This is a failure on several levels.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, is to techno-intellectuals as Bryant-Denny Stadium is to redneck college football fans: it is a monument.

According to Stephenson in this very enjoyable, but lengthy book nerds won the Second World War and are keeping global society free from tyranny nowadays.

Weighing in at 1168 pages, this behemoth saddles up to the literary buffet line alongside Atlas Shrugged and War and Peace. How does a book this big get published and how does an author achieve that goal much less make it entertaining, endearing and just plain good to read? By being expertly written by a very talented author, who is also funny, making similes and metaphors that frequently made me smile and sometimes even laugh out loud.

Neal Stephenson comes across like a geeky Jonathon Franzen, blending erudite sci-fi qualities with meticulously crafted characterizations and rolling all into a cocoon of an intricate plot almost as puzzling as the cryptograms that form the foundation of the story. Comprising two related time lines that slowly blend together, Stephenson held my attention, sometimes making it difficult to put the book down.

Like Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon (with a title that is a nod to Lovecraft) works on multiple levels and establishes parallels between times and generations.

Finally, this is an allegory for the information age and brilliantly illustrates that our treasure is where our data can be found.

A fun and wondering yarn. Neal would benefit from an editor to streamline some of his digressions, but unlike Gravity's Rainbow, this WWII historical fiction's tangents are entertaining. Overall I think this book asks too much from the reader, but if you find yourself with fifty hours of downtime, this isn't a bad way to fill it.

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

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

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

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

My four-star rating will likely puzzle those friends of mine who have had to listen to me piss and moan about this novel for the past six months. My progress as a reader was, shall we say, embarrassingly slow. (In Stephenson's defense, I tended to put his novel aside after every 200 or so pages and read other things; the book actually moves pretty swiftly considering its size.) But the four-star rating is sincere: I did enjoy this very much, for the most part, and I intend to at last read n  Snow Crashn and maybe even finish The Diamond Age, which I abandoned sometime back in the late nineties.

Though this novel is set in the past (and in a present that is quaintly a decade old now), it's by definition a science fiction novel: Ideas and things over people. This one's about a specific process of change in science, and not so much about people save as means of displaying certain ideas at work or in development. (There are some characters who almost achieve a fully rounded quality--Goto Dengo!--but that's not really all that surprising given a thousand pages of storytelling, is it?) So most of this is Stephenson fictionalizing scenes about the development of the information age, essentially saying, "Isn't this incredibly cool?" And it almost always is cool.

And funny.

Stephenson's voice has a kneejerk hyperbolic quality to it that works on a glib, superficial level. His gift for over-the-top metaphor is pretty much consistently astounding and amusing. Even if that same quality of voice never for a moment involves the reader of the reality of this world and it's people. No, the prose is all about braininess and exhibitionistic flaunting of research, ad nauseam, and so what? That's as good a reason to read as any, and this is almost always a good time.

While I never quite felt any of the characters were exactly well-developed outside of their erections and ability to compute, say, the proximate coordinates of a cherished family heirloom, the combined group of characters here give us the most fully fleshed out portrayal of geekitude in literature. Seriously, this is an unparalleled examination of what it is to be a geeky guy in the late twentieth--the love of data and things and problem-solving; the sheer befuddlement in the face of women and their irrational ways; the needlessly-complicated-and-by-the-way-accidentally-insightful manner of apprehending the world that defines several generations of bespectacled men. (It begins in this novel with Waterhouse and Turing and so on and ending with Randy but encompassing even characters such as Shaftoe, who while ostensibly more of a typical man and an a!c!t!i!o!n! hero, is still pretty much free from quaint qualities such as empathy, so women remain mysterious beings who control the world by virtue of their ability to literally screw with men. Sex is a power before which every Stephenson character loses his shit.) (That this is true of most people in the real world doesn't make its universality in a novel an okay thing.)

Of course, the above doesn't much matter in what is essentially a comic novel. Stephenson makes noises about more serious topics (stopping the evilness of war, a potent disgust about the horrors we visit on our fellow humans, etc), but this is just a long caper/heist novel--long on capering and short on import.

But fun! I just wish it hadn't been quite so damned long.

At the start of the year I set myself a small personal task to read Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow and Cryptonomicon; three books I considered to be complex. Infinite Jest was by far the longest, requiring steely determination, patience and an iron will to keep going; Gravity's Rainbow was a mind fuck and probably the most challenging piece of literature I've read in my three decades and compared to the two aforementioned behemoths Cryptonomicon was easily the most accessible of the three. Don't think this is a breeze because it isn't and rather than patience what you need is concentration plus having previously read Anathem and Quicksilver helped when it came to understanding his complicated mathematic stuff.

Geekfest aside this is a great story about Nazi war gold and code breaking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neal Stephenson is brilliant. Quite obviously so. And one of his strengths lies in writing books that make abstruse, convoluted niche subjects feel approachable and exciting to the average reader. His attention to detail and his playful tangents, asides and divagations are charming, witty and often fascinating.

Unfortunately this does not always translate into well-written and well-structured narratives. To put it mildly, Cryptonomicon drags. It meanders. Occasionally it stops completely dead. More than a hundred pages before the end all the surprises and brilliance had been squandered and I was gritting my teeth and just waiting for it to be over.

This is a very male narrative. All of the main characters are straight males, and the book (and its characters) are obsessed with male ejaculations (yes, explicitly) and their effect on the male thought process. Furthermore, Stephenson includes some facile pop psychology about the interactions of the the sexes (which made this homosexual roll his eyes) and took a few embarrassing swipes at academia, atheism and gender equality. The fact that two of the male supporting characters are homosexual does not lessen this impression of male heteronormativity, especially when you realize that both of these characters are doomed to lonely, loveless deaths.

Women are cast only in the most stereotypical roles and are never completely fleshed out. They are either sex objects, sex tyrants, frigid or helpless--nothing in between. Out of all the many, many orgasms in the book, only two belong to women (or rather, A woman) and they are presented in such a way as to make them sound unnatural and almost frightening.

I'm not sure what Stephenson's point was in writing such a heavy-handed, gender-unbalanced narrative, but it alienated me almost completely. Maybe I'm missing the point--I'm sure there are people who would say I am--but it just didn't work for me.

So! In conclusion, Cryptonomicon was a lengthy slog that could have used tighter editing and plotting, and far less fixation on reinforcing gender and sexual norms.

An amazing and massive story of code-breaking during WWII and establishing a data haven in the present. Great characters, an intricate plot, and the most hilarious and ironic narrative voice ever, this was a definitive work for the erudite, info-dump loving Stephenson. There are so many self-indulgent tangents on esoteric lines of geek trivia, but this is an integral part of the author's voice. Though one would think a 910 page story would drag, I found myself increasingly drawn by the interweaving stories, and was sad when it came to an end. A wild and unique story unlike any other!

This book came highly recommended by many friends and reviewers, and I'm a big fan of Neal Stephenson based on Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. It did not disappoint. I will soon tackle the next door-stopper he wrote, Anathem, before someday taking on the imposing Baroque Cycle.

reread this one again after rereading Baroque and as in the earlier review below, I liked it but not as much as the trilogy; mostly for the same reasons

(original review in 2008)
I read this in inverse chronological order of publication, so after The Baroque Cycle to which it shares ideas, and characters' families and I have to say that while engaging and with numerous remarkable moments, it is not as good as the Cycle. Maybe because despite having a math background I have very little interest in cryptography or hacking while the beginning of calculus and the first stabs at constructing a "Theory of Everything" in the System of the World are of much more interest to me.

Also not surprisingly considering that the Cycle has 3000 pages its characters are considerably more developed, considerably more "real" than the ones in Cryptonomicon.

Still a superb novel and highly recommended.

Though n  Snow Crashn will probably remain my all-time favorite Neal Stephenson novel, Cryptonomicon might take the crown as his best.[†:] As I write this review, I wrapping up my third reading of this novel.

BRIEF ASIDE REGARDING THE TIMING OF THIS THIRD READING: It is probably worth noting my mental state when I cracked the spine on this one for the third time. Stephenson's n  Anathemn had just come out and I could not quite bring myself to drop the cash on the hardcover. But I was overwhelmed with the urge to read some Stephenson. Given the the brutalizing that the U.S. economy was taking (according to the news) right about this time, it therefore seemed apropos to read something that involved economics, crypto, currency, libertarianism (and flaws of same), and safety/security.

END OF ASIDE AND RETURN TO REVIEW THAT IS REALLY MORE LIKE A BUNCH OF RANDOM DISCONNECTED OBSERVATIONS: Cryptonomicon manages to do a good job of not feeling terribly dated even nine years after its release. The cutting-edge laptops in the narrative still seem pretty fancy; the issues all continue to feel pertinent and relevant; the only thing that seems to set it in a particular time is an off-hand reference to "the Power Rangers" pretty late in the story.

Anyway.

It holds together well all these years later and is a great exemplar of Stephenson's hyperbolic style and how well he wields that style for explanatory power as well as humor.

What Stephenson does masterfully here is to create an interesting story for nerds (esp. crypto nerds) that has a thinly veiled coming-of-age sub-text lathered onto a character that we (at first) don't think needs any maturation.

I am talking (of course) about Randy.

If you don't figure this out by the time you get to the "Pulse" chapter then you have some explaining to do. We (the readers, the nerds) are thinking that Randy is a grown-up because we (1; as grown-ups) identify with him at the outset and (2) he has all the trappings of a grown-up such as (a) a beard, (b) a girlfriend of 10 years, (c) a business plan, etc. But the Randy we start with is little more than a bearded child running away from his commitments (i.e., his career as a university sysadmin and his relationship with Charlene (though, given the circumstances described in the prose, citing the latter is probably not fair to Randy) to play with his friends (e.g., Avi, Tom Howard) and their toys (e.g., high-tech laptops, GPS receivers). We get the first hint that this late-stage coming-of-age is going on when Randy shaves off his beard to discover a grown-ups face underneath. From there it's a pretty steady sleight-of-hand unfolding through the narrative which is really quite rewarding. (Hence taking the crown as Stephenson's best.)

Granted, there's so much more going on in the novel than just Randy; we could also consider Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Bobby Shaftoe, Goto Dengo, or Enoch Root[‡:]. But Randy is probably the best place to center.


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† = At the time of this writing, there is a pretty broad swath of Stephenson unread by Y.T., namely all three in the Baroque Cycle and the brand new n  Anathemn.

‡ = Root in particular fascinates me because (if what I've heard is true an he does in fact appear in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle) he seems to share a few traits in common with Tolkien's Gandalf (doubly interesting because Stephenson's Randy calls Root a "Wizard" in the Tolkien sense), Weis/Hickman's Fizban, Arthur Miller's "Old Jew", etc. I'm thinking that there is a whole taxonomy of characters to explore here of which Root is one.

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See also:
• 10 Science Fiction Novels You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Actually Read Them) at io9