January 12, 2005
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
First of all, this book is very long (update: dwarfed, however, by Stephenson's more recent offerings). At over 900 pages, it will be quite an investment of time. It does have some pages that could have been easily edited out, but considering the size of this tome, the signal to noise ratio is high enough to recommend this book.
Stephenson makes a strong departure from his previous novels like "Snow Crash". This is his first supposedly `serious' novel. However, the strength of this novel is the same as that of his earlier novels: his inspired descriptions of technology. It does not matter that in this novel the technology described is either contemporary or dating back to the Second World War.
This book has been described and promoted as a historical novel and not really as a science-fiction novel. In my view it is really an alternative history novel which is similar, at least in spirit, to some of the novels written by Connie Willis and others by Philip K. Dick, both of whom have both feet firmly planted in the sci-fi genre.
As the book eventually makes clear, there are good guys and bad guys in this book and they are categorized as such. This would be fine if the bad guys were not uniformly ill-defined, unmotivated and permanently hidden from view. The villains provide most of the impetus for the action but little is known about any of them; from General Wing (corrupt PRC honcho) to Andrew Loeb (a lawyer, no less). Some villains (like The Dentist) appear and then vanish without purpose.
But the book makes up for this by providing the most interesting heroes to populate the pages of a thriller: a bunch of nerds including Randy Waterhouse in a high-tech startup to build a data haven to keep governments off of encryption and privacy software while at the same time introducing their own currency; a group of cryptographers including Alan Turing and Randy's grandfather cracking codes in the Second World War and a conspiracy (implausibly) forged in the chaos of that war.
The ending is hopelessly inadequate but the book remains interesting right until the last page. In this sense, this book reminds me of Neal Stephenson's earlier books. The detailed depiction of each sub-culture and craft and the style of presentation is so engaging that it does not matter that the big picture in the background is plainly kooky.
For example, Stephenson is most lyrical when describing the details behind 'van Eck phreaking' (first proposed by Wim van Eck, van Eck's paper). Eating a bowl of Cap'n Crunch; connecting countries by laying fibre-optics on the ocean floor; and the distribution of family heirlooms by solving a generalization of the Knapsack problem are some of the other things examined under the Stephenson's microscope.
Stephenson, however, sometimes loses control of his writing style. In some places the prose reads like a Unix man page. But the strangest part has to be when Admiral Yamamoto's thoughts use a language that one would expect to hear from an American teenager.
Some parts are less than original. Neal Stephenson's theory about the universal nature of the Hacker character is filched from his earlier book "The Diamond Age". It wasn't compelling then, and it remains a bit strained even now.
More information:
- More details on the engineering behind laying fibre-optic cables onto the ocean floor can be found in Neal Stephenson's Wired article: Mother Earth Mother Board.
- Also, Neal Stephenson's Wired article about the growth of the internet in China: In the Kingdom of Mao Bell.
- About Rudy:
Rudy (Rudolf von Hacklheber, a German mathematician in the WWII storyline) was not a real character, he is totally made up, but I think that he is a reasonably realistic sample of the kind of guy you might have seen running around Princeton at the time Turing was there, immediately before the war.
- Stephenson also states that Alan Turing spent some time during the war in Greenwich Village (New York City) working on voice encryption for Bell Labs. Later in the novel, Stephenson describes Turing using such a device which combines speech with white noise from a accompanying phonograph which is cancelled out at the receiver's end who has an identical phonograph playing.
%T Cryptonomicon %A Neal Stephenson %I London: Arrow Books %D 1999 %G ISBN: 0099410672 (pb) %P 918 %K science-fiction
Date written: 2000/08/26
Posted by anoop at January 12, 2005 11:32 PM