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Title: Cryptonomicon |
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Review of Cryptonomicon
- 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
Product Description
- Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson.
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.
Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton
Amazon.com
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Comments for Cryptonomicon
- Posted on 2008-07-13
Long and glorious.
Neal Stephenson is a fantastic writer, and his skills truly shine in Cryptonomicon. Yes, it's a long book, but I suggest to all those who find fault with Stephenson's long-windedness that brevity is not somehow 'better' than verbosity, it's just different. Stephenson has carved his own niche in the continuum of writing-style, and, yes, it's in the Long-Winded-Land area of the spectrum. Is it a good style despite this? YES. Stephenson is incredibly deft with words, and the telling of his story is extremely effective. Cryptonomicon made me laugh, cry, and feel ill to my stomach at times (in a good way!). The dialogue is witty as usual for Stephenson, the plot is dense, multifarious, and fascinating, and the characters are well-developed. What more could you ask for? I recommend 'Cryptonomicon' to you, yes, YOU.
Score: 5
- Posted on 2008-07-11
Not as bad as Snowcrash
It has the same problems, as it's overlong trite cyberpunk. However, at least his writing's improved.
Score: 3
- Posted on 2008-07-04
WOW!
I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating.
I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head.
The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor."
And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure."
Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak".
Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted.
A wonderful book!
Score: 5 - Posted on 2008-06-21
THE JUNGLE BOOK
When you're in a bookstore the CRYPTONOMICON doesn't look all that intimidating. You've seen tons of books this thick by Tom Clancy and Robert Jordan--and probably read some or all of them with no problem.
But online here at Amazon you only see the page numbers--a whopping 1100 + !!!
Now for the important question: Is it worth your time turning all these pages?
LOCATIONS: A book this thick has to have some interesting locations, and it does: From pre-WWII Shanghai, the jungles of the Philippines, England, Italy, Sweden, Japan and Australia. I've never been to the Philippines but I felt like the author did a good job of describing it.
CHARACTERS: There are several main characters (all male) and the author takes turns telling each of their stories, which is a good way to break up any monotony. I wasn't able to really visualize what the characters looked like, but their individual actions and adventures more than make up for that. Some characters are of the nerdy suit-and-tie type and others are of the practical military-gear toting-type.
FUN: Is this a fun book to read? If you like humor and geeky "Gee Whiz" sort of information every now and then, this book has plenty of it. I especially found the part about Van Eck Phreaking really interesting--and something only the most paranoid of people would worry about. There is lots of history, most of it dealing with the Pacific Theater of WWII that I did not know before, since most games and books seem to dwell on the European side of that War.
OVERALL: If you want to read a book with some variety in location, rich in history and sub-plots that don't seem connected until much later, then I definitely recommend this book. It's a jungle of a book, but sometimes the jungle is where you find the rarest treasure.
Score: 4
- Posted on 2008-06-20
Geez, Louise ...
Well, I gave what I thought to be a valiant effort at 260 pages, then had to say: no more. I'll admit it - I'm 53 years old, and while I have worked with computers for the past 30 years, to look at me you wouldn't think I was a computer geek, but perhaps I am. My beef is this: I grew up with the novels of Arthur Hailey (remember Airport?) where he spun out 8 or 10 storylines, then began to tie them together. Stephenson never ties them together. Perhaps you have to be 14 years old and have the attention span of a gnat to appreciate this (new?) writing style, but it's not for me.
Score: 1