Cryptonomicon

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!

The best way to describe the Cryptonomicon is that it is an adventure story about mathematicians. While Mr. Stephenson has made his reputation writing books that are in the so-called cyber punk genre, this is a mainstream novel that features mathematicians, intellectualism, and a strong dose of what Stephenson calls in another book, "...the imp of the mischievous." So while the target audience of the book may well be hormonal teen-age boys who like computers and math, it is well written enough that most readers will enjoy the time invested in reading this rather large book. Having read most, if not all, of Mr. Stephenson's other books; this book is clearly the best one. This is true in terms of readability, plot, and character development. While there are some real shortcomings in terms of female character development and in the conclusion of the book, this is the only book by Stephenson that is really well written enough to be a mainstream novel. The book weaves two distinct stories together. The first is the story of Waterhouse, Goto Dengo, Enoch Root, and Shaftoe in World War II. The second is the story of how these individuals and/or their grand-children and/or children in the modern day world interact in a related story-line that involves stolen Japanese gold, a mysterious German submarine, and a very bizarre assortment of supporting characters. This book was written back around 1999. It is amazing how much technology Stephenson actually got right. Even more impressive is the fact that the novel is readable by a typical layman without much math or computer science background. Likewise, there are plenty of clues in this book that tie back to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle of novels. While the Baroque Cycle was published after the Cryptonomicon, it was designed to be a prequel. I would recommend this book to anyone who fits one or more of the following criteria: (1) You are occasionally seized by the "Imp of the Mischievous" and do incredibly stupid things. (2) You think math is cool. (3) You think cryptology is fun and interesting. (4) You like computers and telecommunications. (5) You like reading about the weird "super weapons" the Germans wasted money on (6) You have lived in the Philippines One word of warning, I have lent my copy of the Cryptonomicon to others and they found Stephenson's use of sexuality and sarcasm a bit over the top. However, that may just be a matter of taste. I did not find either venue particularly offensive. Overall, a good book that glamorizes math and those who love it.

I read a lot, a whole lot. I first read this monster from the library the month it came out, decided (after I had recovered from the experience) that it was probably the best thing I'd read in the whole of the `90s, went out and bought a hardback for myself, and set it in a place of honor on my shelves. Nearly six years on, I find that aging has only improved it. I've been working my way slowly through his recent trilogy, but Cryptonomicon is still better. His characters exist in a t least five dimensions and will stick with you from a long, long time. There's Lawrence Waterhouse, math prodigy and buddy of Alan Turing, who becomes one of the key codebreakers of World War II. There's Marine raider Bobby Shaftoe, a survivor of everything the war can throw at him -- except heroism. There's Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's equally nerdy grandson, master Unix hacker, and generally nice guy. There's America Shaftoe, partly-Filipino granddaughter of Bobby, master deep diver, and all-round tough cookie -- which doesn't keep Randy and Amy from falling in love. There's Avi, Randy's best friend and front-man in all their business ventures -- in this case, building the world's first politically independent data haven, much to the dismay of major governments. There's Lieut. Goto Dengo, engineer for the Nipponese army and builder of the primary hiding place of Japan's stolen billions in gold bullion. And, moving like mist between the two separate generations, there's the _eminence gris_ Enoch Root, Catholic priest, doctor, cryptographer, conspirator, and take-no-prisoners philosopher. Add to this list several dozen supporting players, all equally well realized, and the richness of the narrative texture is unbelievable. Besides the sheer enjoyment you get from Stephenson's Roman-candle style, his highly original metaphors and similes, and his ironic sense of humor, you're gonna learn a lot about cryptography (both the wartime vintage and the present-day digital variety), and about irregular warfare, and a score of other subjects. Yes, it's a huge book -- but it has to be. The heft also allows space for the author's sprawling digressions on topics as diverse as jungle survival, the similarities between computers and church organs, granny-grade furniture, U-boat life, several Holocausts, imprinting of sexual fetishes, Finnish psychology, the neuro-sociological origins of the ancient Greek pantheon, how to divide up an inheritance, the socioeconomic underpinnings of paper currency, and the proper way to eat Cap'n Crunch. It doesn't all advance the plot, but don't worry about it. Every single paragraph in this thing is worth reading, savoring, and storing away for later rethinking. I'll be reading it against in another decade.

I really liked the Cryptonomicon, but that's no surprise, since I'm a computer programmer, so I found the several cryptological and mathematical concepts really interesting. I'm also into a little philosofy, so that part was also interesting, I specially like when philosophy is applied to computer use and programing. I found the insights into the mind of a cryptologist and his way of comparing real life events to real life crypto fascinating, they had me explaining the concepts to people at work just because I just couldn't keep that only to myself, it was a happiness that had to go out and be shared. I also loved the way each chapter is told from one character's point of view (something I had seen only in Game of Thrones so far). This works specially well here because the story is told mixing two timelines and characters in each timeline, even with flashbacks into events prior to the time of each character's present. It was real fun to read and to assemble in my head what was happening and how some actions were connected through time. In a review by Nathan I read that he had the same experience I had with this. When finishing a chapter I wanted to continue reading about the same character, and there's a bit of dissapointing when you find out it's not happening, but then you read some more words and are deep into the new character, all dissapointment forgotten. The ending is perhaps it's weakest or it's strongest point, since it was a bit weird, the story just stops. But seeing that the author intends to expand this "universe" into the past and into the future it's kind of cool that we still don't know how the story resolved itself. We have an extremely open ended story, where we can imagine what we want until the next book arrives and finish things up.

Incredibly well worth reading if you like multiple disparate plots going on during more than one time period on various parts of the earth with some real historical events (WWII, early days of the Internet 1990s, etc.) and persons mixed in and with some characters/plots that seem, for hundreds of pages, to have nothing to do with other characters/plots. Well, I enjoy that sort of thing. A few times in the book I thought the descriptions were a bit too lengthy (Just get on with it!) but even those were either interesting or amusing or both. The author certainly has an eye for detail. He also has a knack for interweaving lives of characters from all over the planet with a wide array of background, including Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Filipinos, Australians, Chinese, Japanese, etc. The writing style manages to allow the reader crawl right into the brain of the main character, a likable, very intelligent fellow, who hasn't been the brightest bulb with social skills on occasion. His thoughts and emotions, both ordinary and extraordinary, are very clearly felt by the reader as events move along and take all sorts of bizarre turns. The author also manages to throw several words into every chapter that I do not know. This is fun, because I like learning new words (and the Kindle will automatically look most of them up for me), but I do not recall ever reading a book in which I looked up so many words (including some technical scientific and linguistic works). It is not a difficult read, by any means, but despite my own inflated sense of being a highly educated person with a pretty vast vocabulary, I was always stumbling on something new. Yes, I enjoy that sort of thing, too. I read this book on the suggestion of a couple of friends (thanks James and John). Why do I always read the longest books? I have no idea. However, this one was worth the read. In print it is 1,000-1,100 pages, I think. I read it on the Kindle (thank you Amazon for saving my eyesight) and 5-10% of the length is after matter that explains some of the cryptography details as well as some of the development of the plots and ideas and so forth. These also make interesting reading.

Cryptonomicon is a fast-paced highly stylized tome that weighs in at around 1150 pages (for the mass market paperback version). Stephenson's prose, like always, is brilliant but I just can't give this book 5 stars, or even 4 stars. There are a few major kinks in this otherwise fantastic book. In a nutshell Cryptonomicon is a book that has up to four parallel storylines going for it. You have a storyline that follows Bobby Shaftoe - a haiku writing Rambo-esque all American Marine. Lawrence Waterhouse - a math and cryptology genius who has a helluva time remembering people's names. Goto Dengo - a friend of Bobby Shaftoe who happens to be a soldier for the Japanese army. And then you have Randy Waterhouse - a modern day computer geek who is the grandson of Lawrence. He is the systems expert for Epiphyte which is a company trying to setup a data haven in the fictional country Kinakuta (the only fictional location in the book if I recall). The stories for Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse are set in World War 2 while the story about Randy is modern day. Goto Dengo's story is also set in WW2 but he shows up in the modern story as well. For the most part Stephenson does a masterful job weaving all of these threads together. Stephenson's prose is highly addicting making this book downright impossible to put down at times. So, why the beef? Why 3 stars? (I would give it 3.5, but not rounded to 4 - a pessimistic 3.5 I suppose). First, as other reviewers have pointed out: most of the characters seem to be exactly the same. Yes, each has their own quirk and unique background, but the problem is in the dialog. The way the characters talk is almost exactly the same, it ends up sounding more like Stephenson talking and less like the actual characters. The dialog is often funny and/or witty but at the same time it's all too similar. Second, the book is a bit too big for what it is. I'm not like some people who believe this book needs to be cut in half, more like 100-150 pages should be edited out. I do love Stephenson's digressions but sometimes they are a bit much. For instance, there's what has to be 25 pages dedicated to a single email that really doesn't offer much to the story. There are other instances where he could have trimmed the fat a bit (though I did love the infamous Cap'n Crunch digression!). Finally, the ending. I'm usually not picky about endings. A lot of people hated Snow Crash's ending but I found it satisfactory. Cryptonomicon though, it's just so abrupt. After 1150 pages you would expect a grandiose ending but instead a lot of threads are left abandoned and questions left unanswered. I was left wanting more, but not in the way that the book was so good, more in the way of "okay, so what happens next?" Maybe the 150 pages I mentioned earlier that should have been cut should have instead been dedicated to wrapping the story up. Stephenson is a master of carrot-on-a-stick writing. The storyline is constantly bouncing between the modern story and the WW2 story and oftentimes a chapter ends with a cliffhanger, keeping the pages turning. It's just too bad that when you finally get ahold of the carrot at the end of the book and shove it in your mouth it turns out to be a stick of dynamite instead. Still, even though I have substantial gripes about this book I recommend reading it. When I look back I have very vivid memories of a lot of great scenes. So no, this book isn't perfect, but it isn't garbage either. Check it out!

FYI - Kindle version ends at 87% with the rest of the book being appendix and ebook extras. The LAST thing I wanted after reading this book was 13% more reading about code. :-) Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read. Told from multiple points of view, alternating between WWII and present day (late '90's) this is a really complex novel about ... stuff. Lots and lots of stuff and detail about said stuff. Obviously, it was about breaking code in the war, also, breaking code as a hacker. It was about war and the effects of war, and the creation of the first digital computer, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch. And some Greek mythology. Money. Cyber-everything. All over the place. It even included some hints at the creation of the NSA, which was interesting. Particularly since it's very clear to see the need for code-breaking in the war, and what it has "morphed" into. It really was a great story, well-told. I'm glad I slogged through but I would really only recommend this book to people who like to know how things work, to the last detail. The characters were great, and fully developed. I found myself rooting for almost everybody, good guy or bad, and I suppose there's something to that as well. Just because someone is ostensibly on a side you are not on, doesn't mean they aren't on your side. I had a lot of difficulty with the rotating POV's which is part of what made this slow for me. You'd get into a storyline, and then BAM pulled out of it, and who knew when you'd get back to it. Those types of structures don't generally bother me, but in this case it sort of always left an easy stopping point. Also, this book needed editing like NOBODY'S business. You don't have to go step by step decoding an ENTIRE message for me to get the point. And there was one scene (a prison exchange) where it got so didactic they actually spelled out the real definition of a word conversationally. It was so inauthentic. It's a magnum opus for sure. Worthy of its recognition and probably worthy of 5-stars. But I just couldn't get past the bog of excessive detail enough to give it the full 5.

I am 54 years old and I am a nerd. (Sounds like an AA confession or something). You may think Important People like George Bush or Bill Clinton or President-elect (at time of writing) Obama, or A. Lincoln, or Alexander or Ghengis Khan or Hitler or Nimitz or FDR or Churchill are the kind of guys who make the world go `round. Or try to stop it, as the case may be. You'd be dead wrong. An interesting thing happened in the 19th century called the Industrial Revolution. After 20,000-some-odd years of digging in the dirt the planet suddenly went high-tech. Or at least higher-tech. The IPs were shocked, SHOCKED, to find they couldn't win a war (or do much else) without tech. And where did they get their tech? From us autistic, socially-inept, outta-the-box-thinking, harmless-appearing nerds. Stephenson gets this right, oh-so-dead-on-right, in "Cryptonomicon". I almost never buy hardbacks any more except in extraordinary circumstances. Fellow serious bookworms will know why immediately - space. If the total volume in one's abode can be expressed as X, and the volume taken up in said abode by hardback books is .99999X, it becomes obvious that...well, you get the picture. (Omigawd, an equation - means 10% fewer people will read this review). Sooner or later paperbacks start looking like the way to go. When I saw the big Avon hardback edition in 1999 and took a quick look, it seemed like a possibility. But what iced the deal was the inside jacket picture of a young (maybe 10 y.o.?) NTS curled up on the couch reading Epstein's "First Book of Codes and Ciphers", a book I still have on my own shelf. Now THIS was my kinda author! Since then, I've read "Cryptonomicon" every few years and never failed to pull something new out of it. This time it was an even better appreciation of the very digressions many of the reviewers here have taken exception to. They are brilliant little jewels in their own right. To those who fizzed through the book the first time and missed them, or even skipped `em deliberately (arrrrgh!), I say, "Read it again and slow down. Smell the coffee!" The pages leading up to and including Lawrence Waterhouse's Big Insight at the organ keyboard are among the most hilarious I've ever read. Could only have come straight from a true nerd's heart. About the ending. Sometimes in real life, things don't get tied up with a then-everyone-lives-happily-ever-after ribbon, or a can-you-top-this bow. Sometimes the villain wins or the hero loses, or they both win, or they both lose. The codebreaker heroes of WWII got medals and citations they couldn't publicly acknowledge for over thirty years. Many of them worked their butts off on projects the results of which they didn't even see until such information began trickling out in the early 1970s. Many of these ops would have seemed totally absurd from the point of view of the heavily-compartmented participants. Stephenson's genius is his presentation of clandestine activities from the POVs of Bobby Shaftoe, who knows nothing, and Waterhouse, who knows everything. After the 900-page tour-de-force NTS rolls out, about the only other ending I can envision is what I call the "up-yers ending", something like this: "The Earth encounters a random black hole and falls into it. All life is squished into oblivion (including the characters you've read about for the past week) and the world ceases to exist. Thank you for buying this book." THAT would've ticked off the reviewers even more. My background includes writing ICBM flight software and service as a U.S. Navy Intelligence officer. I've read 1000s of books of all types, had three of my own published. I've never given max stars to a book before in my life. This one gets max stars. Six out of five, in fact. Stephenson wrote a book about us and he got it right. Nerds rule.