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A review by jcal9
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
1.0
What utter navel-gazing dribble. I cant believe I persevered for 1100 pages - essentially I was beholden to the sunk-cost fallacy. The is no doubt that the underlying idea of "Cryptonomicon" is right up my alley of interests. The novel has code-breaking set around World War 2, information theory antics, and a whole bunch of early ideas about how the state will interact with the internet.
Unfortunately, Stephenson is a neck-beard (at least in 1999 he was when he wrote this). The character writing, with the exception of the transcendental Enoch Root, are heavily cliched and forgettable. The character writing of women in this novel is atrocious, bordering on non-sensical (as in the only really strong, intelligent woman in the novel falls for the computer nerd for literally no reason). Stephenson weighs down the reader with pseudo-intellectual diatribes that kill any momentum the overly long story develops (don't get me started on the Root's philosophy of Athena V Mars claptrap). The novel reads as a though a mathematician/physicist has an unparalleled view of human nature and is now ready to rough-ride historians, philosophers, and theologians with a basic understanding of libertarianism. On top of this, Stephenson writes overly descriptive scenes that do not reward the reader for picturing, and an incredibly annoying tendency to write the first page or two of a chapter about events that the reader has not yet read (then catches them up in the next page or two). That is a cool literary device to apply seldomly to disorientate, but doing it regularly just fatigues the reader.
Maybe I would have loved this novel if I was younger but I only view it now as complete waste of my time. In summary, avoid at all costs. To be honest, I have not really enjoyed any of the Stephenson's novels and he is now on my avoid list (no matter how much I think the subject matter is up my alley of interests).
Unfortunately, Stephenson is a neck-beard (at least in 1999 he was when he wrote this). The character writing, with the exception of the transcendental Enoch Root, are heavily cliched and forgettable. The character writing of women in this novel is atrocious, bordering on non-sensical (as in the only really strong, intelligent woman in the novel falls for the computer nerd for literally no reason). Stephenson weighs down the reader with pseudo-intellectual diatribes that kill any momentum the overly long story develops (don't get me started on the Root's philosophy of Athena V Mars claptrap). The novel reads as a though a mathematician/physicist has an unparalleled view of human nature and is now ready to rough-ride historians, philosophers, and theologians with a basic understanding of libertarianism. On top of this, Stephenson writes overly descriptive scenes that do not reward the reader for picturing, and an incredibly annoying tendency to write the first page or two of a chapter about events that the reader has not yet read (then catches them up in the next page or two). That is a cool literary device to apply seldomly to disorientate, but doing it regularly just fatigues the reader.
Maybe I would have loved this novel if I was younger but I only view it now as complete waste of my time. In summary, avoid at all costs. To be honest, I have not really enjoyed any of the Stephenson's novels and he is now on my avoid list (no matter how much I think the subject matter is up my alley of interests).