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Review:Cryptonomicon
Cryptonomicon is about crypto, which is to say cryptology, which is to say it's about codes. The title is the name of a book of code-lore which has accrued over the years, though its role in this novel is actually pretty marginal. Cryptology is the glue that holds together a plot that alternates back and forth between World War Two and the present day and focuses on three (almost four) main characters:
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a mild-mannered midwesterner who hangs out at Princeton with Alan Turing and is playing in an army band at Pearl Harbor when it gets blown to hell. Then his mathematical mind is discovered by the military brass and he quickly becomes involved in the information war to which the actual, physical fighting is a series of inevitable afterthoughts and conclusions.
Bobby Shaftoe, the unkillable, morphine-addled China Marine who sees a vision of a Lizard at Guadacanal and ends up fighting his way through a series of inexplicable missions for the top-secret British-American Detachment 2702.
Randall Lawrence Waterhouse, Lawrence's grandson, a computer geek and crypto hobbyist who helps found the Epiphyte Corporation in the present day with some of his friends. He finds himself quickly eye-deep in data havens, underwater cabling, and buried treasure.
The other one vying for billing as a major character is Goto Dengo, a Japanese soldier. Bobby's descendants come into the mix too, as well as a motley assortment of hackers, a sultan, a U-boat commander, a Holocaust-obsessed entrepeneur, and the enigmatic, wonderful pseudo-priest Enoch Root.
So the ground is laid for a rather exciting techno-thriller, and we at least know from Snow Crash that Stephenson can deliver technology-soaked excitement with a deft hand. Cryptonomicon delivers in spades, but it goes a step or two beyond that as well. Crypto shows up again and again not just as a central element in the plots of both timelines, but as a theme that informs everything from Bobby Shaftoe's wartime haikus to Randy's attempts to decipher the love signals sent to him by Bobby's granddaughter Amy. Discovering the hidden patterns within seeming randomness, discovering the order out of chaos -- these things are not just in the book, they are what the book is. The plot works in precisely this way, following different people in different times until their lives inevitably collide and interconnect.
We also get treated to more of Stephenson's razor-sharp cultural insight. The same eye that made Snow Crash so prophetic even while it was being zany and over-the-top informs Cryptonomicon. Instead of inventing a future reality, he digs up the most unusual facts and locales of the real world, and, spinning them into his own idiosyncratic vision and prose, turns it into something so odd and scary and wonderful that we barely recognize it as our own. This is especially jarring in the World War Two scenes, probably because we are used to hearing and reading and seeing those tales in a certain mythic, grainy black & white style. Stephenson can't quite resist doing some fictionalizing of his own, as with the more-Celtic-than-the-Celts realm of Qwghlm and the South Pacific island of Kinakuta. These are fun in their own way but almost disappointments -- he is so able to bring to life the quirks of existing places that going out of his way to make up new ones is unnecessary, a frivolity.
As he was in prevous novels, Stephenson here is highly multicultural in the sense of setting his stories literally worldwide in a wide variety of cultures, and displaying a fair amount of knowledge and insight about each one. What's different and fresh (and will probably piss off some people) is that no culture is safe from his scathing observations about what is worst about it. Much of the novel takes place in the Philippines, past and present -- a cultural & economic & historical crossroads that makes a perfect setting for his melting pot plot. (He is at his best realizing and describing its complex urban & rural dynamics.) He's extremely harsh on the Germans and the Japanese, of course, and yet the two most admirable characters in the book are German and Japanese, respectively.
Cryptonomicon's World War Two subplot is timely in its arrival, what with the upsurge in interest in the period marked, for example, by Saving Private Ryan and Tom Brokaw's bestselling book The Greatest Generation. A certain amount of ancestor-worship is going on here, and this novel takes some part in it. There is a marked difference between the past and present storylines -- our WWII heroes are constantly getting into life-and-death situations, improvising brilliant ways to escape or to kill people, breaking unbreakable codes, inventing the digital computer, etc. By contrast the entrepeneurial exploits of Randy and his friends seem hopelessly mundane. Fortunately it's a good deal more subtle than that, though. For one thing, the constant juxtapositions of events past and present (a present-day corporate board meeting next to a WWII war room, for example, or the hauntingly similar sexual dilemmas of the respective Waterhouses) remind us that what separates these people is not so much essence but circumstance. And in the later pages, too, the present-day subplot gets every bit as life-threatening and globally significant. Stephenson also doesn't idolize or sugar-coat the foibles of his "greatest generation."
So what about the comparisons to Thomas Pynchon? Now that Stephenson has a World War Two novel (or at least half of one) under his belt, they are both inevitable and ubiquitous. Behind it is a larger implied question: does this novel have literary worth? (Whatever that means.) Stephenson can write well, but he's not a prose maestro in the same class as Pynchon or David Foster Wallace. You could also take him to task, perhaps, for "lack of deep character development," if you were into that sort of thing. (Interestingly, Randy is the most well-developed character in the book, probably because the others are too busy doing things for Stephenson to dwell on their inner states overmuch. It takes a certain amount -- no, a tremendous amount -- of courage to make one of your chief protagonists a nerdy UNIX hacker and ex-fantasy roleplayer who's a little soft around the middle. But he does it and it works.) What Stephenson does have is the knack for plot (in this case, an exquisitely complex one), the ability to tell a good, long story. He does it a good deal better than Pynchon or D.F. Wallace or most other big writers these days. For my money, that's the most important part of what makes good literature good, and it's what this novel does best.
Just as important, as long as we're talking about fin-de-siecle literature, is the fact that Stephenson has a flying clue about technology and computers. The world is full of modernist and postmodernist gripe about the existential dilemmas of a fragmented society and the epistemological chaos implicit in the information age. The fact of the matter is that things still seem to be trundling along pretty well -- I for one, don't feel particularly spiritually crippled because I get my news on the Web and stay in touch with most of my friends via email. Any novelist who's going to write about where we are and where we've been can only get so far as an outsider -- he or she has to have the sort of understanding of our hyperlinked world that comes from growing up inside it and around it. That's Stephenson. Bruce Sterling called him a "second-generation cyberpunk author," which is basically saying the same thing in a different context. Cryptonomicon takes us through the origins of the computer on the one hand and their fringe applications with cryptologically-obsessed hackers on the other; in both cases he knows of what he speaks. He can write about people visavis computers with specificity and circumspection.
At root and at heart, though, Cryptonomicon is a technothriller. Adventure, excitement, and discovery are its primary traits, and any status it may claim as a document of cultura insight or a novel for the end of millenium is of necessity a secondary one. This is exactly as it should be -- the person who sets out to write a "great novel" probably won't make it. The person who sets out to tell a cool story just might.
Pressing Question Number One: Does this book have any business being 900 pages long?
Opinion may vary on this one, but I think the answer is yes. We have essentially two novels here, one for each of the timelines, that eventually become fully enmeshed but each have their own arcs of development. Stephenson is not an overwriter in terms of prose -- stuff is happening all through these pages. There are certainly diversions, and maybe it's these that some people would just as soon see removed. Moby Dick had its whaling chapters; Cryptomicon has chapter-long diversions into mathematics, number theory, Van Eck phreaking, and Captain Crunch cereal. A good number of these aren't actually diversions, since you have to absorb a good bit of the cryptological theory before you can fully understand all the subtleties of the plot. Even the truly frivolous diversions are enjoyable in their own right. Sure, we didn't need to have the part where Randy meets a friend amid a bunch of collectible-card-game-playing geeks, but as a geeky gamer myself, I'm sure glad he did.
Pressing Question Number Two: Has Stephenson learned how to actually end a novel?
This question haunted me through much of Cryptonomicon's length. I tossed The Diamond Age across the room in anger when I realized, thirty pages shy of the end, that there was literally no way he could wrap it up satisfactorily. And, indeed, it didn't end so much as get dragged, half-developed, over the finish line. I didn't have as much trouble with the Snow Crash finale as others, but I could always see their points. But now, finally, he's got it right. Fittingly for a novel largely about math, it ends with an almost geometric precision, alternating timelines fleshing out the answers to our lingering questions, crucial bits of witheld information casting whole vistas of previously mysterious action suddenly and satisfyingly clear.
But this is not a novel without weaknesses. It's so big and diffuse that different people will probably be bored and annoyed by different things. My personal biggest gripe comes toward the end, when a minor character lurches onto the scene, barely justifiably, to provide an impetus of danger and climax for Randy & his companions in the jungles of the Philippines. It was, to put it mildly, a stretch. Just the sort of thing that I could imagine happening if Stephenson were desperately cranking out the final pages of the novel, stuck for just what could possibly get in Randy's way, and finally coming up with . . . this. But while a lapse of this kind completely broke the ending of The Diamond Age, here it's just an annoyance. And the annoyances that are to be found don't amount to anything more than the sum of their parts.
Word on the street is that this isn't the last big-ass crypto novel that Stephenson is going to write. There are certainly stories hinted at in here but not explored, especially regarding the mysterious Eruditorium. Yes, there are conspiracies in this novel, and even a gonzo quasi-philosophical worldview worthy of the "nam-shub of Enki." And who were the guy in dreadlocks and the Indian-looking guy, anyway? I have a feeling we'll find out in a few years. We haven't seen the last of the Cryptonomicon. I take that as a good thing.
Pick the book up at Amazon.
Cryptonomicon is really one of the best books to come out in a while... This is a good review of it as well. If you look at the reviews on Amazon you will see quite a few people did not think Stephenson made the jump to 900+ pages very well, but I disagree.
Like most monstrous books, the plot is plodding along rather slowly. I miss the breakneck pace of Snow Crash.
I like the book, have read 'bout 300 pages so far,
but i got really anoyed when I read that Randy
uses his GSM phone in Japan. Japan does not support GSM, they have system called PDC which
currently is not compatible with GSM.
Gravity's Rainbow is indeed a slog. I've
read it 2 1/2 times, I guess. I keep it by
my desk and open it up at random once in a
while when I need a real break. But it is
a slog. I just ignored the unexplicable stuff
the first time throught. There is a concordance
that attempts to explain things. One fantasy I
have is getting a week off by the beach with
GR and the concordance and giving it one more
go.
As for other Pynchon books, I liked (but could
never finish) V. I read the one about the
pacific northwest once, but wasn't thrilled. I'm
very slowly working through "Mason & Dixon". The
beginning nautical stuff is wondefull if you're
a Patrick O'Brian fan (Another story!). The
land-side stuff is a bit thicker go.
My feeling is that the out-of-this-world wierdness
of Pynchon's works fits well in the out-of-this
world wierdness of War. I imagine WWW2 as a
world apart, complete with Heroes, Monsters, and
earth-shattering battles, hence Pynchonesque
narratives fit. It's tougher to translate this
to the 1970's pacific northwest.
As for Cryptonomicon, I actually had it in my
hand the last time I was at a bookstore, but
balked at the price. Oh well, off to the mall,
since "A dying light in cordoba" is almost
wrapped up.
-- cary
Oh, if you want to blither about Pynchon more,
skip over to Amazon. Last time I checked there
was a ton of reviews, both very pro and very con.
Back to work! SLAP!
Yes, I have. It has a lot of the same qualities (humor, fast pace, lots of neat ideas) as his books under his own name, and I'd recommend it to any Neal Stephenson fan.
I wasn't as impressed as the reviewer. I certainly wouldn't give it a 10/10. With 900+ pages to play in, almost all of the characters were unsatisfyingly introduced and left undeveloped. Only the Waterhouse characters actually had a "real person" quality about them. Many other aspects of the story are left to hang in favor of copying from various advanced math textbooks.
.nospam)
Much of the book appears to have been set down to "toy descriptions". My term for the type of writing pioneered by Piers Anthony, where the technical specifications of a contextual element (Finux == Linux) are given higher billing than just interacting with the context in a consistent and exciting manner. There are a number of ways of getting the reader excited about technological context that don't involve long detailed asides into the foundations of the technology. Even Neal knows how to do this, as demonstrated in "Diamond Age", still my favorite book of his. The description of the MC (matter compiler) was spread out through experiential explanations (we overhear Nell being told about the MC, we see the feed stiffen as ice is used by the MC to provide cooling for a powerful computer, etc.).
Finally, all of these spotty and poorly justified story arcs "come together" at the end of the book. This is clearly the least impressive ending Neal has created to date. The various Epiphyte companies are still in a state of inexplicable chaos, the Dentist and others remain immediate serious obstacles, and the most important techo-explanation of the book: how the principals are going to use many tons of gold to create an offshore currency, remains wide open.
I put this book down very frustrated and while there are some elements that I will quote from, and others that are relevant to my own pursuits, I don't recommend this book to anyone but those already involved in communications and crypto.
I give it a 6/10.
Regards,
Ross Bagley ross_bagley.nospam@email.com
(remove
...take a gander at http://www.eruditorum.org, as well.
Yes, there is a certain individual named Ronald Reagan.
Re: Nippon
In Japanese class, we learned it as Nihon. Nippon was a more formal name we never used. Nihon-jin = Japanese person. Amerika-jin = American person.
Re: holocaust
Avi wanted to create an information pod which explained to the potential victims of repression how to prevent it from happening to them. Sort of an ultimate guerilla warfare manual.
Why do people feel that [female,black,gay,canadian,whatever] characters in books have to be models of their notion of [race,class,religion,whatever]?
I take the "Randy's wife" parts of the book as a statement about Luddites and extreme viewpoints in the academic community. Nerds just want to hack. Why should they be made to feel guilty about this? Why can't nerds and non-nerds just get along? I sympathised with Randy's situation, and his reaction, in the restaurant confrontation.
:-) ) Dealing with social issues can at times be difficult and non-sensical for your average nerd, (I have the hubris to speak for all nerds here) but male-female interactions and sex can be very non-linear indeed. All of the nerds I know (including myself) suffer various degrees of anxiety when placed in these situations. Me and my friends are now all happily married, and far more social and well-adjusted than we were as high school geeks, but hey, the anxiety never really goes away. It is amusing to see some of these feelings explored by the Randy and Lawrence characters.
As far as the characterization of the women in the book, I saw this as an honest (but not necessarily politically correct) exploration of male nerds and the difficulties they have with women and sex. Not having eons to contemplate the intracacies, one tends to "black-box" issues so as to not be overwhelmed by them. (Or, you could say that excessive navel gazing is illogical and detracts from hack time
So anyway, That is my read on this part of the book. I will concede that if indeed Neal's intent was to vent his spleen on Luddites and explore nerd sociology, it was not as well defined and spelled out as some of the other "tutorial" sections of the book, like the explanation of cyphers, etc.
anyway, my two cents worth....
Your old sig offended an anonymous coward and you removed it? Have some backbone, man. Don't let some faceless jerk tell you how to act.
I know of this first-hand, my partner is a Women's Studies grad....but it still smacks of feminist-baiting and stereotyping. Not every feminist is a man-hating/technology-hating freak. :) But most(>50%) of them are...that's why it's a stereotype
Hitting the space bar to type morse code nearly got me to laugh caffeine out of my nose. I can imagine sitting and moreing a large document to do that. And the reply with xled.
But WTF with Enoch Root coming back from the dead (finland) to surface in the Phillipines?
The book was good enough to interrupt my sleep patterns, but there were enough holes and inconsistencies to make me annoyed at the end. I think the book could have used a good editor and one last pass through the process.
What do you base this argument on, Mr. Troll? Do you have ANY statistics that back this statement up at all, or are you just talking out of your ass? I'm guessing the latter. You've obviously never interacted in any way with real feminists and know only what you read in novels like this.
>By the way, did anyone else catch that Miss Matheson in Diamond Age was Y.T. from Snow Crash? Or is it just me...
What, because she used the "chiseled spam" line? Someone asked him about that at a reading, and he said para Diamond Age and Snow Crash aren't _really_ in the same continuity, he just threw that in to tweak the readers end para.
>The Cobweb isn't terrible but there are better things to read.
True. It isn't terrible, but it isn't special either. A run-of-the-mill Gulf War technothriller that anyone could have written.
That particular part you mentioned was disconcerting the first time I read it. Continue on and you'll realize that Bobby is dreaming about his experience with the lizard - which is not fully explained at first.
It's Neal, not Neil.
You obviously didn't read the previous post:
But most(>50%) of them are...that's why it's a stereotype
Where does the person who posted this message get the %50 figure from? I've never heard of a Gallup poll that asked the American feminist movement how many of them were crazed man-haters.
I happened to read this on my way to Asia on a business trip, and was extremely entertained by his insights about Asia in general were pretty appropriate, and the comment about airline stewardesses on Asian airlines was spot on! If I were to write a book, I would certainly look to Stephenson as someone I would like to emulate...
Bobby Shaftoe is a funny name to anyone raised in a British culture, as there is a nursery rhyme that runs:
Booby Shaftoe went to sea,
Silver buckles on his knee,
He'll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shaftoe.
etc.
I found that section a splendid send up of the left-wing clerisy that infests universities and other public institutions. The atmosphere of political correctness, witch-hunts and slavish uniformity of opinion at odds with reality was spot-on. If you read further in the book, the 'pointless trip to California' makes the deeper point here, which is a thread that runs through all of Stephensons work. The point is that the left-wing belief that all cultures are equally valid is pernicious bunkum. It leaves a moral vacuum that is filled up with conformity to received ideas and shibboleths with no lasting value.
Cultures and beliefs that have more depth to them are not threatend by disagreement in the same way - with a bedrock of belief and values you can hold to, you are more resilient in the face of chaos in the world. The cultural evolution in Snow Crash and Diamond age explores this, as does the satire in Interface.
The character of Avi makes this explicit in his quest for the roots of genocide and absolute preference for one kind of culture above another. Enoch Root makes and extended exposition of historical and pre-historical roots of succesful and unsuccesful cultures.
(I still can't understand why no-one is making a filem from Interface - it woudl be a Dr Strangelove for the new millennium. Perhaps it undermines the shallowness of media a little too well...)
Hi,
Not talking quality of the prose but the actual medium.
Nearly purchased this book at Boarders, but put it back because the quality of the paper and everything else was horrible.
Talking way jaggeed edges similar to the cheap hard cover editions I used to get from the SciFi book club when I had time to read several books a week.
Anyway, is there anyway to get a higher quality print then what is available in the store?????
Thanx!
motjuste@briefcase.com
I just bought the book today and I happened upon what i think is a mistake. on page 168, it is said that the LCM of 20 and 100 == 200. Not so. The LCM is 100. Anyways.
btyler@ece.utexas.edu
Polo called it Zipangu (at leset, we think Zipangu is Japan, it's hard to tell for sure). The origin of "Japan" is uncertain but probably does come through Chinese, yes.
The puzzle at
www.eruditorum.org
I dunno if it's 'official' or not...
I'm happy that we didn't spend any time on this guy's trip down insanity lane-- the book was long enough as is without wasting space on a minor character's utter breakdown. Of course, what little info we did get (mmmm, satanic ritual abuse. tasty) was enough to spell F-U-C-K-E-D U-P.
Strangely enough, that is exactly what happened to me. I brought work's copy of "Applied Cryptography" home with me after reading "Cryptonomicon". I was expecting to find it quite dry and boring, but no! It was *a * lot more interesting and entertaining than I expected.
Did you notice that Bruce Schneier wrote the "Solitaire" game at the end of the book?
It seems that they do. :-)
I am quite in awe that we have the other cryptographer thanked in "Cryptonomicon", Ian Goldberg, right here in Montreal these days.
Wow.
I sincerely hope that his books are more easy to follow than Pynchon's. I have tried 3 times to read Gravity's Rainbow and to date have not been able to drag myself past page 200. I agree that Thomas is a brilliant writer, but I think my IQ must be a bit too low to be able to follow where the hell he's going with his stories.
David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, is nothing short of a genius. I was heartened to see his name in the review even though it wasn't really used much for comparison purposes. The fact that the two names can be mentioned in the same review at all tells me that I need to check this new book out.
(Anyone who has not read any of Wallace's books should do so. Infinite Jest is a great place to start...)
While I was reading Cryptonomicon I got interested in reading more about cryptography and right there in the new release section of my local bookstore they had this Code Breaking book which was a history and explanation (with seemingly lots of examples) of cryptography.
Has anyone read this? Is it good? I'm not asking for advice on whether to buy it, since I picked it up last night. But I also picked up Ralph Ellison's posthumous Juneteenth and I'm reading that first, so I want to know what to expect.
And if anyone can recommend good crypto books, go ahead. I'm interested and I'm sure some other people are too.
My dad used to be stationed at Yokota Air Force Base in Japan, so I spent several years there. One thing it's impossible not to notice is that the country of Japan seems to keep being referred to as Nippon. So it was pretty easy to deduce that Nippon was the Japanese way of saying Japan, so it should also be correct. NEC is just one example of that, but probably the best for an international audience. I know we Americans tend to change everything to suit us, but I have no idea how the "N" got changed to a "J". Anyone know the etymology behind this?
While I'm completely enjoying this book, I'm not sure it'll catch a large audience. The technology (like Turing machines) aren't explained all that well for non-technical people. Same with some of the people in the book (like Turing himself). The explination of one-time crypto is done pretty well though. The ideas from present day are explained very well, and are about || close to being reality.
My only other complaint is the Gibson-esque jumping around within sections. One paragraph a character is in a plane, the next he's on a beach being pinned down, then a couple paragraphs later he's back on the plane. I have a fairly linear mind (I could handle the rapid changes in books like the in Turtledove's WorldWar series), but I really have this thing about jumping around within sections of chapters. Writing like that would probably be better for the screen.
Posted by TheGrimburgoth:
The jumping-around within chapters was made necessary, a lot of the time, by Stephenson's funky way of tracing the story -between- chapters. The following sort of technique is not just typical, it's ubiquitous in the novel:
1. We end a chapter with Bobby & Co. leaving a crashed ship to fight their way across Sweden.
2. We have a chapter with Randy, maybe a chapter with Lawrence.
3. When we get to the next chapter with Bobby, he's in bed with a Finnish lady! We have no clue what happened in Sweden.
What happens, then, is that somewhere in the middle of a given chapter, the gaps between it and the previous one with that character are filled in (through dialogue, flashback, whatever). But for a few pages there, as the reader you're doing double-time: trying to adjust to where the protag is now, but also waiting and wondering about what happened where he was.
This made for some confusing parts. I definitely had to do a bit of page-flipping at the beginning of some chapters just to remember where we had last left this particular hero. For me, anyway, the technique -worked- in that it kept my interest: I was avidly pluging through each chapter to discover what just happened in addition to what was about to happen. For a novel that's already jumping back and forth through time, it's an appropriate schtick as well.
There's also some interesting (I'll use that word instead of 'good' or 'bad' since I'm not sure if I like it) stuff going on in terms of which scenes he chooses to actually narrate and which ones occur in the gaps between chapters. E.g. the Sweden thing -- dammit, I wanted to read about that! No such luck. Or how we get a whole chapter about Lawrence's sexual frustrations visavis Mary, but absolutely none of the scene of them getting it on or getting engaged -- when we finally learn it it's in a chapter from another character's perspective. That one didn't bother me as much, and for the most part I suspect Neal's instincts were good as to what to keep and what to defer.
Nathan Bruinooge
nsb@wizard.net
nope, it's hiroaki not hirohito.
btw, anyone know where i can get a cryptonomicon t-shirt? they had one in the boston book signing.
mustapha.
I'm fascinated by crypto. I think that "Snow Crash" is a masterpiece of storytelling, and "Zodiac" is also damn good. I bought this book as soon as I could, and in the end I only finished it so I could say I had.
Mr. Stevenson needs to return to tight storytelling; I mostly found his random asides about family histories and suchlike offputting. I think the "tutorial-in-novel" approach comes across as heavy handed. All the women in the book exist for the male characters to fall in and out of love with, which it's hard to ignore when he keeps putting forth his offputting attitude to sex. The plot twists aren't very twisty. The characters are all schematics. Qwyglhm doesn't sit well with the rest of the book. The ending is deeply unsatisfactory. And the appendix describing the encryption algorithm used in the book (which I read first, on Counterpane's home page) turns out to be full of spoilers.
Don't bother. Wait 'till Stevenson writes something short again, and maybe that will reward the time to read it.
--
Employ me! Unix,Linux,crypto/security,Perl,C/C++,distance work. Edinburgh UK.
Xenu loves you!
When she was busted by the Feds in Snow Crash, they give her full name, it is the same as the person in The Diamond Age.
Plato seems wrong to me today
I apologize for being dense but what's so funny about "Goto Dengo"? I can see reading his family name as being like the BASIC instruction GOTO but that's not too funny. "Hiro Protagonist" is pretty funny and "Y.T." funny but less so.
In Cryptonomicon was amused by Randy's asumptions about the address root@eruditorium.org.
If you like Stephenson's stuff you might want to check out the two books he's written with J. Frederick George (who's his uncle or something) under the pseudonym Stephen Bury. The first (and best) is Interface which is a modern day-ish thriller about electing a stroked-out politician with a computer chip in his brain as President of the United States. Their second book together is The Cobweb which takes place during the Persian Gulf War and is about Iraqs working on bio-warefare at U.S. universities. If you like Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon I recommend reading Interface. The Cobweb isn't terrible but there are better things to read.
I'm really glad that Zodiac: The Eco-Thriller was reprinted after Snow Crash's success because I really enjoyed it. I've also read Stephenson's first book, The Big U, which is pretty silly but if you enjoy Stephenson's style you might look for it at your local library. It's out of print and not worth the effort of tracking it down.
But WTF with Enoch Root coming back from the dead (finland) to surface in the Phillipines?
if you pay close attention, he doesn't actually die, they fake it and sneak him out the back... i missed it the first time...
-garrett
--
I really liked this book-- however, Cryptonomicon is not perfect.
It seems Stephenson is at his best when describing some fascinating technical artifact or mathematical algorithm. I really enjoyed those parts of the book, but I would have enjoyed the book more had Stephenson worked more on the ending.
The other problem was that the copy I read (1st printing) is simply riddled with typographical errors. Characters are given the wrong lines of dialog, a cypher key is wrong, and there are spelling mistakes aplenty. These will probably be rectified in later editions, but it makes me wonder if this tome was rushed to market before its time.
He's a cool guy too!
Find out why Neal Stephenson Loves Linux. Check out the interview on amazon.com.
Linux is only free if your time has no value. Windows is only free if you threaten to use Linux.
Well, I just got done doing some comparison shopping. buy.com is cheaper than amazon. And
they have a low price guarantee - they'll match
the price and give you $1 if you find it within
7 days.
I got cryptonomicon for $4 less, 5 or 6 dvd's
for $3-6 less, and the only one that was more
expensive was $0.60 more, and I submitted the
price match, so I'll get $1.60 off.
Pretty cool I must say.
In my copy she's always referred to as Y.T., and her mother is just "Y.T.'s mom".
Goto is an actual Japanese name. Or at least it's a name seen in anime credits among other Japanese names.
In "Snow Crash", we had Hiro Protagonist. In "Crypto", we have Goto Dengo.
"Hiro Protagonist" is much funnier than Goto.
Are their any more humorous names further into the book (I'm circa p. 100)? A Stephenson book without them... Well, it just wouldn't be the same.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
i am wondering if some translation of cryptonomicon will be available? especially french :)
any info on this?
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
i find strange noone has provided the URL of the book, it's http://www.cryptonomicon.com/
also you can read the beginning_print here
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http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
I'm surprised no one else has commented on the Cryptonomicon as an Open Source manifesto.
IMHO one of the fundamental theses of this novel is that before crypto became an open-source project in the late '40s it was heavily unbalanced in favor of the cryptoanalysts. To put it in the terminology of the book, cryptographers before that point were usually dilettantes who came up with good ideas they thought were unbreakable and cryptoanalysts were non-dilettantes who (by working really hard) could almost always break the codes.
When cryptographers started publishing their ideas in the late '40s, those ideas started getting critical review. The result has been the longest period in history when crypto has surpassed analysis.
All of this has pretty obvious implications for the security of Open Source OSes and other programming projects. And those implications probably go far beyond security to stability and speed.
SPOILER ALERT!
I do have one question about the plot of this book: Didn't Enoch Root die in Sweden in 1945 and get buried there only to reappear in a jail in the Philippines in the late '90s?
Was there some explanation of this resurrection that I missed?
Of course, all the discussion about the real purpose of this book misses the point which should be obvious: The whole 900 pages was just an excuse to tell a really bad pun. (The title of the final chapter)
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
If you look carefully, there's one point in Diamond Age where Matheson makes a refrence to Chiseled Spam and her past. In Snow Crash, Chiseled Spam is in an advertistment that Y.T. sees desrcibing what skaters become without Smartwheels on their planks. It's slightly tenuous, but I'll go for it.
The reviewer made some putdown on D.F. Wallace; I thought David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest" was well constructed, with the same relentless switching between plotlines. Hey reviewer: did you notice that it's meant to be read in a loop, over and over again? It makes a _lot_ more sense. Different perspectives are brought up, and they add to the earlier parts of the novel.
But then I assume other people notice a large DFW influence on the structure, themes of, and approach to irony of "Cryptonomicon".
If you haven't, check out Snowcrash and Diamond Age instead. They're examples of how good Stephenson can be; Cryptonomicon is an example of how good and how bad he can be, at once.
I bought Cryptonomicon the instant it came out and was amazed at how bad it was. It's wildly uneven -- there are parts that really make the book worth reading, but there are huge chunks of it that are just baaaaaad. Pages on pages on the frequency of masterbation, masterbation v. sex. A long, pointless trip on the West Coast. The parts that are awesome are dwarfed by the overwhelming badness of the rest of the book.
It seemed to me to be so far below Neal's usual quality that I was shocked he'd put his name on it.
But what really disturbed me was the women. They don't ever do anything more than lay the men, frustrate them by not doing so. Shaftoe's women is disfigured so he kills himself. Amy Shaftoe is the big romantic interest of the book; the climax of the relationship is when she climbs into a jeep, screws the big guy, and leaves.
And I've heard that he's just presenting women as they're seen by the men, and I'm probably the most relectant person to bitch about this stuff, but he's handled it so well in the past I'm amazed he fails so totally here.
It's worth reading, if you don't have any other pressing needs, and I'm inclined to let Neal stumble because he's so obviously talented, but this is his worst effort since the Big U. If you can borrow it, that's probably the best way to go.
Yes, in fact there are going to be several
loosely related books in the same vein...
and the second book is well underway, according
to Stephenson at his book signing in Pittsburgh,
PA (I had the pleasure of attending and talking
with him for a few moments after the signing)
This is an excellent book well worth the cost
and time to read...
locust
The character Avi was portrayed as being obsessed with the Holocaust and other evils. Part of his motivation for creating a data haven and digital currency was supposedly to prevent those things from ever happening again -- in fact, he appears to convince Goto Dengo to help them on the basis of this argument.
So what is it about unrestricted data and digital cash which protects humanity against inhumanity?
This is supposed to be the first of a series; maybe he'll explain this more in a future book.
I did enjoy Crytonomicon; best I've read in a long while. Made me go out and buy his others; I'm reading Snow Crash now.
BTW, Anyone know why Stephenson chooses to call Japan "Nipon" and Japanese "Nipponese"? Even in the historical (1940s) plotline -- it's like he's using it as an alias -- ala Finux == Linux.
Cryptonomicon is not, in fact, a real book. He just made up the name.
And this should be the first book in a trilogy, although trilogy should be loosely interpreted, as I believe no character reuse will occur, it will be only thematically a trilogy.
I also have to take issue with the reviewer's comment that "Any novelist who's going to write about where we are and where we've been can only get so far as an outsiderAny novelist who's going to write about where we are and where we've been can only get so far as an outsider". Gibson didn't know a whole lot when he wrote neuromancer, which arguably was the first book of it's genre, or at least the one that really kickstarted it.
What I don't disagree with is that the book was great. I was worried a bit, after reading the diamond age, that hen was going down hill... but he really didn't.
And, for those of you who haven't looked yet, try http://www.eruditorum.org/
felix
My impression of this jumping backwards and forwards, especially in Bobby Shaftoes storyline, is that he was skipping between his present and his daydreaming about his traumatic experiences.
I think your confusion about whether you were still in the present was meant to reflect the character's. I think it worked quite well.
I do not think the renaming was randon. By and large the things he changed the names of played a major role in the plot (with the possible exception of 'Finux' which still got lots of mentions), and he said various things about them which are not true or only somewhat true and which could be considered libellous and/or were just dramatic embellishment.
The things he left were either not that important (Windows) or are so conspicous (Windows, Alan Turing, GPS) that it would be pointless to disguise them. He also largely limited himself to historically verifiable statements about these things.
By the way, did anyone else catch that Miss Matheson in Diamond Age was Y.T. from Snow Crash?
I thought it was likely, but I could not find anything very solid to back up my feeling with
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... and will grace the halls of the underworld in the afterlife.
Believe with me, my saplings.
You absolute legends. I've been trying to get Stephenson fans to confirm whether there was a carry over character since I read DA and SC two years ago. I'd only heard it as a rumour in an online review of the book, and have since tried to find out whether it was true. You absolute legends :) Thankyou and goodnight!
Believe with me, my saplings.
'...he changed the name to "Finux" so this slashdot story wouldn't be full of people saying "Stephenson is
an idiot because the Linux boot prompt _actually_ looks different from in the book, and Linux has feature x and not feature y like in the book".'
And does Stephenson have any idea about what the GPL actually means? Why did Windows get a mention - that's not GPL! Personally, I think Stephenson's books should all have to be Open Source, because that would make them better, and he'd sell more, plus he could advertise support. Where does that Stephenson guy get off making his hackers eat that sort of food when everybody knows that they really eat pizza, as is proven by the sky being blue and Gates a bastard. QED.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I have yet to read C., but I've found in other books that character development is ... not as well done as everything else, dissapointingly. I found this particularly in Interface.
Believe with me, my saplings.
I've always just had the strange feeling that the character closest to Stephenson's heart was the protagonist of Zodiac. This is a completetly njustified comment, and I expect it to be moderated down accordingly :) But that character had the most spelt out and believeable values.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Thank God! This is the first time I've seen any indication anywhere that anyone but me thinks Wallace is up there with the Really Big Ones. Not that I've gone looking for it, though... perhaps there's an underground Wallace cult somewhere that I'm not aware of.
Anyway, certain types of geeks are sure to love Wallace. In particular people who like complex plotting, some off-the-wall experimentation, and any writer who can make you see things the way he sees them, even after you've put the book down.
I would have to say, though, that Infinite Jest is not necessarily the best place to start, unless you're accustomed to reading insanely long, absurdly complex, and purposefully difficult books. A rough length/complexity benchmark: Cryptonomicon took me three days to read, IJ took nearly two months. I'd say Girl With Curious Hair (a collection of relatively short stories) would be a better introduction to the world of Wallace, along with possibly The Broom of the System, although I thought that one had some seriously Stephenson-esque ending problems. Come to think of it, IJ kind of did too.
I'm reading his new one now (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), and, well, hmm. It's different, that's for sure. Much more experimental that anything else I've read, by him or anyone else for that matter. It's impressive to note that he does manage to carry off most of the stories, which few other writers would be able to, given the level of formal weirdness that's going on. I want him to write Infinite Jest II though.
----------------------
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
My business partner and I have started reviewing books by describing them as foods. We both independently described Cryptonomicon as a Napolean. Large, tasty, artfully constructed and quite enjoyable, but somewhat lacking in nutritional value (although some of us have metabolisms that require a lot of empty calories ;-))
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
On the random renaming: At the book signing I attended in Boston, someone asked Neal about the renaming of Linux to Finux. He responded that he probably didn't have to do it, but it was an "old writer's trick" to rename objects in your story so you were not bound by the actual abilities of their real-world counterparts.
Written by Stephenson under a pseudonym, I believe, and set around now.
Anyone?
The Dodger
I've not read anything of Stephenson's other than Cryptonomicon, so my judgements are based entirely on the one work.
/worse/ than Clancy at understanding and transcribing women.
This. Book. Blows.
Comparisons to Pynchon are totally unfounded: Pynchon can write. I think a much more accurate comparison would be to Tom Clancy, another drum-thumping polemicist who can't write a convincing character to save his life. Stephenson appears to believe that, by aping the literary tricks of his betters, he becomes something more than he is.
What is exceptionally galling about this book is that it reads much more like an audition for the much coveted role as Piper to the Anonymous Cowards than a thoughtful, funny, or interesting work of anything. The one-dimensional strawman enemies! The Techno-Correct sloganeering! The sheer awe-inspiring awfulness of the technical aspects of writing! This is a book so inelegantly plotted that, far from integrating the disparate plotlines into a satisfying whole, it shakes itself apart in the hands. Which is too bad, in a way, as Stephenson's obviously a smart cracker (and on the right side of many of the things he "writes" about), but his intelligence is much more in the perpetually masturbating (and feeling sick guilty after) 14yr old boy vein, than in that of, say, TC Boyle or Pynchon.
I understand that some people will see themselves in Randy or Doug or Avi or any of the other 'characters' that Stephenson poops forth -- and this is sad; they're not people, they're Pirates of the Caribbean golems, robotically spouting the puerile and self-congratulatory mantra of the self-identified ubermensch.
The females in the book are so laughably bad, so freakishly homogenous in their character, so divorced from any kind of reality, that it doesn't seem unlikely that we've finally encountered a writer
Bah, humbug. I'd trade a mountain of Cryptonomicon for a page of Jack Vance.
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I agree. The Deliverator totally hooked me.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Amen to the Deliverator. Hooked TOTALLY. I loved that book, and Diamond Age. Working on the big C right now (about page 456).
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
The stereotypical white-male-bashing-feminist-liberal-type portrayal is so one-dimensional, it only makes the inclusion of her character feel reactionary and childish on Stephenson's part. The same can be said for the emasculated colleagues she is surrounded with...It seems like a cheap shot.
...
These people DO exist, I've met them. I don't have any problems with feminism or liberalism, only with those who use them as a substitute for empathy and personality.
Post-modernism might be popular with a few Unix weenies after Larry Wall's popularisation thereof, but it's not going to move the wheels of industry or stop the war in Kosovo.
It's a novel, for Chrissake. PC is IMHO the enemy of good literature. Neal S is telling a story, not shoring up the last bastions of male chauvinist hegemony. Jeez, I'm starting to talk like Charlene
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Neal Stephenson makes a reasonable effort to get the technical details in his stories right. However, he seems to be far more interested in the social aspects of technology than the technical details, so he makes some mistakes. A lot of his audience consists of the type of people who do know the technical details, including many who look down on anyone who knows less about their particular technical specialties. I'm sure he caught a lot of grief about the "Built In Operating System" mistake in Snow Crash. If Stephenson had written about Linux rather than Finux, and gotten one detail (however minor) wrong, what would have happened? A bunch of Rabid Linux Advocates would have been flooding him with hatemail (a la Mindcraft) and badmouthing him all over the net. Writing about Finux is a reminder that Cryptonomicron is Only A Novel.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
I got the book about a week ago, and I've been pretty busy, so I'm only up to page 116, but never before have I thought, "Hey, this is written for me!" I bought Snow Crash because of "In the Beginning was the Command Line". I liked Snow Crash, but I still thought "In the Beginning" was better (completely different genres, I know). Cryptonomicon is even better! Of course, I can't make too much comment from the first ~100 pages, but it does seem very good so far. How many other books have Alan Turing as a normal character in the first 20 pages? It has all that subtle (and not-so-subtle) humor that Snow Crash had, but it has a lot more of it. I've actually laughed out loud a lot, and I really don't do that when reading books much (Dave Barry, though, can do that to me). But somehow he manages to be hilarious without being flippant. There's a scene (being really vague to avoid any spoilers, but I don't think there are any here anyway) where sailors are walking by and see their babies by local women. That was a really well-written passage that has nothing to do with sci-fi and isn't really humorous. It was just inciteful. I second that 10/10, and I haven't even finished!
Insightful, not inciteful. Maybe both . . . nah. (My girlfriend's going to see this and rag me about it; she stalks me on Slashdot!)
He was mean, though! Seriously, the sig was a bit old and needed replacement; that was just my excuse. If you want to see it again, by all means.
Having said all that, here's my problem with the book:
The character of Randy's wife seems like a big troll for feminists...Stephenson has had a long history of strong female characters in his books, and that's why this character is such a letdown: The stereotypical white-male-bashing-feminist-liberal-type portrayal is so one-dimensional, it only makes the inclusion of her character feel reactionary and childish on Stephenson's part. The same can be said for the emasculated colleagues she is surrounded with...It seems like a cheap shot. The restaurant scence seems particularly set up to inflame liberals and feminists. Although many of the points he makes are valid, it could have been done in a more mature manner. This treatment of women seems to be a recurring theme in the book. The female characters are either there to provide sex(Glory or Mary for example) or are stereotyped butch feminists(Amy, whose character is pretty thinly developed, and Randy's wife)...I realize the opinions of the author and the characters in his novels are not necessarily one and the same, but if this is how Stephenson really feels it would be a big disappointment....
-- Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
P.S. I'm not at all trying to say that being offended by this reaction isn't a valid female perspective. It's just that the book was written from the perspective of a socially inept man.
Well, as a socially inept man, I find myself a little disturbed, for a couple of reasons....first off, not every geek is a guy(although, yeah, yeah...i know, most of us are...)and why should only women be offended by these things? Second, the book's written in the third person...so technically it's not written from his perspective.
Just picking nits here, but it's important to make these distinctions.
-- Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
I love the reverse timeline Stephenson Employs.
Cryptonomicon to Snow Crash to Diamond Age..
From 1945 to ~2145(?)
- The Crypt is obviously what is referred to when Stephenspon said in "Snowcrash" that strong crypto brought down the old governmental structures.
By the way, did anyone else catch that Miss Matheson in Diamond Age was Y.T. from Snow Crash? Or is it just me...
Ah well, apparently I'm just rambling, need more coffee
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Neal, are you reading this? I know you're a regular.
Could you clear this up for me/us?
It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off
Super friends?
I thought that 'The Deliverator' was one of the finest intros of any book I have ever read!
Stephenson created a book that not only expands on the past and future of cryptology, but serves as encouragement for hackers everywhere. Using skill and craft to thwart powerful, but technically inferior, forces (i.e. governments, multinationals, militaries).
Neal is the anti-Clancy. Instead of encouraging world domination, with the United States as global judge and jury, Stephenson projects a world where power is deseminated. It only takes a small percentage of like minded individuals with the right tools.
I agree with the politics and have a overactive imagination so I can look past some of the faults. Just use your imagination to picture the future of Epiphyte and the crypt. That ending doesn't need to be written.
Moose
Neal Stephenson understands media. This is a book for a certain audience: it is an audience seeped in new forms of media, and it is, without too much powerful argument, all about the power of different media in different situations. Encryption's effects on media is an obvious theme, and his views on money as a medium are obviously crucial as well. For more on this, check out Marshall McLuhan's 'Understanding Media.' It's a brilliant book that's outdated now, but its ideas are only growing in importance. The 'digital revolution' or 'information superhighway' or whatever is going on now is basically just the fact that our culture is waking up and throwing all of their energy into media development. 'The Medium is the Message,' might or might not be a true statement, but the implicit assumptions of digital media are growing in importance geometrically. Stephenson understands this extremely well, and he has an organized worldview that will make only make more sense.
If there's one criticism of the book, it has to be the scale. But the scale of the book is one of its most important aspects. This book presents a remarkably unbiased picture of the information of real life: he spends nearly equal time on Randy's pc and his cereal-eating habits. The book's scale will turn off a lot of readers, but the scale is one of the work's most fundamental aspects.
Stephenson digs pretty hard into academia and college life. Is his polemic deserved? Dunno. But his worldview obviously includes the idea of the breakdown of the academic system. And I think that he makes a pretty good case, even if it's a subtext. 'In the beginning' has a lot of this too. I agree with some of his ideas, and I'm not without perspective on this, since I have a certain amount of familiarity with a few college departments. He's stuck on the idea that the educational system has to change, or so it would appear. That's fine, but I'd like to see a constructive idea as well-developed as his take on money with the Crypt. (I've only read this, and I'm halfway through Snow Crash, so if he addresses this in another work, somebody please steer me that way.)
My verdict is that this book rocks: it's alive, and the issues in it are the big ones. The right ones, if you ask me. Neal knows what's up, for sure, and that's his biggest asset as a writer.
My favorite parts are all the crap that Goto Dengo had to go through and still come out on top.
I liked it when Randy, who was afraid someone was tapping into his computer, instead wrote code in Finux(Linux) using Morse code on the space bar and the caps lock lights on his keyboard as the interface! That was pretty wild.
I was a little confused about the guy at the end that started shooting arrows at everyone before stepping on a land mine. They didn't really explain WHY he was so obsesed as to follow them all out in the jungle....in his business suit no less. Sure, he was flaky, but they didn't go through his flakyness to total insanity.
But it was a good read, if a little dis-jointed at times.
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
Yes, I know who the guy was at the end that sort of lost it and went after Randy and Amy, but they didn't explain fully the guys trip into total madness like that. I mean the scene before we see him in the jungle with his leg blown off by the land mine, he was standing in front of the offices of Ordo trying to serve a search warrent.
Also, I haven't read any of the other books, but I'll have to check them all out now!
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
In Japanese, Japan is pronounced "Nippon," or "Nihon" nowadays. "Nihon" is an alliteration of "Nippon" -- Japanese sometimes soften a double p sound into an h sound.
Haven't finished yet, but it's a great book.
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
Bring this guy back for more reviews! Much more substantial than some of the Slashdot reviews.
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
"...doesn't mean I view all women as either sex-toys or ballbreakers. That's a one-dimensional view, in my opinion."
It certainly is, but that's obviously not Stephenson's view.
Stephen Molitor steve_molitor@yahoo.com
But what really disturbed me was the women. They don't ever do anything more than lay the men, frustrate
them by not doing so.
Well, I actually think that's appropriate! As a nerd myself I can say that the majority of the emotional interaction I have with women fits into those catagories... nearly all the latter.
Let's see. I'll try to paint a typical scenario. Some women are fun to hang out with, or study with, or even program with (damned few). Of those to whom I never get very close, nothing is lost. But there isn't much emotional repore going on either. Now in the case that there is something more, I sometimes become friends with them, and grow closer. But if a woman is cool enough to become friends with, I'll invariably be attracted. Then, after being rejected in that way, I become sexually frustrated. Next the woman becomes frustrated at my frustration, and the friendship ends. Had the person been a male on the other hand, he would probably be a wonderful friend.
This is a pretty normal social pattern for the sort of person who knows 3 languages, and does inverse laplace transforms for the hell of it... but can't relate to women worth a damn. The geekier half of my friends have similar experiences. After a while it becomes less and less worthwhile to try to become friends, when rejection and pain are the natural results. Pursuing sex/relationships is what is left.
I don't think Neil's portrayal was sexist. It was a very astute, if unpleasant depiction of how women interact with/affect nerdy men. I think it's only by willingly blinding oneself by our culture that it is possible to deny these sorts of universal human experiences.
P.S. I'm not at all trying to say that being offended by this reaction isn't a valid female perspective. It's just that the book was written from the perspective of a socially inept man.
I'm a gnu world man.
-- "But what really disturbed me was the women. They don't ever do anything more than lay the men, frustrate them by not doing so." --
Well, I actually think that's appropriate! As a nerd myself I can say that the majority of the emotional interaction I have with women fits into those catagories... nearly all the latter.
Let's see. I'll try to paint a typical scenario. Some women are fun to hang out with, or study with, or even program with (damned few). Of those to whom I never get very close, nothing is lost. But there isn't much emotional repore going on either. Now in the case that there is something more, I sometimes become friends with them, and grow closer. But if a woman is cool enough to become friends with, I'll invariably be attracted. Then, after being rejected in that way, I become sexually frustrated. Next the woman becomes frustrated at my frustration, and the friendship ends. Had the person been a male on the other hand, he would probably be a wonderful friend.
This is a pretty normal social pattern for the sort of person who knows 3 languages, and does inverse laplace transforms for the hell of it... but can't relate to women worth a damn. The geekier half of my friends have similar experiences. After a while it becomes less and less worthwhile to try to become friends, when rejection and pain are the natural results. Pursuing sex/relationships is what is left.
I don't think Neil's portrayal was sexist. It was a very astute, if unpleasant depiction of how women interact with/affect nerdy men. I think it's only by willingly blinding oneself by our culture that it is possible to deny these sorts of universal human experiences.
P.S. I'm not at all trying to say that being offended by this reaction isn't a valid female perspective. It's just that the book was written from the perspective of a socially inept man.
I'm a gnu world man.
I'd like to take this opportunity to make the claim that I can instantly factor ANY prime number NO MATTER HOW BIG IT IS! The problem with deciphering these coded messages is not factoring large prime numbers, but rather in factoring composite numbers which are multiples of large prime numbers.
Overlooking that small point, the rest of the book is entertaining but not addicting. That could be a good thing or not, depending on your pov.
--Mizerai
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What worked for me was not just the techno-nerdism like the whole Van Eck freaking episode, but also the math-nerdism. I'm surprised no one mentionned the mathematical model of Lawrence Waterhouse's libido. I've never laughed so hard over mathematical equations before.
Does this book mean Stephenson has stepped away from sci-fi? I doubt it. He said the sequels to Cryptonomicon would take place in multiple timelines. I'm already guessing we'll see a medieval thriller at some point (and see how the Cryptonomicon was written.) I'm also suspecting we'll see just where the events in Cryptonomicon will take humanity next.
Side-note: anyone read An Instance of the Fingerpost? In one of Life's weird sequiturs, I read Cryptonomicon immediately following An Instance.... One character is a cryptographer under Cromwell, in 1660. I could almost picture him as the author of the Cryptonomicon...
Also: I'm grateful this review was filed under "Cryptography" here on Slashdot. I hope Cryptonomicon gets many techno enthusiasts to pick up Schneier's Applied Cryptography .
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"It's out of print and not worth the effort of tracking [...] down."
Wow; that's a surprising reaction. Prior to Cryptonomicon, it was the best Stephenson's done.
I *am* glad he's finally figured out how to write endings, though.
I recommend TBU to any Stephenson fan; all his good qualities (and all his standard warts) are there, but the absurdity is top-notch.
I don't know if he made it to any of the other sites, but when Stephenson did a signing last month in Minneapolis (the one at Barnes & Noble, not the one at Uncle Hugo's), Bruch Schneier was there as well. He didn't end up getting to do much during the presentation (he said he was mainly there to answer any highly technical questions), but I got to chat with him a bit afterwards and he was pretty cool. He was signing his appendix to Cryptonomicon if people wanted; he also indulged my nerdy request to sign my notebook, as there was much more important stuff in there (namely the blowfish algorithm in BestCrypt, the finest completely transparent, container-based encryption (for Windoze, sorry) I've been able to find.) I was wondering if Schneier made it to any of the other signings or if those of us in the Twin Cities were just lucky since this was his home turf.
The point of storing the information on the data haven was that it was the only way to make sure that it would be accessable to people. If they put it on a server that was any less essential, oppressive governments would simply cut off access to the offending server. If, however, a major data haven and the cornerstone of the world's financial system happened to have that information freely available off of it, there would be little that anyone could do to prevent the information from being available without shooting themselves in the foot in the process.
For an author that goes to such great lengths to be technically accurate in this book, there is one egregious error that bugged me. (SPOILER FOLLOWS)
Of course, I'm no expert, but I play one on the web...For those who "laughed out loud" really need to get out more. Try turning on fortune when you login (not quite the same as human interaction, but a lot funnier than this book).
The crypto stuff is interesting, but so is man pgp. And I can get pgp (er, "ordo") for free, unlike this beastly doorstop Cryptonomicon.
In a nutshell: yawn.
I'm sorry, I just HAVE to mention Rudy Rucker's Software, Wetware, and Freeware series. Tho, I must admit, it's a bit further out there, but it's got my vote for the "made for the slashdotter" title.
This book has proved to be a great investment of time. Its slow and rather pedantic beginning almost turned me off.
Note to Neal: "Please, do not introduce your characters as if you were introducing the Super Friends. Everybody does not have special powers, nor do they need them. You eventually settled down with human-like people, but you came very close to giving them Clancy-like super-abilities that, had they not had them, the book would be bunk"
Neal does one other thing that irks me, but does not detract from the book. While gladly using the names of Alan Turing and Winston Churchill, etc etc, he then decides to create new names for existing people (Commander Schoen, for instance). He also does this for companies (ETC, i.e. IBM/Motorola), software (ORDO, i.e. PGP) and for certain operating systems we all love (Finux...well, I get the pun here, but Linux would have worked fine). Microsoft Windows gets no modifications, interestingly enough.
Well, I needed a place to say this. These are minor things and come mainly from having been a Clancy junkie in high school. The rather predictible and annoying introduction of "super" characters gets old.
One big positive: This is very fresh and original for me and probably a lot of people my age who did not cut their teeth on Ian Flemming and Dean Koontz spy novels.
Jesse