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4.12 AVERAGE
4.12 AVERAGE
adventurous
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
I can't even imagine the research that went into this one. Will Enoch Root show up in a later book?
Cryptonomicon is Neal Stephenson’s 1999 speculative fiction epic and the precursor to Stephenson’s 2003 and 2004 three-volume Baroque Cycle. I’d actually read the first two volumes of the Baroque Cycle before learning that Cryptonomicon was involved—yeah, I really failed to do my research beforehand on this one—and so I went back to read it before I eventually proceed to the final volume of the Baroque Cycle.
Cryptonomicon is a sprawling, highly ambitious novel that intertwines multiple timelines in a 900-page narrative, blending historical and science fiction, and centering on the hunt for gold stolen by Nazi and Japanese forces during World War II.
The plot occurs in two timelines: one that takes place during World War II, and the other taking place in the late 1990s. During the war, we follow the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rugged Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe as they become embroiled in the Allies’ counter- intelligence efforts to break the codes created by the German Enigma machine. This historical thread is incredibly detailed and focuses on the tense and thrilling race to outsmart the Axis powers.
In the 1990s timeline, we meet Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence’s grandson, who is a computer expert working on a digital currency project. This modern storyline explores the development of data havens and cryptographic methods to create an untraceable, non-taxable currency. Randy’s project becomes enmeshed with his grandfather’s wartime efforts, leading to a convergence of past and present that is positively gripping.
One of the standout characters in the novel is Enoch Root, a seemingly ageless figure. Root’s wisdom, mysterious nature, and pivotal role in the unfolding events make him a truly awesome character who adds depth and intrigue to every scene he’s in.
Stephenson’s exploration of cryptography is fascinating and complex. The book dives into the mathematical intricacies of code-breaking and encryption, presenting ideas that range from rather accessible to way over my head—though the creative ways in which Stephenson integrates these complicated concepts into the plot are undeniably impressive and thought-provoking.
Themes of secrecy, the flow of information, and the ethical implications of technology are found throughout the novel, as characters grapple with the balance between security and freedom, the power dynamics of information control, and the enduring impact of historical events on the present. Stephenson’s portrayal of these themes is nuanced and compelling, prompting reflection on the parallels between the wartime and modern eras.
Cryptonomicon is a richly detailed and surprisingly intellectual novel that rewards patience, and despite its occasional overindulgent aside, its blend of history, technology, and adventure makes it a highly engaging read that I enjoyed quite a bit. Stephenson’s ability to craft a story that spans decades and dives into incredibly complex subjects while remaining interesting and exciting is a real testament to his authorial skill. It’s certainly quite an undertaking, but if you’re willing to invest the time, Cryptonomicon is a journey well worth taking.
Cryptonomicon is a sprawling, highly ambitious novel that intertwines multiple timelines in a 900-page narrative, blending historical and science fiction, and centering on the hunt for gold stolen by Nazi and Japanese forces during World War II.
The plot occurs in two timelines: one that takes place during World War II, and the other taking place in the late 1990s. During the war, we follow the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and the rugged Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe as they become embroiled in the Allies’ counter- intelligence efforts to break the codes created by the German Enigma machine. This historical thread is incredibly detailed and focuses on the tense and thrilling race to outsmart the Axis powers.
In the 1990s timeline, we meet Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence’s grandson, who is a computer expert working on a digital currency project. This modern storyline explores the development of data havens and cryptographic methods to create an untraceable, non-taxable currency. Randy’s project becomes enmeshed with his grandfather’s wartime efforts, leading to a convergence of past and present that is positively gripping.
One of the standout characters in the novel is Enoch Root, a seemingly ageless figure
Spoiler
who appears not only in both timelines, but in the Baroque Cycle, as wellStephenson’s exploration of cryptography is fascinating and complex. The book dives into the mathematical intricacies of code-breaking and encryption, presenting ideas that range from rather accessible to way over my head—though the creative ways in which Stephenson integrates these complicated concepts into the plot are undeniably impressive and thought-provoking.
Themes of secrecy, the flow of information, and the ethical implications of technology are found throughout the novel, as characters grapple with the balance between security and freedom, the power dynamics of information control, and the enduring impact of historical events on the present. Stephenson’s portrayal of these themes is nuanced and compelling, prompting reflection on the parallels between the wartime and modern eras.
Cryptonomicon is a richly detailed and surprisingly intellectual novel that rewards patience, and despite its occasional overindulgent aside, its blend of history, technology, and adventure makes it a highly engaging read that I enjoyed quite a bit. Stephenson’s ability to craft a story that spans decades and dives into incredibly complex subjects while remaining interesting and exciting is a real testament to his authorial skill. It’s certainly quite an undertaking, but if you’re willing to invest the time, Cryptonomicon is a journey well worth taking.
I count this as one of my, "I just had to put it down" novels.
This is a difficult book for me to review. It’s pretty good writing... but. The book was very long, and I can’t help but think that lots of stuff that was in there really didn’t need to be. Like, Randy’s family dividing up the inheritance — what did it add beyond Stephenson showing off this idea of his about how to maximize utility (which, frankly, wasn’t terribly brilliant in the first place, and even a crazy family isn’t going to force themselves to do it outside in the snow...). And the digression on Lawrence’s mathematical performance and its relationship to his sexual performance — why was that even there?
Which gets me to the other thing. Sure, half of it’s a WWII story, so one doesn’t necessarily expect many women taking big parts there; but the treatment of the ones we do see, through the eyes off both the WWII characters (not including Goto Dengo, whom we never see interact with a woman at all) is completely objectified, and seem to exist just so Stephenson can write about his characters having sex. Even the little details that Stephenson drops, like about the women, or of Japanese at Bletchley Park, always seems to turn them into sexual creatures. And the ‘major’ woman character, Amy, is totally not a POV character, or one that gets any agency.
So, I’m really torn. I enjoyed the book during the reading of it. I’m just the kind of science geek that enjoys the crypto, and liked how realistic it was about what computers and cryptography can actually accomplish. But the more I think back on it, the more troubled I am by the gender and racial (somewhat more excusable, since Shaftoe would realistically be pretty racist given his historical context...) aspects of the work.
Which gets me to the other thing. Sure, half of it’s a WWII story, so one doesn’t necessarily expect many women taking big parts there; but the treatment of the ones we do see, through the eyes off both the WWII characters (not including Goto Dengo, whom we never see interact with a woman at all) is completely objectified, and seem to exist just so Stephenson can write about his characters having sex. Even the little details that Stephenson drops, like about the women, or of Japanese at Bletchley Park, always seems to turn them into sexual creatures. And the ‘major’ woman character, Amy, is totally not a POV character, or one that gets any agency.
So, I’m really torn. I enjoyed the book during the reading of it. I’m just the kind of science geek that enjoys the crypto, and liked how realistic it was about what computers and cryptography can actually accomplish. But the more I think back on it, the more troubled I am by the gender and racial (somewhat more excusable, since Shaftoe would realistically be pretty racist given his historical context...) aspects of the work.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. I would have given it a higher rating but I found some of the modern day story wasn't really relevant and bogged things down. I found myself skimming through some of these sections. The historical stories that tie together are a good read. Stephenson definitely gets into some of the math behind cryptography. As a teacher of discrete math, I enjoyed seeing what I teach woven into the novel, although some readers may end up skimming right over these parts.
Neal Stephenson is a magnificent writer and a dismal editor. There were moments when I could have given the prose a 5-star rating for the shrewd and evocative analogies and character sketches Stephenson uses to bring accessibility and interest to an expansive set of characters, subplots, and timelines. And then there were the 1000-odd other pages of equally descriptive analogies, employed for everything from the most mundane of grey wool sweaters to the most complex of novel cryptocurrency schemes.
I feel a little disingenuous for critiquing a book for having too much good writing - but the fact is, when the same level of detail and gloss is given to everything in the book, it gets difficult to recognize any of it as special. It's why I don't really watch the Olympics - because when EVERYONE competing is the absolute best the world has to offer, the individual performances just tend to run together. It's not until you throw a JV athlete or someone having an off day into the mix that you are really able to tell exactly how skilled the best competitors are.
And, I have to say, while the prose itself is good, the characterization left a lot to be desired. Some of the main characters start out well enough, with probably the first half of the monolithic book dedicated to digging rather deeply into where Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe and Randy Waterhouse come from, and what they're about, and why they are the way they are. There are early threads of plot here, but the main point of the novel doesn't actually show up until the last chapters - which is fine, if it's more about the characters and their journeys than it is about what they're ultimately doing.
But there are characters who are also never given their due, who serve primarily as functionaries or foils to the other characters, and eventually this causes those "key" characters to seem reductive by extension.
We could take Avi, for example, who nominally runs the show when it comes to Epiphyte and the Crypt, and whose motives ultimately enable the whole endgame plot to resolve. But Avi is basically written as a morality pet; a collection of vaguely Jewish adages and mannerisms whose devotion to the idea of how bad holocausts are is regarded as more of a nerd quirk than a driving force of his character. The technology Avi develops to functionally address holocaust history and prevention is given the barest of attention compared to all of the cryptosystems, economic models, and military organizational structures delved into with much more care.
Then there's Amy. Amy has the makings of a great adventure hero: she has an established lineage of bad-ass military and mercenary forebears which is often the narrative cue for the adventure-hero protagonist, and is described as having all the skills and attitude requisite to rightfully number herself among them. But this is one of those books that twists narrative convention on its head to make the biggest nerd the hero-protagonist (usually something I totally support), and unfortunately, instead of leaving out the bad-ass character altogether, Stephenson chooses to use Amy's character as a series of misogynist stock-tropes - at one point, a character ACTUALLY MAKES A MEN-ARE-FROM-MARS-WOMEN-ARE-FROM-VENUS REFERENCE when the woman who is earlier described as potentially looking down on Randy because he can't do anything useful, like scuba dive, is chickified into the hand-wringing Girlfriend of Emotional Support when she visits Randy in prison - not to help him figure out why he is there or to help get him out (although some mysterious and unnamed character gets that job), but to ostensibly talk about their relationship. That... that was irritating. The last straw, however, is when - after the book belabors the point that the Waterhouse men (men in general) can't get down to the manly business of intellectual pursuits when there are women around because they have all these troublesome erections they don't know how to deal with, and unless they have access to a prostitute-functionary or wife-functionary (or the thoroughly-modern update, the girlfriend-functionary) they must resort to the base and inefficient solution of taking care of their own damn problems - Amy's character is reduced to more or less the Kleenex of Randy's isolationist sex life. She appears out of nowhere just when Randy needs his "intellect unclouded," Randy is allowed to get off, Amy is dismissed without any regard for her satisfaction, and the very next scene where Amy appears is a LITERAL, ACTUAL KITCHEN. Talking girl talk, while Randy gears up for the climax of his big global treasure-hunting adventure. Wait, who was the ACTUAL treasure-hunter in this novel? That's right - it was Amy. But she takes an arrow to the knee at the end, because apparently she only USED to be an adventurer.
I loved Snow Crash. I enjoyed a lot of the writing in Cryptonomicon, even in light of the desultory editing; the deft juggling of a substantial collection of intertwined subplots kind of explains the trouble with trimming the narrative fat. And there were early sections in the book where I tried to convince myself that the sexism and xenophobia displayed were the writer's attempt to make his characters seem true to a certain model of 1990s tech-guy stereotype. But the fact that the main plot only took off in the last quarter of the book and in parallel with the main female character's blatant reduction to emotionally-driven enabler of male pursuits - overall, no.
I feel a little disingenuous for critiquing a book for having too much good writing - but the fact is, when the same level of detail and gloss is given to everything in the book, it gets difficult to recognize any of it as special. It's why I don't really watch the Olympics - because when EVERYONE competing is the absolute best the world has to offer, the individual performances just tend to run together. It's not until you throw a JV athlete or someone having an off day into the mix that you are really able to tell exactly how skilled the best competitors are.
And, I have to say, while the prose itself is good, the characterization left a lot to be desired. Some of the main characters start out well enough, with probably the first half of the monolithic book dedicated to digging rather deeply into where Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe and Randy Waterhouse come from, and what they're about, and why they are the way they are. There are early threads of plot here, but the main point of the novel doesn't actually show up until the last chapters - which is fine, if it's more about the characters and their journeys than it is about what they're ultimately doing.
But there are characters who are also never given their due, who serve primarily as functionaries or foils to the other characters, and eventually this causes those "key" characters to seem reductive by extension.
We could take Avi, for example, who nominally runs the show when it comes to Epiphyte and the Crypt, and whose motives ultimately enable the whole endgame plot to resolve. But Avi is basically written as a morality pet; a collection of vaguely Jewish adages and mannerisms whose devotion to the idea of how bad holocausts are is regarded as more of a nerd quirk than a driving force of his character. The technology Avi develops to functionally address holocaust history and prevention is given the barest of attention compared to all of the cryptosystems, economic models, and military organizational structures delved into with much more care.
Then there's Amy. Amy has the makings of a great adventure hero: she has an established lineage of bad-ass military and mercenary forebears which is often the narrative cue for the adventure-hero protagonist, and is described as having all the skills and attitude requisite to rightfully number herself among them. But this is one of those books that twists narrative convention on its head to make the biggest nerd the hero-protagonist (usually something I totally support), and unfortunately, instead of leaving out the bad-ass character altogether, Stephenson chooses to use Amy's character as a series of misogynist stock-tropes - at one point, a character ACTUALLY MAKES A MEN-ARE-FROM-MARS-WOMEN-ARE-FROM-VENUS REFERENCE when the woman who is earlier described as potentially looking down on Randy because he can't do anything useful, like scuba dive, is chickified into the hand-wringing Girlfriend of Emotional Support when she visits Randy in prison - not to help him figure out why he is there or to help get him out (although some mysterious and unnamed character gets that job), but to ostensibly talk about their relationship. That... that was irritating. The last straw, however, is when - after the book belabors the point that the Waterhouse men (men in general) can't get down to the manly business of intellectual pursuits when there are women around because they have all these troublesome erections they don't know how to deal with, and unless they have access to a prostitute-functionary or wife-functionary (or the thoroughly-modern update, the girlfriend-functionary) they must resort to the base and inefficient solution of taking care of their own damn problems - Amy's character is reduced to more or less the Kleenex of Randy's isolationist sex life. She appears out of nowhere just when Randy needs his "intellect unclouded," Randy is allowed to get off, Amy is dismissed without any regard for her satisfaction, and the very next scene where Amy appears is a LITERAL, ACTUAL KITCHEN. Talking girl talk, while Randy gears up for the climax of his big global treasure-hunting adventure. Wait, who was the ACTUAL treasure-hunter in this novel? That's right - it was Amy. But she takes an arrow to the knee at the end, because apparently she only USED to be an adventurer.
I loved Snow Crash. I enjoyed a lot of the writing in Cryptonomicon, even in light of the desultory editing; the deft juggling of a substantial collection of intertwined subplots kind of explains the trouble with trimming the narrative fat. And there were early sections in the book where I tried to convince myself that the sexism and xenophobia displayed were the writer's attempt to make his characters seem true to a certain model of 1990s tech-guy stereotype. But the fact that the main plot only took off in the last quarter of the book and in parallel with the main female character's blatant reduction to emotionally-driven enabler of male pursuits - overall, no.
This massive book is at times hilarious and at times horrendous, but at all times utterly fascinating. My mathematics wasn’t up to scratch for the technical parts, but the book would have lost out in its dedication to compelling detail had none of that been there, so I wasn’t bothered by that. I loved the quirky characters and found the gradual coming together of the different time-lines absolutely brilliant. What a fabulous nerdy trip over time and around the world!
This book was awesome. If it just followed Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo it would have been phenomenal. I didn't really get into the other characters as much as these two. The crypto-analysis was fascinating but Waterhouse just didn't hit the mark for me.
Great book though. The math went well over my head, but it was still interesting.
Great book though. The math went well over my head, but it was still interesting.