Neal Stephenson started out writing Snow Crash and other post-cyberpunk idea-heavy techno-SF. Cryptonomicon was his breakout book, and though it was nominated for a Hugo some people said it wasn’t SF at all. It’s set partly in the near future (of 1999) and partly in the Second World War, and all of the technology in the modern section pretty much existed at the time the book was written. It is in fact definitely a genre work and arguably fantasy, but to really know that you have to also have read the Baroque Cycle, which is set much earlier in the same universe.
The stories and characters dovetail and interlock cleverly, it has the kind of wonderful exposition that’s Stevenson’s trademark, and unlike his earlier work it actually has an end. The characters in the WWII sections are the fathers and grandfathers (yeah, not so many women) of the characters in the modern sections, and so you sometimes know what will happen to the characters without knowing how it will happen.
I mean it is a nerdy book full of infodumps about anything and everything, but the joy of Cryptonomicon is its wonderfully satisfying complexity, and also the surprisingly well-drawn characters. They’re very different from each other and I like all of them.
The four main POV characters are two computer nerds (grandfather and grandson), one marine who can terrify his superiors by saying “Sir, yes sir!” and a Japanese mining engineer. The incidental beauty of the convolutions of detail and plot is what mesmerised me the first couple of times I read this book, but I keep coming back to it to hang out with the characters. I’m especially fond of the marine, Bobby Shaftoe, who is addicted to morphine and spends large chunks of the book trying to figure out what he’s doing while touring the hot spots of WWII. He’s so unlike what you’d think of as a Stephenson character, but he’s so great, and so essential to the whole pattern of the book.
There’s only one continuing character in both time periods, and that character, Enoh Root, was also around in the Baroque Cycle, which is set during the Enlightenment. Re-reading Cryptonomicon after the Baroque Cycle, it’s easy to see the huge number of links backwards it has. (Eliza Peak, the Leibniz gold, and the ancestors of minor as well as major characters.) Yet none of that feels unnecessary to Cryptonomicon, and if what Enoch Root was doing with the cigar box is clearer in Cryptonomicon once you know what he was doing with it there, I never had a problem with it in the first place. I still have far more questions than answers about Enoch. (One of the most burning ones is: if that is alchemy, the philosopher’s stone gold, then is it fantasy or science fiction?)
Stephenson has said that his intention was to have the Enligtenment stuff balanced by a far-future volume, and this time through, I can see things he may have been doing to set that up. It would certainly have descendants of Randy and Amy, but it could have (and clarify the mystery of) Enoch Root. It could also have as characters the Eutropians—John Cantrell and Tom Howard and Pekka, the Finn Who Was Blown Up, who all have bracelets explaining how they are to be frozen. John and Tom “expect to be having conversations a hundred thousand years from now” and I wonder if we’ll see those in a future volume? It seems to be exactly the kind of thing Stevenson would do.
Oopsy! Got Stephenson with a V in it at the end there.
Good comments, anyway! I’ve yet to read the Cryptonomicon and I keep telling myself I will, and then end up reading something else.
After reading this I am even more motivated to get started. Thanks, Jo!
This is one of favorite books, just because it’s so incredibly rich. The first time I read it, I had almost no clue what was going on half the time, b/c Stephenson makes you work for it. I was right there with Shaftoe, trying to make sense of what and why of everything he did. Each time I read it, I manage to pick a few more details, and plus the various sections are written so damn well. Even with a grain of salt, I learned more about greek mythology and platonic philosophy from Randy and Enoch’s conversation in prison than anywhere else.
Also: I’ve applied Enoch’s term “morphine-seeky” to my cigarette smoking. Is that a bad thing?
Fantastic book by a fantastic writer. Crytonomicon is a prime specimen of that rarest of all beasts: the science fiction/mainstream crossover. While initial sales of Cryptonomicon were indeed driven by fans of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon‘s popularity in the mainstream was remarkable. Any book store I walk into still has multiple copies of it for sale, and rarely are they shelved in the S/F section!
I enjoyed parts of Cryptonomicon an awful lot, but I found parts of it tedious in the extreme. The Shaftoe stuff was my favourite: The idea of a commando unit proving plausible deniability for the Bletchly Park code crackers is brilliant, but all that stuff about people getting hard ons for the public key – private key algorithms… meh.
Not just the Liebniz gold, Der Liebnizarchiv — the gold is not just gold, not even just solomonic gold, but it has what Daniel and Liebniz believed was the seed of a thinking machine imprinted upon it. It’s credible as an AI seed.
[Bobby Shaftoe]’s so unlike what you’d think of as a Stephenson character
And so like what you’d think of as a Pynchon character.
I enjoyed Cryptonomicon a lot, but its debt to Gravity’s Rainbow is a bit too much for comfort.
You just got me so excited with those hints of a far-future sequel!
One of my favourite books. My copy of the Arrow 2000 paperback is battered and curled and the spine is starting to go. I’m even prepared to forgive the crappy reproductions of the diagrams of the Bundok tunnels.
That said, the first time I read Cryptonomicon I got to the end and thought “oh…all that and it was just a treasure hunt”. Now it’s possible to view the end as just another stepping point in the narratives that have led there, and hinted-at consequences will follow.
I think the discursiveness is wonderful – the detours into apparently tangential subjects, the changes of voice and narrative structure, the playing with chronology.
I have a transatlantic flight coming up…I think my in-flight reading is settled.
Is Cryptonomicon really his breakout book? For me, it was Snow Crash. It has a killer first chapter, one that grabs and doesn’t let go & makes you want to never stop reading. The Diamond Age was a more mature work that won a Hugo, and Cryptonomicon has AFAIK sold the most copies. I heartily love all three.
I’m a bit surprised by how well Cryptonomicon did as I consider it a geeky book about WWII, cryptography & information technology.
Aw frak. My paragraphs of critique just got ate.