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Neal Stephenson

Cryptonomicon Kindle Edition

by Neal Stephenson (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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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.

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William Morrow
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March 17, 2009
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Popular Highlights in this book

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Now he had learned that a machine, simple in its design, could produce results of infinite complexity.
Highlighted by 1,075 Kindle readers
Once you found the math in a thing, you knew everything about it, and you could manipulate it to your heart’s content with nothing more than a pencil and a napkin.
Highlighted by 986 Kindle readers
This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Neal Stephenson is the bestselling author of the novels Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

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

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"The Diamond Age establishes Neal Stephenson as a powerful voice for the cyber age and shows that his 1992 best seller, Snow Crash, was no fluke." -- Steve Jones, USA Today

"Neal Stephenson is the Quentin Tarantino of postcyberpunk science fiction. . .Having figured out how to entertain the hell out of a mass audience, Stephenson has likewise upped the form's ante with rambunctious glee." -- The Village Voice

"Stephenson [is] a literary visionary of the technological future." -- Seattle Weekly

"Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage." -- Los Angeles Reader

"Stephenson's world-building skills are extraordinary. . .The Diamond Age . . .should cement Stephenson's reputation as one of the brightest and wittiest young authors of American science fiction." -- The San Diego Union-Tribune

"This is a story to bury your nose in." -- John R. Alden, The Plain Dealer

"[Stephenson] is the hottest science fiction writer in America. . .Snow Crashis without question the biggest SF novel of the 1990s. Neal's new SF novel, The Diamond Age, promises more of the same. Together they represent a new era in science fiction." -- Bruce Sterling, Details

Cryptonomicon ... wants to blow your mind while keeping you well fed and happy. For the most part, it succeeds. It's brain candy for bitheads. -- The New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner

Stephenson ... lives up to his reputation as a steely-eyed word hacker, driving the story along with prose thick with cultural references and a plot that needs a substantial wood pulp infrastructure to support it. -- Wired, Craig E. Engler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews

Stephenson's prodigious new yarn (after The Diamond Age, 1995, etc.) whirls from WWII cryptography and top-secret bullion shipments to a present-day quest by computer whizzes to build a data haven amid corporate shark-infested waters, by way of multiple present-tense narratives overlaid with creeping paranoia. In 1942, phenomenally talented cryptanalyst Lawrence Waterhouse is plucked from the ruins of Pearl Harbor and posted to Bletchley Park, England, center of Allied code-breaking operations. Problem: having broken the highest German and Japanese codes, how can the Allies use the information without revealing by their actions that the codes have been broken? Enter US Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, specialist in cleanup details, statistical adjustments, and dirty jobs. In the present, meanwhile, Waterhouse's grandson, the computer-encryption whiz Randy, tries to set up a data haven in Southeast Asia, one secure from corporate rivals, nosy governments, and inquisitive intelligence services. He teams up with Shaftoe's stunning granddaughter, Amy, while pondering mysterious, e-mails from root@eruditorum.org, who's developed a weird but effective encoding algorithm. Everything, of course, eventually links together. During WWII, Waterhouse and Shaftoe investigate a wrecked U-boat, discovering a consignment of Chinese gold bars, and sheets of a new, indecipherable code. Code-named Arethusa, this material ends up with Randy, presently beset by enemies like his sometime backer, The Dentist. He finds himself in a Filipino jail accused of drug smuggling, along with Shaftoe's old associate, Enoch Root (root@eruditorum.org!). Since his jailers give him his laptop back, he knows someone's listening. So he uses his computing skills to confuse the eavesdroppers, decodes Arethusa, and learns the location of a huge hoard of gold looted from Asia by the Japanese. Detail-packed, uninhibitedly discursive, with dollops of heavy-handed humor, and set forth in the author's usual vainglorious style; still, there's surprisingly little actual plot. And the huge chunks of baldly technical material might fascinate NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk: showtime, with lumps. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Stephenson follows his startlingly original Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) with proof that he can do as well at twice the page-count, and not only that, but with the promise that this immense volume begins a saga that may rival Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time in its eventual proportions. Volume one, then, is the well-told tale of a World War II code breaker whose descendants end up trying to track down the secrets of the Third Reich's cryptographers--secrets that may liberate or ruin the cybertech world of the present day. Stephenson mixes historical and contemporary settings, handling both with great skill, as he presents a large cast of vividly imagined characters, notably including the original code breaker's granddaughter, and makes both the tale's technology and its conspiracies highly believable. His choice to tell the entire story in the present tense rather calls attention to itself, and, given a book nearly 1,000 pages long, every word is not really essential. Still, this is a book that should be bought for the sake of saying that you have it and read, however long that takes, for the pleasure and intellectual stimulation it is likely to give to most readers. Imagine Tom Clancy turning to cyberpunk, and you have some idea of its broad potential appeal. Roland Green --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Amazon.com Review

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

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Computer expert Randy Waterhouse spearheads a movement to create a safe haven for data in a world where information equals power and big business and government seek to control the flow of knowledge. His ambitions collide with a top-secret conspiracy with links to the encryption wars of World War II and his grandfather's work in preventing the Nazis from discovering that the Allies had cracked their supposedly unbreakable Enigma code. The author of Snow Crash (LJ 4/1/92) focuses his eclectic vision on a story of epic proportions, encompassing both the beginnings of information technology in the 1940s and the blossoming of the present cybertech revolution. Stephenson's freewheeling prose and ironic voice lend a sense of familiarity to a story that transcends the genre and demands a wide readership among fans of technothrillers as well as a general audience. Highly recommended.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Inside Flap

Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon was first published in 1999 to immense critical and popular acclaim. An ambitious, absorbing account of war, conspiracy, and code breaking, it represented a huge step forward for a gifted writer whose previous creations included the Hugo Award-winning The Diamond Age and the virtual reality classic, Snow Crash.The events of Cryptonomicon take place along two parallel time tracks: the Second World War and the present day. The earlier segments feature, among others, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a young math prodigy tasked with concealing the fact that Allied forces have successfully broken Germany's infamous Enigma code. Protagonists of the latter section include Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's grandson, a computer hacker helping to construct an autonomous “data haven” in the Sultanate of Kirakuta. Together, these two narratives successfully illuminate two different worlds, one of which grew directly out of the struggles and achievements of the other.Sometimes horrific, frequently hilarious, densely packed with information on a wide variety of subjects, from cryptanalysis to treasure hunting to the proper method of eating Cap'n Crunch, Cryptonomicon is a genuine modern epic. On one level, it is an astonishing, wholly original portrait of a world at war. On another, it is a provocative meditation on the ways that science and technology help shape—and alter—the course of human history. A work of great erudition and equally great imaginative power, it is—and will remain—one of the significant literary accomplishments of the modern era. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

From AudioFile

When an innovative Internet company decides to lay cable in the seas around the Philippine Islands, the company becomes embroiled in a treasure hunt of astounding potential. With roots in the Japanese occupation of the islands and in the grandparents of a current manager of the project, the story places its current happenings against a backdrop of history. As the plot bounces between the 1940s and the present, Scott Brick brings a sardonic tone that suits this motley collection of characters. His characterizations are well presented and differentiated. Some transitional passages are read by an unidentified woman, which is helpful, but close attention will still be required to follow the plot. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FC11A6
Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow (March 17, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 17, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2676 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 1168 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0380788624

Best Sellers Rank: #23,552 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #83 in Hard Science Fiction (Kindle Store)
- #87 in Technothrillers (Kindle Store)
- #104 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Kindle Store)

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(4.5) 7,752 ratings

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Neal Stephenson

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Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer, known for his speculative fiction works, which have been variously categorized science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk. Stephenson explores areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired Magazine, and has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system.

Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum) Stephenson came from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs "propeller heads". His father is a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics professor; his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, while her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa in 1966 where he graduated from Ames High School in 1977. Stephenson furthered his studies at Boston University. He first specialized in physics, then switched to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography and a minor in physics. Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Seattle with his family.

Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic "The Baroque Cycle" (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Paul Murphy

A Message From God

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 21, 2015

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Cryptonomicon is a book about patterns, numbers, and patterns in society. It is a macho laced adventure that takes place on two parallel time continuums involving characters of two generations of family. Mixed in this is a moral message. The whole book is a metaphor on how cryptic this moral message is. It’s the unfolding of character traits with the suggestion that through all of the history of mankind, there is a thread that can be pulled through to our origins, God. The message is cryptic and the reader only needs to tune in to it. Essentially the center theme, stated through the character Avi a Jew, is to redirect the energy put in to war driven greed towards good. Now that sounds real sappy. So Stephenson as opposed to a Marvel Action comic book, presents an intellectual action thriller.

One comes to appreciate in the first story thread that takes place during WWII how much value should be placed on intelligence. Knowing what the Germans or Japanese were going to do was essential to being ready for their attacks. We woke up to this reality on December 7, 1941. The prime characters in this thread are the intellectuals that decrypt coded messages. Mixed in with the character set is one action hero that stands apart. Amazing how need to survive catapults technology. There is little moral message in this thread. Some of the characters are fictional, and some are genuine as in Alan Turing. Turning and Waterhouse, college buddies combine their efforts to give birth to what has grown up to be artificial intelligence. Yeap computer punch cards, with patterned punches decrypted enemy messages. At that time, and I believe it is still mostly true today that artificial intelligence still requires a human to input the original algorithm. I say this because the reader will find in this book the answer to that question through school: “why do I need to learn math”?

On the other time continuum the second generation comes in the form of hi-tech adventure capitalists stumbling into the opportunity to recoup enough war gold to realize the kernel of capital to eliminating the greed/power seeds of war. The reader becomes aware of the fundamentals of an economy and therefore appreciates that any economy must be underwritten with the ability to pay on a promissory note, no matter what technology, that being a coin, a piece of paper, or a digital bitcoin. Yeap the book gives legitimacy to the reality of a totally digital currency.

Moral Message: First you encounter these words that draw on the gods of the Greek that go back to origin, it speaks to patterns of thinking that transcends time: From the book: "“If you think of the Greek gods as real supernatural beings who lived on Mount Olympus, no. But if you think of them as being in the same class of entities as the Root Rep, which is to say, patterns of neurological activity that the mind uses to represent things that it sees, or thinks it sees, in the outside world, then yes. Suddenly, Greek gods can be just as interesting and relevant as real people. Why? Because, in the same way as you might one day encounter another person with his own Root Rep so, if you were to have a conversation with an ancient Greek person, and he started talking about Zeus, you might—once you got over your initial feelings of superiority—discover that you had some mental representations inside your own mind that, though you didn’t name them Zeus and didn’t think of them as a big hairy thunderbolt-hurling son of a Titan, nonetheless had been generated as a result of interactions with entities in the outside world that are the same as the ones that cause the Zeus Representation to appear in the Greek’s mind. And here we could talk about the Plato’s Cave thing for a while—the Veg-O-Matic of metaphors—it slices! it dices!”"

So past events are tied to a future of world peace at the grace of super heroes who use brain and brawn to get you there. But Stephenson gets you there with a moral message tied to Jesus Christ, the Son of God. In the end there is much dialogue that begins with a Catholic priest and Randy Waterhouse a crypto-geek in a prison cell that carries on to an executive of a very powerful Japanese firm who knows where the war gold is:

From the book: "“I came to the Church because of some words.”“Words?”“This is Jesus Christ who taketh away the sins of the world,” Goto Dengo says. “Enoch Root, no one knows the sins of the world better than me. I have swum in those sins, drowned in them, burned in them, dug in them. I was like a man swimming down a long cave filled with black cold water. Looking up, I saw a light above me, and swam towards it. I only wanted to find the surface, to breathe air again. Still immersed in the sins of the world, at least I could breathe. This is what I am now.”

My interpretation of this somewhat cryptic moral message enter keyword cigarroomofbooks, its in my Oct 2015 reviews

7 people found this helpful

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Daniel Myers

WOW!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2008

Verified Purchase

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!

17 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Marcus

The sort of ripping yarn where the nerd always gets the girl

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 6, 2018

Verified Purchase

As books in this genre go, it is pretty well written, with genuine wit, and some creative imagery. The plot rattles along in an unputdownable way, and I like the peppering of well-presented elementary cryptography.

The style reminds me of those old H. Rider Haggard books like She: an adolescent wet dream with no real characters, but at least you know who the goodies and baddies are. You can see why male computer nerds like this sort of book, where all the beautiful girls end up going out with nerds.

Some other reviewers have compared Cryptonomicon to Thomas Pynchon's books such as Gravity's Rainbow, Against The Day, or V. These share with Cryptonomicon a love of Mathematics and sometimes far-fetched engineering. They also share graphic descriptions of sex.

However, Pynchon is a great novelist, and Stephenson is a competent one. What is the difference?

Partly it is down to the care taken over the authorship. Cryptonomicon has holes in its plot that undermine its credibility: why does Andrew Loeb act the way he does? what is the point of Wing? The name Ferdinand is spelt in Japanese differently every time it is written, and I do not think we can blame the Kindle version for that, though there are plenty of examples of Kindle'ese here, such as 'burnwad'.

Partly it is down to the two-dimensionality of the characters, especially the female ones. I cannot see this book appealing to feminists, or women at all really. It is very hard to see why any of the female characters are attracted to the male ones.

But the great thing about Pynchon is that his books are about something. Not just the plot, but the shape of the plot, the subplots, the nature of the characters, the descriptive passages, even the title -- all resound to the same theme. Cryptonomicon in contrast reads like a collection of different ideas, loosely stapled together.

To summarise, I enjoyed reading the book, kept turning the pages, and especially enjoyed the Appendix. Maybe I'd have been more generous with the stars had the book not been so eclipsed by Thomas Pynchon.

31 people found this helpful

Andy Fox

320 great pages , which left 611 really dreadful ones...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 19, 2022

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Nine Hundred and eleven pages of disconnected ramblings.

I'm a fan of the author and have read a few of his books and thoroughly enjoyed them.

this book is a dreadful read from start to finish, no story, nothing to keep it together, it jumps from timeline to timeline with nothing to hold the threads together,

Cardboard characters that are so artificial I couldnt get to liking or even empathizing with.

the fact that its even less historically less historically accurate than the film U571 doesnt help anything along, neither does the really bad explanations of how cryptography works.

with some random references to UNIX and Windows NT4.0 coupled with some really pointless sex scenes, and multiple descriptions of Masturbation and nocturnal emissions make this book a big fat Zero.

I should have sacked this off at the 50 page mark but i stayed with it till the bitter end.

Dont waste your time with this book, it is dire.

if you are tempted to buy it then avoid the Kindle version and go for either paperback or hard back editions. with 900+ pages you wont need to buy toilet roll for a good few months

5 people found this helpful

Bertolt

A few weaknesses but basically very good

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 4, 2022

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For a long time I shied away from this author, because somehow I'd go the idea that he writes huge tomes (he does) with great wads of description (not as such). I gave him a go this time because a review said he was like Thomas Pynchon.

He's not THAT much like Pynchon tbh, but this is good. The three main story threads are set in two different time zones, WWII and today (or at least, the time the novel was written), and both deal in codes - Bletchley Park-type spy codes and code-breaking in earlier threads and computer coding later. Except, as you go along everything becomes a code. Someone walks through London streets, up and down the high curbs, and he envisions it as a code. There's a business deal, one party pulling tricks, and the others have to read his actions as if they were a code. An intelligence officer twists a radio aerial in ways designed to fool German spies into thinking X, so he is in effect getting them to read it... like a code. It's clever and witty, with a lot of narrative and events. There is lots of information about maths, codes, etc, along the way, which you may not like. Personally, I found it interesting.

It's not without flaws. It is, finally, too long (should have ended about the 75% mark.) Parts are absurd, and I'm not sure it ultimately adds up to much: if this were Pynchon then codes would serve as metaphor for all of Western civilisation, with well-researched and insightful observations throughout, but this is just a lark. Still, it's intelligent, there is plenty in it, and it cracks along at a fair pace, not really developing rounded characters much but offering plenty of story that pulls you with it. I will definitely read more from this author.

4 people found this helpful

Book worm

Incoherence

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 17, 2020

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In each of the first 3 chapters you're thrown into a random situation, you're trying to familiarise yourself with new characters, new story, new location. As soon as it starts getting interesting the chapter is over and everything changes completely. It's almost like it's intentionally trying to build confusion just to be great later. If that's the case, the book failed. I'm not wasting my time on another potentially pointless chapter, so all I'm left with is the first 3 incoherent chapters.

6 people found this helpful

Don Rogers

Fun and a bit mind stretching

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 28, 2020

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I first read this when it came out (late 90's) and enjoyed it a lot, and also learned some interesting stuff about cryptography, so I was looking forward to reading it again 20 years on. Interestingly it has not dated as much as I had anticipated, mostly because much of the most interesting stuff is set in the second world war. This time round I rather enjoyed as well the romance set in the present day. There are lots of bits that are light and sometimes quite funny, as well as some pretty gruelling treatments of events during the war. However (like most of Stephenson's work) it is very long, and could have done with some heavy editing - sometimes it's quite tempting just to give up on the whole thing. Overall though I'd say give it a go, though I think I still prefer Snow Crash, by the same author

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