Cryptonomicon: From cracking Nazi Enigma codes in WWII to a modern data-haven heist―Waterhouse and Shaftoe heirs unite against a hidden conspiracy

I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating. I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head. The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor." And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure." Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak". Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted. A wonderful book!

First, I never would have read this book if it had not been for my Kindle. For a good number of years I have avoided lengthy books because of their weight which makes them tiresome to handle and typically the print is small which also makes them tiresome and hard to read, so the Kindle is a great tool for reading a long and heavy book like Cryptonomicon. As regards the book itself, overall I found it quite enjoyable as it blends history, technology, geography, important historical personalities, excellent writing, mathematics, computers, and many other subjects of interest to me into a package that at times reads like a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel. At times I really could not figure out how Neal Stephenson was able to come up with such original phrasing combined with a vocabulary that I must admit is well above my own. On almost every page I found it necessary to refer to the dictionary for words that I had not seen before or could not remember their meaning. In every case the word Neal used was the perfect one for the circumstance. As he is relatively young and did not get a Harvard or M.I.T. education, I can only attribute it to him growing up in a family of highly educated professionals who did a lot of his education at the dinner table. Another thing I liked about the book were the main characters Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Randy Waterhouse, Avi, Alan Turing, the Dentist, and many others who were well developed and given real personality by the author. This and the overall plot were the things that made this book quite enjoyable. On the somewhat less enjoyable side and the reason I did not give this book five stars were the following. First the ending, after asking the reader to slog with him throughout the world and all the way through World War II, I thought the ending was really weak and almost like an afterthought. It seemed like Neal ran out of writing energy at this point. It also seemed like he got kind of goofy at the end by bringing Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, and General Douglas Macarthur together in the middle of a baseball diamond during the final battle for Manila. This is fantasy that loses its entertainment value. Also I did not like the forty or fifty pages devoted to the relationships between various Greek and Roman Gods, a good editor would have gotten rid of this entire segment. Another thing I hated in the Kindle edition of this book is the two hundred page article about worldwide undersea laying of communication cables. This article is dated, more than ten years old, uninteresting, old technology, most of the companies talked about have gone out of business, and has no place at all being in this book. Maybe this tourist trip was of interest to Neal ten years ago but it really turned me off by being inserted in this book. Amazon and Neal should do us all a favor and permanently delete it as irrelevant. In spite of my complaints on these few issues, I would still highly recommend that you read Cryptonomicon. When I recuperate from reading it, I will probably read Quicksilver but it will be a few more months before I am ready for it.

I am 54 years old and I am a nerd. (Sounds like an AA confession or something). You may think Important People like George Bush or Bill Clinton or President-elect (at time of writing) Obama, or A. Lincoln, or Alexander or Ghengis Khan or Hitler or Nimitz or FDR or Churchill are the kind of guys who make the world go `round. Or try to stop it, as the case may be. You'd be dead wrong. An interesting thing happened in the 19th century called the Industrial Revolution. After 20,000-some-odd years of digging in the dirt the planet suddenly went high-tech. Or at least higher-tech. The IPs were shocked, SHOCKED, to find they couldn't win a war (or do much else) without tech. And where did they get their tech? From us autistic, socially-inept, outta-the-box-thinking, harmless-appearing nerds. Stephenson gets this right, oh-so-dead-on-right, in "Cryptonomicon". I almost never buy hardbacks any more except in extraordinary circumstances. Fellow serious bookworms will know why immediately - space. If the total volume in one's abode can be expressed as X, and the volume taken up in said abode by hardback books is .99999X, it becomes obvious that...well, you get the picture. (Omigawd, an equation - means 10% fewer people will read this review). Sooner or later paperbacks start looking like the way to go. When I saw the big Avon hardback edition in 1999 and took a quick look, it seemed like a possibility. But what iced the deal was the inside jacket picture of a young (maybe 10 y.o.?) NTS curled up on the couch reading Epstein's "First Book of Codes and Ciphers", a book I still have on my own shelf. Now THIS was my kinda author! Since then, I've read "Cryptonomicon" every few years and never failed to pull something new out of it. This time it was an even better appreciation of the very digressions many of the reviewers here have taken exception to. They are brilliant little jewels in their own right. To those who fizzed through the book the first time and missed them, or even skipped `em deliberately (arrrrgh!), I say, "Read it again and slow down. Smell the coffee!" The pages leading up to and including Lawrence Waterhouse's Big Insight at the organ keyboard are among the most hilarious I've ever read. Could only have come straight from a true nerd's heart. About the ending. Sometimes in real life, things don't get tied up with a then-everyone-lives-happily-ever-after ribbon, or a can-you-top-this bow. Sometimes the villain wins or the hero loses, or they both win, or they both lose. The codebreaker heroes of WWII got medals and citations they couldn't publicly acknowledge for over thirty years. Many of them worked their butts off on projects the results of which they didn't even see until such information began trickling out in the early 1970s. Many of these ops would have seemed totally absurd from the point of view of the heavily-compartmented participants. Stephenson's genius is his presentation of clandestine activities from the POVs of Bobby Shaftoe, who knows nothing, and Waterhouse, who knows everything. After the 900-page tour-de-force NTS rolls out, about the only other ending I can envision is what I call the "up-yers ending", something like this: "The Earth encounters a random black hole and falls into it. All life is squished into oblivion (including the characters you've read about for the past week) and the world ceases to exist. Thank you for buying this book." THAT would've ticked off the reviewers even more. My background includes writing ICBM flight software and service as a U.S. Navy Intelligence officer. I've read 1000s of books of all types, had three of my own published. I've never given max stars to a book before in my life. This one gets max stars. Six out of five, in fact. Stephenson wrote a book about us and he got it right. Nerds rule.

Incredibly well worth reading if you like multiple disparate plots going on during more than one time period on various parts of the earth with some real historical events (WWII, early days of the Internet 1990s, etc.) and persons mixed in and with some characters/plots that seem, for hundreds of pages, to have nothing to do with other characters/plots. Well, I enjoy that sort of thing. A few times in the book I thought the descriptions were a bit too lengthy (Just get on with it!) but even those were either interesting or amusing or both. The author certainly has an eye for detail. He also has a knack for interweaving lives of characters from all over the planet with a wide array of background, including Americans, Brits, Germans, Swedes, Filipinos, Australians, Chinese, Japanese, etc. The writing style manages to allow the reader crawl right into the brain of the main character, a likable, very intelligent fellow, who hasn't been the brightest bulb with social skills on occasion. His thoughts and emotions, both ordinary and extraordinary, are very clearly felt by the reader as events move along and take all sorts of bizarre turns. The author also manages to throw several words into every chapter that I do not know. This is fun, because I like learning new words (and the Kindle will automatically look most of them up for me), but I do not recall ever reading a book in which I looked up so many words (including some technical scientific and linguistic works). It is not a difficult read, by any means, but despite my own inflated sense of being a highly educated person with a pretty vast vocabulary, I was always stumbling on something new. Yes, I enjoy that sort of thing, too. I read this book on the suggestion of a couple of friends (thanks James and John). Why do I always read the longest books? I have no idea. However, this one was worth the read. In print it is 1,000-1,100 pages, I think. I read it on the Kindle (thank you Amazon for saving my eyesight) and 5-10% of the length is after matter that explains some of the cryptography details as well as some of the development of the plots and ideas and so forth. These also make interesting reading.

This is one of the finest books I've ever read, and I've read a lot, from pulp to classics. It should definitely be on the list of "several hundred books you should read before you die." It is highly entertaining, extremely well written, and fast moving from start to finish. But it is literature; if the author had lived in the 19th century, he'd have been rubbing sleeves with Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. He's that good. When I search for contemporary examples similar is originality, skill, and scope, what comes to minds is "We, The Drowned" by Carsten Jensen. The thread running through the book is cryptography, during WWII and in the modern era as computer encryption and hacking to circumvent it. The book gives good historical insight into the massive contribution Allied cryptographers made to the war effort in breaking German and Japanese codes, and into the difficulty of concealing from the enemy the fact that these codes had been broken. The historical and present-day periods are linked in that the characters in WWII are either still alive in the present-day part of the story, or are the grandparents of the present-day characters. I found the main characters in the book to be believable and well developed. There are mildly technical descriptions of coding and codebreaking throughout the book that are, however, geared to the lay reader and can be read or skimmed according to the reader's inclinations. I personally found them readable and interesting. The book also gives an insight into how mathematicians' minds work, with humerous illutrations such as one of the WWII characters mathematically characterizing the 'Horniness Index' as it applies to a young woman he's fallen in love with and the effect of this on his work. Sketches like this were simply fun to read. Overall, the book deals with serious issues, but the underling tone throughout is one of wry humor. Caution: Don't pick up this book unless you have a good chunk of time. It is over 1000 pages of addictive reading.

Cryptonomicon is a fast-paced highly stylized tome that weighs in at around 1150 pages (for the mass market paperback version). Stephenson's prose, like always, is brilliant but I just can't give this book 5 stars, or even 4 stars. There are a few major kinks in this otherwise fantastic book. In a nutshell Cryptonomicon is a book that has up to four parallel storylines going for it. You have a storyline that follows Bobby Shaftoe - a haiku writing Rambo-esque all American Marine. Lawrence Waterhouse - a math and cryptology genius who has a helluva time remembering people's names. Goto Dengo - a friend of Bobby Shaftoe who happens to be a soldier for the Japanese army. And then you have Randy Waterhouse - a modern day computer geek who is the grandson of Lawrence. He is the systems expert for Epiphyte which is a company trying to setup a data haven in the fictional country Kinakuta (the only fictional location in the book if I recall). The stories for Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse are set in World War 2 while the story about Randy is modern day. Goto Dengo's story is also set in WW2 but he shows up in the modern story as well. For the most part Stephenson does a masterful job weaving all of these threads together. Stephenson's prose is highly addicting making this book downright impossible to put down at times. So, why the beef? Why 3 stars? (I would give it 3.5, but not rounded to 4 - a pessimistic 3.5 I suppose). First, as other reviewers have pointed out: most of the characters seem to be exactly the same. Yes, each has their own quirk and unique background, but the problem is in the dialog. The way the characters talk is almost exactly the same, it ends up sounding more like Stephenson talking and less like the actual characters. The dialog is often funny and/or witty but at the same time it's all too similar. Second, the book is a bit too big for what it is. I'm not like some people who believe this book needs to be cut in half, more like 100-150 pages should be edited out. I do love Stephenson's digressions but sometimes they are a bit much. For instance, there's what has to be 25 pages dedicated to a single email that really doesn't offer much to the story. There are other instances where he could have trimmed the fat a bit (though I did love the infamous Cap'n Crunch digression!). Finally, the ending. I'm usually not picky about endings. A lot of people hated Snow Crash's ending but I found it satisfactory. Cryptonomicon though, it's just so abrupt. After 1150 pages you would expect a grandiose ending but instead a lot of threads are left abandoned and questions left unanswered. I was left wanting more, but not in the way that the book was so good, more in the way of "okay, so what happens next?" Maybe the 150 pages I mentioned earlier that should have been cut should have instead been dedicated to wrapping the story up. Stephenson is a master of carrot-on-a-stick writing. The storyline is constantly bouncing between the modern story and the WW2 story and oftentimes a chapter ends with a cliffhanger, keeping the pages turning. It's just too bad that when you finally get ahold of the carrot at the end of the book and shove it in your mouth it turns out to be a stick of dynamite instead. Still, even though I have substantial gripes about this book I recommend reading it. When I look back I have very vivid memories of a lot of great scenes. So no, this book isn't perfect, but it isn't garbage either. Check it out!

FYI - Kindle version ends at 87% with the rest of the book being appendix and ebook extras. The LAST thing I wanted after reading this book was 13% more reading about code. :-) Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read. Told from multiple points of view, alternating between WWII and present day (late '90's) this is a really complex novel about ... stuff. Lots and lots of stuff and detail about said stuff. Obviously, it was about breaking code in the war, also, breaking code as a hacker. It was about war and the effects of war, and the creation of the first digital computer, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch. And some Greek mythology. Money. Cyber-everything. All over the place. It even included some hints at the creation of the NSA, which was interesting. Particularly since it's very clear to see the need for code-breaking in the war, and what it has "morphed" into. It really was a great story, well-told. I'm glad I slogged through but I would really only recommend this book to people who like to know how things work, to the last detail. The characters were great, and fully developed. I found myself rooting for almost everybody, good guy or bad, and I suppose there's something to that as well. Just because someone is ostensibly on a side you are not on, doesn't mean they aren't on your side. I had a lot of difficulty with the rotating POV's which is part of what made this slow for me. You'd get into a storyline, and then BAM pulled out of it, and who knew when you'd get back to it. Those types of structures don't generally bother me, but in this case it sort of always left an easy stopping point. Also, this book needed editing like NOBODY'S business. You don't have to go step by step decoding an ENTIRE message for me to get the point. And there was one scene (a prison exchange) where it got so didactic they actually spelled out the real definition of a word conversationally. It was so inauthentic. It's a magnum opus for sure. Worthy of its recognition and probably worthy of 5-stars. But I just couldn't get past the bog of excessive detail enough to give it the full 5.

I read a lot, a whole lot. I first read this monster from the library the month it came out, decided (after I had recovered from the experience) that it was probably the best thing I'd read in the whole of the `90s, went out and bought a hardback for myself, and set it in a place of honor on my shelves. Nearly six years on, I find that aging has only improved it. I've been working my way slowly through his recent trilogy, but Cryptonomicon is still better. His characters exist in a t least five dimensions and will stick with you from a long, long time. There's Lawrence Waterhouse, math prodigy and buddy of Alan Turing, who becomes one of the key codebreakers of World War II. There's Marine raider Bobby Shaftoe, a survivor of everything the war can throw at him -- except heroism. There's Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's equally nerdy grandson, master Unix hacker, and generally nice guy. There's America Shaftoe, partly-Filipino granddaughter of Bobby, master deep diver, and all-round tough cookie -- which doesn't keep Randy and Amy from falling in love. There's Avi, Randy's best friend and front-man in all their business ventures -- in this case, building the world's first politically independent data haven, much to the dismay of major governments. There's Lieut. Goto Dengo, engineer for the Nipponese army and builder of the primary hiding place of Japan's stolen billions in gold bullion. And, moving like mist between the two separate generations, there's the _eminence gris_ Enoch Root, Catholic priest, doctor, cryptographer, conspirator, and take-no-prisoners philosopher. Add to this list several dozen supporting players, all equally well realized, and the richness of the narrative texture is unbelievable. Besides the sheer enjoyment you get from Stephenson's Roman-candle style, his highly original metaphors and similes, and his ironic sense of humor, you're gonna learn a lot about cryptography (both the wartime vintage and the present-day digital variety), and about irregular warfare, and a score of other subjects. Yes, it's a huge book -- but it has to be. The heft also allows space for the author's sprawling digressions on topics as diverse as jungle survival, the similarities between computers and church organs, granny-grade furniture, U-boat life, several Holocausts, imprinting of sexual fetishes, Finnish psychology, the neuro-sociological origins of the ancient Greek pantheon, how to divide up an inheritance, the socioeconomic underpinnings of paper currency, and the proper way to eat Cap'n Crunch. It doesn't all advance the plot, but don't worry about it. Every single paragraph in this thing is worth reading, savoring, and storing away for later rethinking. I'll be reading it against in another decade.

I discovered Neal Stephenson a little later than many of his fans, simply not being aware of him until I read an interview with another author who simply raved about him. I browsed his books to find what seemed like the best one to introduce me to him and settled on Cryptonomicon. I was very quickly immersed in it, and found it to be a mind-blowing mixture of great narrative and big ideas. Neal Stephenson has written science fiction as you would normally know it, but this comes from a different angle in that he writes about how science and technology change the world here and now. Most science fiction does the same, but portrays the future or alternative reality resulting from that progress. Here Stephenson tells the story of the moments that the world changed. The springboard for the story is Turing's development of the first computer to break the Enigma code during World War Two. From there we are given a less well-known, mostly fictional tale of people and events connected with that breakthrough - the people supporting Turing and trying to keep the existence of the ultimate code breaking machine from the enemy, and the efforts to achieve breakthroughs in cracking new codes. This story is epic enough, spanning all the theatres of war from Europe to Australia, paying special attention to the pivotal role of the Philippines in the war effort. Also interwoven with this narrative though, is the story of a new breed of technologists in the year 2000, some of whom are descendants of the characters in the wartime story. The children and grandchildren of Turing's contemporaries are engaged in a different kind of battle on a new frontier. It's still about codebreaking and communication, but now it's about data encryption, new communications technology and the digital flow of money and information around the world. The thousand page result is a complex and thrilling story - at its start, mathematicians provide the real breakthrough in the war effort more powerful than an atom bomb. What they create is a computer, and a massive leap forward in encryption and codebreaking. The result was a new era of technology, forged in the furnace of global war, transforming the world we live in. Decades later, we use the technology developed since then to explore new possibilities and break new ground; and the technology, breakthroughs, wars and developments of the past are the ancestors of the technology that runs the world in the present. In a sense the story set at the turn of the 21st century is just a function of Stephenson's big idea. We are all descended from the people who built the future, or fought for it. The technology we use is descended from the inventions and work of previous generations. The computers and communications tools in use today derive from tools built to fight the Nazis. The seas where we lay cables to send information around the world in the blink of an eye still bear the marks of the battles fought there before. The plans we hatch, the future we build, the battles we fight are one way or another a continuation of plans, futures and battles that have been in play since before we were born. It's perhaps inevitable that the invention of the first computer as a means of breaking the Enigma code, the struggles across multiple theatres of war and riding in jeeps with MacArthur or on bicycles with Alan Turing will possess more drama and weight than modern day storylines where most of the fighting is done in the boardroom or on the telephone. Perhaps the one false note in the book is Stephenson's attempt to inject drama into the more recent events so they are not overshadowed by the sound and fury of World War Two. But this story set more or less in the present is necessary for the reader to connect to the narrative, and the idea that what went before built we are today. And there is still much to savour in the modern storyline, especially as the number of connections and echoes of the wartime story begins to increase and the whole picture of Stephenson's story emerges. The criticisms in other reviews of Cryptonomicon centre around the length of the book, the events Stephenson has chosen to focus on, the ancestry of the modern characters and the sheer level of detail provided to the story. It's true the story is immensely long and detailed, the interwoven storylines very complex, with long descriptions of mathematical concepts complete with graphs and illustrations. They are fundamental to the novel, though, so it's really a case of whether you're prepared to persevere with that for the huge rewards the book has to offer. For me, the world Stephenson creates is so enthralling that I'm glad it went on for a thousand pages so I could keep experiencing it. It's full of quirks and little changes to the world we know, just to keep you on your toes - for some reason, Wales and the Isle of Man seem to have merged into one in Stephenson's reality. This book opened up a whole new world for me and I became a confirmed Neal Stephenson fan on the strength of this novel. It's also a perfect stopping off point to get you into the Stephenson universe, if you intend to read his magisterial Baroque Cycle.

This is probably my favourite book. I bought it again for Kindle so I can re-read it at leisure. It's long and complicated, well worth ploughing through. Plenty of derring-do in the second world war and in the present day, lots of technical stuff and plenty of human interest. Superb stuff, finely described characters, lots of action and some black comedy, heart-rending tragedy and a fantastically satisfying end.

Olvidad al Señor de los Anillos, a los Mangas, a la trilogía Illuminatus... Esta novela os hará (al menos justo después de leerla) la persona mas inteligente del planeta. Evidentemente se toma sus libertades artísticas, pero pocos libros describen la ciencia de la criptografía y sus fundamentos matemáticos de una manera tan apasionada y a la vez entretenida. La trama tiene lugar en varios lugaes y en dos épocas, entrelazadas entre si por el nexo común de los códigos. Pero no todo es ciencia. Este libro es para todos los públicos.

Great read

It's a very interesting novel that takes us through World War II, allowing us to share the work great minds were doing to defeat the enemy. It masterfully weaves together many themes, keeping you engaged the entire time.