Neal Stephenson

Cryptonomicon.

A gripping and page-turning thriller that explores themes of power, information, secrecy and war in the twentieth century. From the author of the three-volume historical epic 'The Baroque Cycle' and Seveneves. In his legendary, sprawling masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - a mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702, an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists. Some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. Their mission is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. Waterhouse is flung into a cryptographic chess match against his German counterpart - one where every move determines the fate of thousands. In the present day, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. Joining forces with the tough-as-nails Amy, Randy attempts tosecretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 - and an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. There are two ways this could go: towards unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty - or towards a totalitarian nightmare... Profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyperactive, Cryptonomicon is a work of great art, thought and creative daring, the product of a ingenious imagination working with white-hot intensity.

Cryptonomicon

Edward Steel

Fun as a historical view into nerd culture of the late nineties. Great depictions of WWII cryptographic work. Silicon Valley parts are outdated and boring. A lot of cheesy Testosterone characters.

Aske Dørge

Sarah Sammis

I'm at the half way point and the book is becoming more and more of a chore to read. There are too many characters and most of them I just don't find interesting enough to care about. The Waterhouses past and present are the two most interesting characters. Had the book just stuck with them it would have been a fast and fun read.

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy - is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, CRYPTONOMICON is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly icon

Colleen

2 Stars


  


 
Did you ever have a stress dream that you showed up for a class only to find out it was the final and that you somehow missed going to class all semester and are now completely unprepared for this extremely difficult exam now looming in front of you? Well, that’s kind of how reading Cryptonomicon felt to me.
 
If you like straightforward plots or rich character development, then this isn’t the book for you. If you like neat, linear stories, then you should steer clear. If the mere sight of a mathematical formula sends you into a narcoleptic slump, then run for the hills!
 
Stephenson certainly has a… distinctive writing style. And he seems to have successfully marketed to a niche market. Sadly, I won’t be joining his fan club. My dad likes his books though. He is the one who gave me this book, so I really tried to like it. Honestly, I did try. If this hadn’t been given to me, I probably wouldn’t have even finished it. At 918 pages, this was a chore to slog through. And having finished it, overall, I can’t say it was worth the time.
 
The story itself wasn’t all bad. There were some really interesting aspects to the plot. It has espionage, cryptography, military strategy, a secret society, and buried treasure. And Stephenson is clearly a smart guy. But the character development was lacking, and the writing style drove me nuts.
 
The book dumps you in with no explanations. It jumps around crazily between timelines and different characters’ POV without clarifying anything. I had a hell of a time trying to keep everyone straight especially since some of the characters are descendants of the earlier characters, so they have the same last names. And there are the made-up bits. While you’re still sitting there trying to figure out how the hell to pronounce Qwghlmian, the story has already jumped on to some other random part. It was so disorienting!
 
This is really two stories intertwined. The first is about cryptography in WWII. The second is set in the late 1990’s and has to do with cryptocurrency and data havens. The first timeline was significantly better than the second. I didn’t care for any of the characters in the latter timeline, and the plot for their sections was underwhelming, so the only draw of their part was the glimpses it showed about the outcome of the first story.
 
The subject of this book draws from fiction and nonfiction. There were a lot of people and events that are true. The Allies really did break the Enigma machine and rather than revel that they’d broken it, they enacted a complicated plan of laying false information so that they could continue to use the broken code without their enemy realizing they had broken it. The story also concerns the breaking of the Japanese code Purple although the book renamed it Indigo for some reason. But he also makes up entire countries, so this isn’t fully grounded in reality. (It isn’t grounded in anything really…) Anyway, I really liked the parts about breaking the codes and the espionage strategies to lay false trails about where the information came from. That stuff was interesting. But looking back, it’s really the only thing I liked about the whole book. As I mentioned, the latter timeline didn’t hold my attention. The character development was severely lacking. There were several scenes that should have been poignant, but the characters were so flimsy that I couldn’t care. The whole thing was just off-kilter enough to sound like someone humming a song half an octave off-key. And for such a doorstopper of a book, there was an alarming lack of substance. So much telling that just felt like pointless, time-wasting filler.
 
The writing also has a very weird tone. It was borderline absurdist fiction. And I have to say, I have a terrible track record with absurdist fiction. It was also crude and sometimes racist. Part of that was because nationalism and prejudice has encouraged by both sides during the war, but it seemed excessive. And when you combined that with the author’s irreverent tone, it was to hard to tell if he was making a point or joining in.
 
Of the real historical figures that make appearances, Alan Turing gets the most page time. But his portrayal was an unflattering, campy caricature. Imagine if Groucho Marx played Alan Turing; that’s about how he was written in this book. Oh, he was still smart but in an unbecoming way. A lot of this book was about portraying the geek mind, but it was an insulting and inaccurate parody of one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century.
 
There is also a ton of math in this book. It doesn’t just mention cryptography and coding and such. It shows every formula and even writes out the Perl script for the Pontifex cipher. There was a lot of mathematical and technical jargon – most of which I will readily admit went way over my head. I kept thinking about the difference between knowledge and wisdom. This book had an abundance of knowledge. Not so much wisdom though.
 
But the absolute worst part about this book is that there is SO MUCH useless filler!!! Any time things got remotely interesting, some character would spout off ad naseum about random things like the weather, going to the dentist, or picking out furniture. He spent three freaking pages just talking about one character eating cereal. Yes, you read that right: three pages about eating cereal. Every. Single. Possible. Detail. About eating damn CEREAL. What type of cereal. What temperature the milk should be. HIS PREFFERRED METHOD OF CHEWING SAID CEREAL. I am usually all about details, but I have NEVER IN MY LIFE PONDERED METHODS OF CHEWING CEREAL. It was the epitome of pointlessness. And I’d estimate that about one third to half of this book is inane details like that. Someone else told me that all that filler was “like foreplay.” Well… I hate to break it to you, but foreplay isn’t supposed to send you to sleep.
 
Apparently this also ties into his Baroque Cycle. I’m not certain I want to find that out for myself though.
 
Things did pick up towards the end but then abruptly stopped with a massively underwhelming ending. If the ending had been even a little better, this book might have been ok. But I feel like I walked to Mount Doom and back for no reason at all. Cryptonomicon had some good ideas but was swamped down by a massively self-indulgent, chaotic writing style. This book will probably (and apparently does) appeal to a specific type of person, but I guess I’m not among that group.
 

RATING FACTORS:
Ease of Reading: 2 Stars
Writing Style: 1 Star
Characters and Character Development: 1 Star
Plot Structure and Development: 2 Stars
Level of Captivation: 2 Stars
Originality: 2 Stars

Gavin

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:
  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.

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.

  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.


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:

  “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.
 

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.

  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.


---

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:

  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. 


* 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:

  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.

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. 

* (view spoiler)[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. (hide spoiler)]

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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.

Bouke van der Bijl

This book was basically made for nerds like me, it is a sort of historical fan-fiction adaptation of the people who worked as code crackers in WW2. It's a combination of people during WW2, and their ancestors 70 years later. Expect plenty of references to cryptography, computers, and military humor. This book actually had me laughing out loud in certain passages.

roman

Jeff James

It had been a few years since I'd read anything by Stephenson, so I'd forgotten what a hilarious writer he is. This a rip-roaring adventure tale, set both during World War II and modern times, and it was a hell of a lot of fun to read. This book has actually been on my shelf for a pretty long time, thoroughly untouched because of the sheer length. However, I'm glad I finally got up the nerve to crack it open and read it, because even at 1000+ pages it was a brisk and entertaining read. I'm sure I could have finished it weeks ago if not for all of the time I spent getting read to move at the start of the month. Highly recommended, easily in my top 10 for the year even this early on.

Todd Luallen

I couldn't finish this. Perhaps not a bad book, but not one that kept my interest. Very hard to follow in audiobook format because there are some similarities in names. This is more problematic because the story takes place during two time periods. So while listening I found myself not even knowing if I was listening to WWII era happenings, or something taking place in modern day. The cryptography discussion and the topics of online banking are interesting, but otherwise I was constantly looking for it to end --- only to find out that I have 25 hours left.

Adam

Another Neal Stephenson story following 2 story lines: one following code breakers in World War II, another a group of dot com entrepreneurs. Featuring fictionalized versions of names from the time including Alan Turing made it easier to identify with the characters. The first half of this very long book was tough to get through, with most of the payoff towards the end. The detailed descriptions of cryptography and theories about a digital currency were the most interesting part.

Arun Raghavan

While the story was pretty gripping, I found Neal Stephenson's writing exhaustingly verbose.

Jason 

It felt like reading a thick uninteresting syrup.
It felt like hating to read.

Ben Nathan

long, dense, but really wonderful. I loved it and am giving it five stars because the scope was huge and was pulled off brilliantly. that said, I think I'm going to like other books if his more, but this made me very happy.

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. As an added bonus, the e-book edition of this New York Times bestseller includes an excerpt from Stephenson's new novel, Seveneves. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn. A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.

Cryptonomicon.

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