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Neal Stephenson

Cryptonomicon Mass Market Paperback – Box set, November 5, 2002

by Neal Stephenson (Author)

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With this extraordinary first volume in 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 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.

Print length

1168 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Avon Books
Publication date

November 5, 2002
Dimensions

4.19 x 1.75 x 6.75 inches
ISBN-10

0060512806
ISBN-13

978-0060512804
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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

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 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.

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.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Avon Books (November 5, 2002)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1168 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060512806
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060512804
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.19 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1.75 x 6.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #412,891 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,255 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #1,796 in Hard Science Fiction (Books)
- #20,498 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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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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beyond excellent

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 29, 2023

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Actually, beyond my puny brain... This author left me in the dust with his wordsmithing. Many times I had to interrupt and look up something a character says in the dictionary and then I could continue. So if you want a good look into WW2 history this is an entertaining place to start.

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

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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!

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M.A

Cryptonomicon, un clásico de Ciencia Ficción

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on September 24, 2019

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el libro llegó a tiempo y en perfectas condiciones.

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Excellent book, typical Stephenson ending

Reviewed in Japan 🇯🇵 on August 19, 2013

Verified Purchase

I really enjoyed this book. Flipping between time periods from chapter to chapter was fun and worked.

The ending was ok, but not up to the same standard as the rest of the book.

Fernando A. O. Prieto

Apenas aceitável.

Reviewed in Brazil 🇧🇷 on November 18, 2019

Verified Purchase

Não encontrei nesse livro o que esperava; acho o estilo do autor muito concentrado em certos aspectos (por exemplo detalhes de operações) que para mim não são muito interessantes. Isto não desqualifica o autor e a obra para leitura de outras pessoas.

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Martin L.

Second thoughts about the WW2 crypto story?

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on March 26, 2019

Verified Purchase

I had those second thoughts. Also, I am not fond of spy thrillers or anything of that sort.
This book is, however, one of the greatest stories I have read. To put a single genre label on it would not do it justice. The whole big mix is coherent and understandable and you always know where you are and why; I still love every page of it.

2 people found this helpful

rbr5679

A huge disappointment.

Reviewed in Germany 🇩🇪 on November 9, 1999

Verified Purchase

I was so looking forward to reading this book, but then this. The plot is lame, the characters lack any depth, and Stephenson's normally superb writing style is at its worst. Only halfway through the book, the general idea becomes clear. After that you hope for something to happen but the story doesn't take off. The worst thing is that dozens of pages are devoted to absolutely irrelevant topics (eating cereals!). The only good part about this book is the good explanation of crypto-systems but then you don't buy a novel to read about technical details. Conclusion: Don't buy this book. Go and read Zodiac, Snow Crash, or Diamond Age, they are a lot better. (Hopefully Stephenson's next book will rise up the old level of writing.)

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