One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it. Here’s my attempt to boil the story down to its essence.During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japanese and German codes, and his job is to keep them from realizing how successful the Allies have been by faking events that give the enemies reasons other than compromised codes to pin any losses on. Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe had to leave behind the woman he loves in the Philippines when the war broke out in the Pacific and after surviving some brutal island combat, he finds himself assigned to a unit carrying out dangerous and weird missions that seem to have no logical goals.In the late ‘90s, Waterhouse’s grandson Randy is an amiable computer geek who has just co-founded a small company called Epiphyte that has big plans revolving around the booming Internet in the island nations of southeast Asia. As powerful people with hidden agendas begin showing an interest in Epiphyte’s business plan, Randy hires a company in Manila owned by former Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe to lay an underwater cable. That’s just a sideline for Doug and his daughter Amy who primarily work as treasure hunters. When they make a startling discovery, it links the personal history of the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes to a lost fortune in Axis gold.That makes it sound like a beach thriller or airplane read by someone like Clive Cussler, right?But I didn’t mention all the math. And code breaking. And the development of computers. And economic theories. And geo-politics circa 1999. And how it was ahead of the curve about personal privacy. And it’s about a thousand pages long. And there's some other stuff, too. Plus, Neal Stephenson doesn’t feel the need to conform to anything close to a traditional three act narrative structure. He’s also often the writing equivalent of Clark W. Griswald in the movie Vacation since he’ll cheerfully divert his readers four short hours to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth. Sprinkled among all this are appearances by real historical figures like Alan Turing and Douglas MacArthur. So what you get is a book that should be a mess of infodumps and long tangets that ultimately don’t have anything to do with the story. And quite frankly, the ending is kind of a mess, too.So whenever I read criticism of Neal Stephenson, I shrug and concede that there are many things about the guy that should make me crazy as a reader. However, the really odd thing is that he doesn’t. I’ve pretty much loved every book of his I’ve read despite the fact that I could list his literary sins at length.What’s great to me about Stephenson is that it’s so obvious that he loves this stuff. When he takes up a whole chapter laying out the mathematics behind code breaking, it’s his enthusiasm for the subject that helps carry my math-challenged ass through. He’s not giving us elaborate histories or explanations because he did the research and wants to show off, he’s doing it because he’s a smart guy who is excited about something so he can’t help but go on at length about it. The other factor that redeems him for me is his sense of humor. No matter how enthused Stephenson is, it’d still break down in the delivery if he didn’t pepper his books with some hilarious lines. Sometimes even his long digressions are done solely in the interest of delivering the funny like a parody of a business plan that includes gems like this:“Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went belly-up and only returned her ninety-nine dollars. Ever since then the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril--you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.”It’s also easy to overlook how these seeming digressions help build the entire story. When Randy is trying to retrieve some of his grandfather’s papers from an old trunk, he gets embroiled in his family’s attempts to divvy up his grandparent’s belongings. Since the family is made up of academics a whole chapter becomes a description of a mathematical formula based on an x-y grid laid out in a parking lot that allows family members to place items according to both sentimental and economic value while Randy has to try to find a way to diplomatically claim the papers. There’s no real reason for this scene, and it could have been cut entirely or boiled down a few lines about a family squabble. But the whole chapter is funny and tells us a great deal about Randy and his background by putting him in this context. It doesn't accomplish anything else plot wise, but it’s the kind of scene that makes this book what it is.Even as a fan of the way he works, I still wish Stephenson could tighten some things up. The goals of Epiphyte and Randy shift three or four times over the course of the novel, and the drifting into and out of plots gets very problematic late in the game. It also seems like Stephenson had a hard time determining exactly who the bad guys in the 1999 story should be. (view spoiler)[ The stuff with Andrew Loeb, a litigious asshole who once drove Randy into bankruptcy, showing up as an arrow shooting/knife wielding attacker wearing a business suit in the jungle at the end seems to come out of the blue since he’s really only appeared in flashback form before that. Even though he's the lawyer suing Epiphyt there aren't any scenes directly showing him in action except for Randy viewing him from a distance during the raid on their server. And while most of the book seems to operate under the idea that the rich dentist is the main threat to Epiphyte, he suddenly tags out and a Chinese guy that we’ve only seen as a slave during WWII is revealed as the hidden hand behind it all very late in the book, yet we have no present day scenes with him. (hide spoiler)]
I am FINIIIIIISHED! I thought it didn't have an ending! I thought Neal Stephenson kept sneaking to my house and inserting more pages in the back while I was asleep! I thought he would never be appeased until I begged him to stop with a deck of cards, morse code and a wide variety of pleading looks!This is a massive boy book. A MASSIVE boy book. It's got overwhelmingly male characters, and they do really boy things, like coding, and shooting things, and drawing logarithmic graphs about the last time they masturbated. I kept being surprised that I could open this book and it didn't immediately smell overpoweringly of old canvas and sweat. And I say this in the most endearing way, generally speaking - the characters in this book have no idea, none at all!, that I am not One Of Them, so I got to romp about with the best of them, messing about with submarines and mid-nineties hacker politics.I should probably tell you at this point, that two of my favourite things as a mid-teenager were vintage pen-and-paper codebreaking and rambly adventure stories, so I was in my element. This book is very exclusive in many ways and I am sure that in any other context I would get the rabbit in headlights look of someone who knows they're about to be accused of being a fake geek and who doesn't know *quiiite* enough what they're talking about to put those (wholly ridiculous) accusations to rest - but as it was, for most of the time I was reading this, it was me and my comfy chair and my knitting and the printed word of Neal Stephenson, and I could slot myself into that narrow band of intended audience and roam around at my leisure. This book is a boy book, and while I was reading it, I was a boy. Which is a cack-handed way of saying that I am a nerd and I don't get to talk about polyalphabetic ciphers you break with frequency analysis and a pad of graph paper very often, and Cryptonomicon made me feel as much at home as I could possibly have wished for. Which is nice.It's also a cack-handed way of saying I feel, in some way, like I shouldn't have felt at home? It was so chock-full of Tech Men and Soldier Men and Men Who Do Things Despite Slash For Their Womenfolk, that I genuinely felt like I was empathising on the wrong side of the divide at some points. Like I was having to sneak in and pretend I had a metaphorical moustache. Very odd. Ladies of Goodreads, is that a thing you understand? Men of Goodreads, when you read something very female led, like say Jane Eyre, or Rebecca, or whatever it is you emancipated chaps read these days, how do you feel? I've rarely felt that this strongly (*cough*Gorky Park) it was very odd. At any rate I am interested by how/how strongly this manifests itself in other people.Back to the book! It's an info-dump; there is almost more info-dump than plot. Some of it I knew already and that was comforting, some of it really fired me up for playing with numbers a bit more. While I've been reading this book, I've been occasionally meeting a friend who's teaching me the basics-and-then-some of statistics, and I get the same feeling from that of channeling my enthusiasm into something practical, something that someone else is excited about as well. I liked the info-dump.It starts off really slowly. There is basically no plot for probably the first two-fifths; certainly the first third. It is full of inside references and totally devoid of beginning, middle or end. If this bothers you, don't read it. It bothered me, for a while - that's why I put it down and came back a few months later. Or that's one of the reasons. The other reason is that it's NINE HUNDRED PAGES LONG AND NEAL STEPHENSON IS STILL TALKING.In the end, I put it aside often, but always came back. There are very few books I can say that about, and of the others they were almost entirely written by Frenchmen. This book is not like those books. If you ask me, it's worth having a go at, and if you get 60 pages in and go cross-eyed at the tiny font, don't worry. You won't have missed much, and it's a nice place to come back to. I might even read it again, but it probably won't be for a while. A long while.
What do You think about Cryptonomicon (2002)?
4.0 stars. I am glad I finally got around to reading this as I had read so many sterling reviews and I am a big fan of Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash and The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer being two of my "All Time Favorite" novels). While not enjoying this as much as the two aforementioned books, there is no doubt that Stephenson can write and write well. The plot is complex, taking place in two time-lines (World War II and today) that eventually tie together, and containing a myriad of superbly drawn characters. This is a very long book (over 900 pages) and there were times that the pacing seemed slow (hence the 4 stars instead of 5). That is about the only criticism I can give to this excellent book. Recommended!!!P.S. I listened to the audio version of this book (just under 43 hours)read by William Dufris and he did an excellent job (for those of you who listen to audiobooks).Nominee: Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best NovelWinner: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction NovelNominee: Prometheus Award for Best Novel
—Stephen
My four-star rating will likely puzzle those friends of mine who have had to listen to me piss and moan about this novel for the past six months. My progress as a reader was, shall we say, embarrassingly slow. (In Stephenson's defense, I tended to put his novel aside after every 200 or so pages and read other things; the book actually moves pretty swiftly considering its size.) But the four-star rating is sincere: I did enjoy this very much, for the most part, and I intend to at last read Snow Crash and maybe even finish The Diamond Age, which I abandoned sometime back in the late nineties.Though this novel is set in the past (and in a present that is quaintly a decade old now), it's by definition a science fiction novel: Ideas and things over people. This one's about a specific process of change in science, and not so much about people save as means of displaying certain ideas at work or in development. (There are some characters who almost achieve a fully rounded quality--Goto Dengo!--but that's not really all that surprising given a thousand pages of storytelling, is it?) So most of this is Stephenson fictionalizing scenes about the development of the information age, essentially saying, "Isn't this incredibly cool?" And it almost always is cool. And funny. Stephenson's voice has a kneejerk hyperbolic quality to it that works on a glib, superficial level. His gift for over-the-top metaphor is pretty much consistently astounding and amusing. Even if that same quality of voice never for a moment involves the reader of the reality of this world and it's people. No, the prose is all about braininess and exhibitionistic flaunting of research, ad nauseam, and so what? That's as good a reason to read as any, and this is almost always a good time.While I never quite felt any of the characters were exactly well-developed outside of their erections and ability to compute, say, the proximate coordinates of a cherished family heirloom, the combined group of characters here give us the most fully fleshed out portrayal of geekitude in literature. Seriously, this is an unparalleled examination of what it is to be a geeky guy in the late twentieth--the love of data and things and problem-solving; the sheer befuddlement in the face of women and their irrational ways; the needlessly-complicated-and-by-the-way-accidentally-insightful manner of apprehending the world that defines several generations of bespectacled men. (It begins in this novel with Waterhouse and Turing and so on and ending with Randy but encompassing even characters such as Shaftoe, who while ostensibly more of a typical man and an a!c!t!i!o!n! hero, is still pretty much free from quaint qualities such as empathy, so women remain mysterious beings who control the world by virtue of their ability to literally screw with men. Sex is a power before which every Stephenson character loses his shit.) (That this is true of most people in the real world doesn't make its universality in a novel an okay thing.)Of course, the above doesn't much matter in what is essentially a comic novel. Stephenson makes noises about more serious topics (stopping the evilness of war, a potent disgust about the horrors we visit on our fellow humans, etc), but this is just a long caper/heist novel--long on capering and short on import.But fun! I just wish it hadn't been quite so damned long.
—Michael
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon is a lengthy historical fiction set during both World War II and the late 1990s with much of the action taking place in the Philippines. In the 1940s, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, colleague of Alan Turing, is hired by the U.S. Navy to help break Axis codes. Meanwhile, Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, who's too enthusiastic and courageous for his own good, doesn't realize that his troop's job is to make it look like the U.S. hasn't broken the codes, but just happens to always be in the right place at the right time.Waterhouse and Shaftoe know each other only superficially, but their descendants, who've noticeably inherited some of their traits, meet in the 1990s storyline. Randy Lawrence Waterhouse is a systems administrator who's trying to set up an electronic banking system in the Philippines. There he meets Doug and Amy Shaftoe, a father and daughter team who are doing the underwater surveying for Randy's Internet cables. Randy and the Shaftoes eventually realize that they share a secret heritage and together they set out on a massive code-breaking treasure hunt.The plot of Cryptonomicon is clever and elaborate, sometimes exciting (e.g., most scenes with Bobby Shaftoe), frequently funny (such as when Ronald Reagan interviews Bobby Shaftoe, and when the Waterhouse family uses a complicated mathematical algorithm to divide up the family heirlooms), and always informative.Neal Stephenson's fans know (and love) that you can't read one of his books without learning a lot. Predictably, Cryptonomicon is chock full of information. If a character walks past a bank in China, you can bet you're in for a lecture on Chinese banking. If he sees a spider web dripping with dew, you'll be taught how spiders catch their prey. Character backstories are used to teach us about the history of the Jews in Eastern Europe or the familial habits of the Filipinos. In Cryptonomicon there are many pages that think they should be in a textbook on computer circuitry (and some that actually admit they belong in Letters to Penthouse). There are three pages devoted to a doctoral dissertation on facial hair and shaving fetishes, and another three pages of instruction on the proper way to eat Cap'n Crunch.These divergences interrupt the plot and make the book much longer than it needs to be, but you just can't help but forgive Stephenson (or to at least smile and shake your head knowingly as if he has some sort of uncontrollable yet endearing pathology), when you see him poking fun at himself for this very thing. In one scene, Bobby Shaftoe thinks he's in "HELL'S DEMO" when he's forced to listen to someone "explain the organization of the German intelligence hierarchy." Though the lecture causes Shaftoe to hallucinate, the reader still manages to learn something about the Wehrmacht Nachrichten Verbindungen while being thankful to realize that Stephenson knows he has this "issue."It's easy to tell that Neal Stephenson loves to do research and loves to impart the knowledge he's gleaned, or ideas he's thought up, and it's hard to criticize him for this, especially since it's all done in his clever, colorful, and entertaining style, even if it's not always relevant to the plot. And sometimes these infodumps can really set a scene. Here's a very short example:"The Bletchley girls surround him. They have celebrated the end of their shift by applying lipstick. Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all of the good stuff was used to coat propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins. It is the smell of War."Stephenson also delights in creating quirky similes:"Like the client of one of your less reputable pufferfish sushi chefs, Randy Waterhouse does not move from his assigned seat for a full ninety minutes..."Though I skimmed a few of Stephenson's longer tangents, I was nevertheless entertained by the clever plot of Cryptonomicon. I read the novel in two formats. One was Subterranean Press's signed limited edition which was printed on thick glossy paper and embellished with new artwork by Patrick Arrasmith, several graphs, and even some perl script. My Advanced Review Copy of this book weighs 4 pounds (and it was only paperback -- the published version is hardback). I also listened to MacMillan's audiobook read by William Dufris. I'm sure Cryptonomicon was not an easy book to read out loud, but Dufris did an amazing job, even actually sounding like Ronald Reagan during the Reagan interview.Cryptonomicon won the Locus Award in 2000 and was nominated for both the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards that year. Pretty big accomplishment for a book that's not even science fiction. For readers who haven't tried one of Neal Stephenson's books yet, Cryptonomicon is a good place to start.
—Kat Hooper
