuparnos por la existencia de una bacteria.

Criptonomicón viene a ser una lápida inmensa en relación al legado de la humanidad. Sus conocimientos y avances tecnológicos, vienen a ser resultado de el afán de ganar una batalla, una pelea, una guerra. Los países “desarrollados” invierten cantidades demenciales de dinero, esfuerzo, materia prima y recurso humano, en crear nuevas armas y herramientas de destrucción. De destrucción del otro que no soy yo, que no se ve como yo, que no piensa ni cree lo que creo yo.

Una tremenda puñetez.

Ni todo el oro del mundo bajo el Gólgota o en el V-Millennium podrán nunca evitar que catástrofes bélicas puedan volver a suceder. Es el sueño, la utopía de unos pocos. De muchos. Contra los sueños de dominación y control y poder de otros pocos.

Stephenson se las ingenia para escribir una novelota increíblemente amena, entretenida, divertida y para nada tonta, al contrario, hay partes que te exigen todas tus neuronas trabajando; podrías brincar esas partes, pero, entonces, cuál es el chiste. Finalmente, una novela puede ser un mensaje cifrado de algo más. De algo que solo cada lector podrá descifrar, incluso no en una primera lectura, a lo mejor en dos o tres; incluso, puede que no al terminar de leerla, puede que pasen meses, años, antes que tu cabeza, o tu espíritu, tengan la “tecnología” necesaria para descifrar ese mensaje.

No recuerdo haberme encariñado tanto con la trama de una novela, con sus personajes, y medio odiar a unos.

Espero que Bobby Shaftoe me acompañe en más de una batalla. Espero tener tiempo, ojos y vida para leer algo más de Stephenson. Espero poder ser digno de ese río de oro que es la vida.

I mean, FINE, okay, this is one of the most engrossing books I've ever read. I don't really mean "best" or "best-written", necessarily. I mean, it's a messy sprawling epic that's almost too clever by half and full of hilarious characters and history just-so tweaked to accommodate them and also pure unadulterated geekiness. So it's not really for everyone but boy did I lap it up and then eat my huge slices of humble pie for everyone in my life that's been bugging me to read it for about four years.

I do have a couple small tiny niggling complaints, and one of them was the massively inbred dynastic mindfuck that was the generational split between mid-century and modern. I mean, are there only five families on the planet that had any effect whatsoever on the latter half of the 20th century? Neal Stephenson seems to think so! It's clever, I mean, in an Aureliano Buendia, Great Men History sort of way to see the same quirks and traits and consequences of history revealing themselves in the microcosm of a few generations of a few families. But I didn't necessarily need to be hit over the head with it, NEAL.

That said, though, I can't think of a family I'd rather find myself marooned in the seas of literature with than the Waterhouses or the Shaftoes, so.

Also I had a love/hate relationship with the lectures that Stephenson felt was his god-given right to slam smack in the middle of a scene because he just feels like you HAVE TO UNDERSTAND THIS NOW and you do, so I struggled against enjoying the lectures because I'm a nerd and I like learning things and hating the lectures because I love fiction and I hate great big long swathes of explanatory text slammed into a character's mouth. It's all very Giles.

But I mean, if you know the book you know these are sort of tiny complaints in the face of the awesomeness of Stephenson's humor and imagination, his passion for these, let's call them archetypes of humanity that he's wrapped around history and technology and ideas. In a way, it's what I always hated about Rand that somehow works brilliantly when Stephenson does it. Huh.

This is an award-nominated historical novel techno-thriller mashup by Neal Stephenson, published in 1999, nominated to Hugo in 2000 (lost to A Deepness in the Sky. It was 3rd both in nominations and final voting, with A Civil Campaign being the 2nd one) and won Locus Award for Best SF Novel. It can be described as a computer geek dream novel, which appeared just before the dot-com crash and which discussed cryptocurrencies years before the general public heard about Bitcoin and the like. I read it as a part of the monthly reading for August 2023 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group.

This is a really large book, 42 hours of audio and 918 pages of the first edition hardback, big enough so that several translations were published as three and even four volumes.

I usually outline the starting setting, but because the book’s narrative weaves together multiple storylines spanning different periods, from before World War II to the late 20th century, I guess it is better to list the characters. Some of these characters or their relatives appear in the author’s later works, so they are a part of a specific universe. So, let's take a closer look at some of the characters:

Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse is a brilliant mathematician and cryptanalyst who studied with Alan Turing and met Einstein. For most of the novel, he works for the Allied forces during World War II, helping to break Axis codes. He is an archetypical intellectually driven, socially awkward genius.
Randy Waterhouse is Lawrence Waterhouse's grandson and represents a more contemporary, tech-savvy version of a geek. He is a computer programmer and entrepreneur, and his character showcases the intersection of intellectual prowess with the emerging world of technology. He is also socially inept, but he understands that it is a drawback and tries to adapt.
Bobby Shaftoe is a Marine during World War II, and his character is an anti-thesis for geekiness: he embodies physical strength, toughness, and resilience, a Rambo version of WW2. He isn’t perfect, and he has brains, not only brawl.
Goto Dengo is a Japanese soldier in World War II, who became Shaftoe’s friend just before Pearl Harbor, when both Japanese and US troops stayed in Shanghai. He represents a different cultural perspective, not only as a soldier but as a poet and an engineer.

The novel is great in parts where it explores themes of cryptography, technology, and the impact of tech on society. While the book primarily focuses on themes related to cryptography and technology, it also delves into the lives and personalities of several key characters. It also gives a wealth of real historical figures and events as well as some slightly disguised/fictionalized, like there is Electrical Till Corp, which is IBM in all but name, or there is a version of Operation Mincemeat. The overall plot is heavily influenced by Libertarian thought.

It is definitely the work of its times and shows how in just a few decades SFF fandom may change: while "Cryptonomicon" doesn't necessarily stress masculinity as a primary theme, it, like much older SF, has most of the characters white, male, heterosexual. There are a lot of depictions of young men's sexual urges and the need to ‘lose some steam’, but all women in the book are more objects than persons, needed to move a plot. Also, there is a criticism of extreme cases of political correctness, like in the following two pieces:

1.
Nip is the word used by Sergeant Sean Daniel McGee, U.S. Army, Retired, to refer to Nipponese people in his war memoir about Kinakuta, a photocopy of which document Randy is carrying in his bag. It is a terrible racist slur. On the other hand, people call British people Brits, and Yankees Yanks, all the time. Calling a Nipponese person a Nip is just the same thing, isn’t it? Or is it tantamount to calling a Chinese person a Chink? During the hundreds of hours of meetings and megabytes of encrypted e-mail messages, that Randy, Avi, John Cantrell, Tom Howard, Eberhard Föhr, and Beryl have exchanged, getting Epiphyte(2) off the ground, each of them has occasionally, inadvertently, used the word Jap as shorthand for Japanese—in the same way as they used RAM to mean Random Access Memory. But of course Jap is a horrible racist slur too. Randy figures it all has to do with your state of mind at the time you utter the word. If you’re just trying to abbreviate, it’s not a slur. But if you are fomenting racist hatreds, as Sean Daniel McGee occasionally seems to be not above doing, that’s different.

2.
“So,” Randy continued, “to get back to where we started, the Information Superhighway is a bad metaphor for the Internet, because I say it is. There might be a thousand people on the planet who are as conversant with the Internet as I am. I know most of these people. None of them takes that metaphor seriously. Q.E.D.”
“Oh. I see,” Kivistik said, a little hotly. He had seen an opening. “So we should rely on the technocrats to tell us what to think, and how to think, about this technology.”
The expressions of the others seemed to say that this was a telling blow, righteously struck.
“I’m not sure what a technocrat is,” Randy said. “Am I a technocrat? I’m just a guy who went down to the bookstore and bought a couple of textbooks on TCP/IP, which is the underlying protocol of the Internet, and read them. And then I signed on to a computer, which anyone can do nowadays, and I messed around with it for a few years, and now I know all about it. Does that make me a technocrat?”
“You belonged to the technocratic elite even before you picked up that book,” Kivistik said. “The ability to wade through a technical text, and to understand it, is a privilege. It is a privilege conferred by an education that is available only to members of an elite class. That’s what I mean by technocrat.”
“I went to a public school,” Randy said. “And then I went to a state university. From that point on, I was self-educated.”
Charlene broke in. She had been giving Randy dirty looks ever since this started and he had been ignoring her. Now he was going to pay. “And your family?” Charlene asked frostily.
Randy took a deep breath, stifled the urge to sigh. “My father’s an engineer. He teaches at a state college.”
“And his father?”
“A mathematician.”
Charlene raised her eyebrows. So did nearly everyone else at the table. Case closed.
“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. Some of them, out of habit, looked at him soberly; etiquette dictated that you give all sympathy to the oppressed. Others gasped in outrage to hear these words coming from the lips of a known and convicted white male technocrat. “No one in my family has ever had much money or power,” he said.

I personally am interested in both major themes of the book like WW2 history and 90s hackers, as well as minor ones, like RPGs, trading card games, and theosophical discussions, so for me, the book is great, even if it definitely has flaws and therefore can bore or anger (quite reasonably) some people.

It's perhaps not fair to review a book that I didn't finish reading, but I found this to be so poorly written, so painfully boring, so self-indulgent on the part of the author, and with such laughably sophomoric dialog and characterizations, that I couldn't resist blowing one final raspberry at Mr Stephenson's clown-car of a book. No doubt he is an author with a lot on his mind, and "computer" science fiction is a nice change of pace, but he's not got the chops to pull off such a long and intricate book without the help of a good editor with the guts to tell him when he's sucking.

This book will appeal to people interested in World War II, cryptography, paranoia at the highest level, swash buckling adventures, the power of money, commerce, international communications networking; which probably covers 80% of the readers in the world.

Unlike Stephenson’s book called Snow Crash (Highly recommended) this story is one in the present time with deep links back to the 1940’s during World War II.

The main characters are Bobby Shaftoe- a grunt in WW II Marines; Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse – a cryptography and code geek at the highest level; Goto Dengo – a Japanese soldier who follows orders without question, any order; Avi – super super paranoid genius and business person: Rudy – who ends up working for the Nazi’s during WW II. Along with a large supporting cast of characters

The bulk of the story revolves around creating and breaking codes during WW II and then extends beyond that as future off spring of the main characters run into each other when developing a data crypt in the Philippines, while looking for some long ago buried gold (literally tons of it).

They intermingle and run into mostly bad guys along the way.

Stephenson fully develops each character and we are privy to what they are thinking during various situations. The evolution of computers is blended into the story line as well.

The various story arcs move along at a fast pace which is god as the book is over 1100 pages long.

Recommended. I have Stephensons ReaMd on my shelf to read and am looking forward to it based on the last two books I have read from this author.

I am somewhat ambivalent about this novel. If "novel" is the right word. It's more like a treaty on a bunch of topics with a narrative woven through. If a novel it is, then it's one with a lot of exposition. Perhaps that's why it's so long. That, and the diggressions. Good heavens, the diggressions.

The story itself is not bad, and it's even gripping on occasion. It sometimes reminded me of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug", what with the cryptography and hidden treasure. Only with Nazis instead of pirates. And, of course, much longer, ambitious, and sprawling. In fact, its own ambition and scope might be playing against it. The book is all over the place, and in some spots the author seems to be out of his depth.

Now, if you have any interest in mathematics, cryptography or history, you could certainly do much worse than read this book. You could, for example, watch that recent movie where Benedict Cumberbatch plays a Sheldon Cooper-esque version of Alan Turing. Cryptonomicon is much more respectful and knowledgeable about its subject matter, and it doesn't tend to underestimate its reader.

But there are also some things I didn't quite warm up to. First, it is glaringly obvious that Cryptonomicon was written in the days of the dot-com bubble, and it partakes on that techno-capitalistic optimism that private entrepreneurs will singlehandedly make the world a better place, and the best thing governments can do is to stay out of the way.

Also, this is a very nerdy book. I don't mean that in a bad way; after all, that's one of the main reasons I picked it up. I loved reading about hacking, Enigma machines and one-time pads. The unexpected downside, however, is that it showcases, in what seems to be an earnest, unselfconscious manner, some of the ugly parts of nerd culture as a white boys' club [1]. To the book's credit, at least gay characters (among them a fictionalized Alan Turing) are treated no differently than straight characters. No sophomoric jokes are cracked at their expense. And sophomoric this book can be when discussing sexual issues.

Female characters, on the other hand, are a different matter. You see, women are for sex [2]. Women are irrational. Women manipulate men. Women in this book exist to be someone's wife, or girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, or prospective girlfriend. None of them shows any interest in math or IT, or has the required skills. Those are male pursuits.

This is not just subtext. It's pretty much spelled out. Randy Waterhouse, protagonist of the 1990s storyline, voices the idea that women are just not focused enough. But, you see, this is totally not a sexist remark, because he immediately adds that this alleged fact makes women superior to men, not inferior, as it allows them to develop their social skills rather than hunch in front of a computer. I am sure Randy's opinion is objective and fact-based. After all, we know he is totally unlike those intellectuals whose smug ignorance annoys him so much in an early chapter. Only those social science types would ever run their mouths about things they know nothing about, right, Randy? Right, Mr. Stephenson?

Seeing this is such a nerdy book, the pro-Christian, anti-atheist undercurrent that rears its head from time to time is somewhat surprising. A couple of background characters are even stated to be non-judgmental precisely because they are secretly devout Christians. Why secretly? Because apparently, in certain circles Christianity is not "politically correct" [3].

And there's the matter of the character that dies, yet later pops up still alive with no explanation. I find references online that this particular character shows up in other books and might be immortal. Still, it might have been a good idea to drop some hint rather than have the readers scratch their heads all the way.



[1] Cue angry, missing-the-point yelling: "What do you have against white boys?" The protestors might or might not include the author of the book, who either (a) thinks that the concept of "privileged white male" is supremely amusing, or (b) has a big chip on the shoulder about it.

[2] And the point of sex is male ejaculation. So, women are for male ejaculation. I wish I was making this up.

[3] Yes, this is a book that uses the words "politically correct" unironically.

2.5 stars?

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

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

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

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

I usually roll my eyes at blurbs on books, especially when they're as reductive and simple as the ones I'm about to cite, but "electrifying" and "a hell of a read" seem like the two most fitting ways to summarize my opinion on this book. I had a tough time putting this down. It's not a challenging book, but it's also not a stupid book and I was surprised to find how "literary" it actually is. Outside of that, and really most importantly, it's an absolute blast to read.

Clearly a lot of research went into the writing of this and it's unbelievably thorough and generous in its presentation of all this information. Even when it gets into the mathematics and theory behind cryptography it never stops being comprehensible and it's very clear that Stephenson had a strong desire to not dumb anything down and to simultaneously not allow himself to get too obtuse or evasive. It's a really skillfully managed balancing act. I realize that accessibility is not a virtue unto itself, but it really is favorable for this particular story, because the majority of the labor done by the reader here shouldn't be to glean the meaning of the text so much as to keep up with it and figure out its applicability.

This book reminds me of David Fincher's film "Zodiac" in a lot of ways. Both of them are, as a result of the obsessive nature of their topics, obsessively structured themselves, reflecting not just the obsession of the characters within the works but also the obsession of the creators themselves. Both of them are packed to the gills with detailed information. Both of them are unusually long, although they're both so absorbing that this is a non-factor, or at least it was for me. The major difference between this and "Zodiac," however, is the fact that while that particular film zeroes in on one singular person/mystery/topic, this book seems to jump and tear and grasp at everything in its wake. The fact that it doesn't feel unfocused despite this really blows me away.

I enjoyed reading cryptonomicon. It is frustrating and drags a lot in many places but it is quite brilliant in the good parts. Neal Stephenson has many interesting things to say on various subjects. He does a good job of explaining the math involved in many places. I also loved the conversation between Root and Randy in the prison regarding Athena and Ares.

The characters are all essentially one-dimensional, but i loved Enoch Root and Bobby Shaftoe. All the scenes with Bobby Shaftoe are hilarious.

So even though there are some quite brilliant parts in the book i really enjoyed, it also gets quite annoying in some places. It is way too long and in the end the story just seems to stop abruptly.

9/10