Customer Reviews

Cryptonomicon

5 star:		(367)
4 star:		(184)
3 star:		(67)
2 star:		(29)
1 star:		(43)

 

 

This book starts very slow, and you're wondering how these characters and timelines are related. But patience really pays off. After a couple hundred pages, you are deeply involved in these characters.

I explain to my friends that this book is not written as science fiction. The tech/science mentioned is either today or near-today. What is science fiction is what it make you THINK.

The science is rock solid, one of the few authors who doesn't treat computers (my business) as a magic black box that does wonderful things for you. The main characters are pleasantly solid, yet excentrically unique. They are unfortunately the only characters with any depth.

My business partner is a huge fan of the author's, and has pushed me to read several of his books. This is the only one I have liked.

As Clancy made 250 pages of how to construct a nuclear bomb interesting, Stephenson makes you WANT to understand how cryptography works, and gives you increasingly complex explanations over the entire length of the book, fleshing out the explanations and definitions of many of the critical concepts.

The characters he creates leave you with the sense that they are true to life, but shown in a twisted way leading to many different levels of humor. I found myself laughing at a joke three times. Separate times, in three different places in the book, as the events in that place further illuminated the joke told several chapters back. There were surprises around every corner.

Highly recommended.

Going in to CRYPTONOMICON, I had absolutely no idea what to expect. I'd never read anything by Neal Stephenson, nor had I read any blurbs or reviews of the book. However, it had appeared on enough "Best Book" lists that I decided to give it a try. And boy am I glad I did.

This novel is fun, huge, funny, rambling, witty, and sprawling. It is clever, engaging, and well-paced. It is full of quirky, eccentric, immensely likeable characters, crazy, interesting ideas, and amusing, often hilarious, looks at various situations including, but not limited to, mathematics, life, how to eat Cap'n Crunch properly, the purpose of beards, and well, just about anything else you can think of. Obviously, then, this book is not for everyone. Those who like tight, meticulously pared-down straightforward stories may not be able to get into this one.

For me, though, as you may have guessed from the title of the review, this book was an absolute joy to read. The books chapters cycled between four main characters, and every time I finished a chapter I found myself in an awkward position: I didn't want to go on, because I wanted to keep reading about the character I'd been following. However, by the end of the first paragraph of the next chapter, I'd be feeling the same way about the next character in the cycle. It was an odd feeling, and a tribute to the skill with which Stephenson created these characters that each of them was so completely engaging.

In addition to the main characters, the settings and situations were vivid and well-drawn. Despite this books immensity and its tendency to ramble at length about inanity, it never got boring, and always retained its charm. Stephenson provides us with a very amusing outlook on life.

However, this book is not without flaws, the two biggest of which have been noted in previous reviews:

1) Women. There are no really well-developed female characters. Most of the women have virtually no "screen time" at all, and the one who does have quite a bit of time is not fully realized as a character. It would have been very helpful to have gotten inside her head once in a while.

2) The ending. This book kind of just ends, without resolving properly. It feels like it just cuts off, and that was kind of unsatisfactory. Randy's story deserved at least another chapter or an epilogue of some sort to tie-up the plot. Alas, Stephenson, at the end, couldn't deliver.

So, as I've said, this book is delightfully readable, and if not for the sudden ending, would easily have garnered a 5/5 rating. I'm definitely looking forward to the next CRYPTONOMICON book (which, if I'm not mistaken, is intended to stand alone; it will not be a sequel, per se).

I don't usually place much weight into the book reviews publishers tag on back covers, but the review on this book really does describe it - this book is Tom Clancy mated with William Gibson with James Mitchner acting as a midwife.

Even though this book is an astounding 1200+ pages, it is an engrossing read. Like Mitchner, the story weaves the lives of many generations together through a common theme. Except Mitchner never wrote about lives so exciting (Apologies to any Mitchner fans - but Hawaii was a little dull.)

There are many character threads and stories in the book, but the two main ones are the story of a WWII cryptographer (Clancy style), and the story of his Silicon Valley grandson's pursuit of an offshore data center and advanced cryptography (Gibson style). Both threads are thoroughly engrossing. The book paces perfectly, it never gets too frentic or too dull.

The character development is also done very well - Stevenson doesn't clutter the book with too many marginal characters besides his main ones and he makes most the characters very memorable. This leaves him lots of time to develop his main characters into complex and interesting people.

Stevenson's writing style is also very readable, yet not as flat as the standard supermarket fiction (or bad sci-fi for that matter). The different story threads are written in a different tone, and Stevenson uses his command of tone to provide even more character and plot development. For example, his savant WWI cryptographer thinks in mathmatical proofs, his modern-day cyberpunk in Tolkein-inspired metaphors.

If I had a complaint about this book (I don't have many) it is that the ending leaves a little to be desired. I won't give anything away, but my overall impression with the last 200 or so pages of the book was that Stevenson got tired and just started typing out some text to finish the thing up. It's not a complete breakdown, but compared to the rest of the book it is a weak showing.

Regardless, I still highly recommend this book to any cyberpunk fans, war story fans, or math geeks.

Neal Stephenson ably juggles multiple story lines in multiple timelines with a variety of fascinating and quirky characters while also managing to develop a fascinating treatise on encryption and its development in the 20th century. An absolutely excellent novel. A superb introduction to the development and value of encryption with some wonderful reference material in the back end of the book. The concept that develops toward the end of the book may move towards a hacker pie-in-the-sky concept (see Bitcoin and its troubles), but the narrative run of the book manages to overwhelm that issue with its sheer sense of fun. Highly recommended.

It's been years now, but I can still recall the utter absorption... the humour, marvelous wit, the history come alive, ... this is a suspense novel for science buffs in a way.

And Stephenson's science is right on.

(From a physics grad).

The book spans generations, shifts in time that always have you looking forward to one or the other. Providing amusement at post-modern university crowds, fascination at scientific achievements during wartime, and horrific amazement at trials and brilliance of the characters in the book during WWII.

I think I'm due to read it again... and I rarely do so with books! Esp considering how lengthy this one is... but really enjoyable read!

This is the kind of great novel that, without any pretensions of intellectualism (but an enormous display of intelligence), is both immense in scope, bold in vision, and lightheartedly cool and funny. No review could convey the range of issues, both mundane and enormous, that are covered in this book. More than that, no review could convince a reader how enjoyable and laugh out loud hilarious it is in more places than I can count. I really liked the fact that I could get lost in the novel for a while, put it down for a few weeks, then be absorbed again, and again and again. One complaint that some have put down here is that it sometimes gets bogged down in details. That is true; Stephenson has a tendency to digress. But most of the digressions are fascinating; they sometimes do allow you to lose track of the story, such that when the digression is over you no longer feel the irresistable urge to know what comes next, but I liked that about my experience of reading this novel. I found that it can't be read in one or two or three sittings. There's just too much there. I probably read it in thirty or fourty sittings over the course of about a month; when I'd had enough, I could set it down and do something else, and come back to something new and surprisingly intriguing the next day or week. Most novels that took that long would lose their grip on me. Some books that don't lose their grip on me have me staying up all night for a few days. Somehow with this book the digressions and the interruptions in the story as he moves between the points of view of four or five main characters from different time periods allowed me to walk away and come back comfortably. I will say that by the last few hundred pages I couldn't put it down, and kept going until it was over.

I have been saying this (woe to hyse) outloud for over a year now and still get a kick out of it (read it-you'll get it). So much so that I am re-reading the novel. Before derailing into incomprehensible semi pretentious litterary babble (see Quicksilver & co.), Stephenson created a gem with Cryptonomicon.
The style is a notch away (above?) from mainstreem thrillers. The digressions are hilarious. The observations keen. The humour witty and tongue in cheek. The history informative. The breeziest 1200 page read ever. Does with words what Bach did with notes.
All in all a terrific effort worth all the praise it has garnered.
Woe to Hyse!

I've read Cryptonomicon twice now and am convinced that while this is very tough read, it is both highly entertaining and extremely educational. Stephenson has a tendency to weigh the reader down with minutae, but it's the kind of information that'll make you hit the internet to learn even more about. The plot switches back and forth between two eras: 1940s in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of WWII and in present day. If you're a technically minded person interested in historical fiction, cryptography, and the evolution of currency (i know, sounds weird but is highly interesting written by Stephenson), this is a must read.

I enjoyed this book from start to finish, and went right to the computer to order more books by the author.

The style can be a little trying -- the metaphor density is about 6 to the page -- and it can get a little arch. Still, most of the flourishes are pretty fresh, while some are genuinely startling.

One review on this site complained of the overly "freakish" characters. That's certainly fair. If your taste doesn't run to characters who are extreme outsiders, you won't enjoy the book. Personally, I found the characters engaging.

Science fiction writers like to work a Theory of Everything into their plots. This author has a handful of Theories of Everything. I didn't mind. Most of the theories were interesting enough to serve as enhancements of the story rather than annoying digressions.

Plot Summary: How to summarize this plot...Well, It starts with 2 professors and 1 student riding bikes at a late 1930's Princeton talking about zeta functions and building a machine to do calculations. Then there are WWII stories from Bobby Shaftoe's and Lawrence Waterhouse's (the student above) very different perspectives. They are both part of a code-breaking part of the US military where Waterhouse is one of the chief enemy code crackers, along with Alan Turing for the British from the bike ride above, and Shaftoe one of the soldiers carrying out seemingly strange orders to make the results of these cracked codes look like random occurances. It takes a long time in the book for Shaftoe to realize the true agenda behind 90% of his missions. Waterhouse has added large sections to the Cryptonomicon, the compendium of all crypto knowledge, as a result of his work. The other part of the story involves Randy Waterhouse (grandson of Lawrence) and his new company Epiphyte trying to develop a data haven in the south Pacific and the various legal and technical troubles that it involves and the enemies they accrue. Randy and co. meet up with the Shaftoe descendants as part of a surveying and cable laying venture in the Philippines. One of the WWII era characters, Enoch Root, starts emailing Randy Waterhouse messages concerning a certain crypto system that was not broken during the war. This is the same secret code that Randy's grandfather Lawrence was also working on in his lifetime incidentally. Eventually, almost every decendant of a war era character, if not that character himself, becomes involved in what becomes a large treasure hunt. The plot is in no way as simplistic and boring as I made it sound, despite the seemingly boring subject matter of cryptography and digital currency may be.

Opinion: This is a long book, but I loved it. It is incredibly funny at several points and had me chuckling out loud. The 2 main plotlines are pretty seperate for like 700 of the 900 pages but come together in a very nice way. I liked the writing style most of the time. Long, train-of-thought sentences, very descriptive. It drew a nice mental picture of things. The story was very engaging all around and I never felt like the novel was dragging. The characters were very believable. I'm an engineer and didn't get lost in any of the technical, code-breaking and cryptological discussions, some people might. There are graphs in this book which usually deal with something like Lawrence's work performance vs. how many times he has ejaculated and how to optimize his work, so don't be intimidated with those, they are tangents most of the time. For the super nerdy among us, there is a complete description of the "Solitaire" encryption method in the Appendix...not to mention a PERL script in the text somewhere around page 450.

Recommendation: Read it. 5 out of 5 stars. Did I mention this is funny? I will be reading more Stephenson due to how much I enjoyed this book.