Cryptonomicon

Rating:
Summary: History,math, computers,tech, personalities,excitment
Review: If you have read Neal Stephenson before, you know that he writes fast, furious, smart, and smartass. This time the scope is huge. The span is pre-World War II through today. It is divided into three segments of history and personalities. Although the stories are woven, one story line abruptly ends and another picks up, sometimes when you are really intensely interested in the one you are reading. Some people only like one story line or another, I loved them all. It's long. It's great. Interesting thought-provoking ideas completely played out. Probably my favorite of all times.

Rating:
Summary: Minor Flaw
Review: I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon, and give it 4 stars.

But I was surprised that the author's research missed something that makes the plot appear a bit uniformed.

For the first 600 pages or so I kept expecting Zuse's famous 1941 general purpose digital computer to enter the plot - until the book suggested that in 1945 the hero was the only one who knew how to build such a machine. Then I realized Stephenson was not even aware of Zuse.

So for what it's worth, here comes the info: In 1941 it was Konrad Zuse who built the first fully functional, automatic, programmable, general purpose, digital computer. All previous machines (by Pascal, Leibniz, Babbage, Atanasoff, Turing, and Zuse himself) were mere calculators limited to very specific types of operations.

Details: Between 1935 and 1938 Zuse completed the Z1, a fully mechanical programmable digital computer (reconstruction in Museum fuer Verkehr und Technik, Berlin). In 1940 he completed the Z2, world's first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer (most of the Z2 functions already worked in 1939). In 1941 he developed Z3, the first machine with program control based on binary digits. This was the first real, fully functional, automatic, programmable, general purpose, digital computer, and therefore his most important breakthrough. The machine was later destroyed in an air raid (reconstruction in Deutsches Museum, Munich). 1945/46 he developed Plankalkuel (plan calculus), presumably the first programming language, a predecessor of the modern algorithmic programming languages, including concepts of logic programming. In 1949 he founded ZUSE KG at Neukirchen. ZUSE KG at some point had 1000 employees and was bought by Siemens AG in 1956. 1966 - 1995 he finally received uncountable awards and world-wide appreciation as "inventor of the computer" but devoted most of his time to painting. Google will give you 20,000 hits or so on Konrad Zuse.

Maybe Stephenson or someone else will find the above useful for his next alternative history novel.

Rating:
Summary: 800+ pages of bad road
Review: While I like Stephenson's earlier work, I don't much care for his latest attempt at literature. With convoluted interlocking plotlines, sketchy charecterization, obscure math jokes, patronizing footnotes, and the most inexplicable sex scene I have ever run across, this doorstop of a novel was not the pleasure I had hoped for. A groundbreaking work in the field of literature intended exclusively for hard-core coders.

Rating:
Summary: Recommended...
Review: Its a good novel, especially for someone that's into technical details.... just for the fun of it, really.

I'd say its one of those novels that you wish would spawn a sequel after finishing it in record time.

I'm still waiting.....

Rating:
Summary: It does not get better than this book
Review: This book flies with speed and intensity. At times, there are so many simultaneous storylines that it is difficult to keep up. The stories wind around each other so artfully, that they support each other and eventually become one. This is the best book I've read in years.

Rating:
Summary: Nerd's Delight
Review: Crytonomicon is a great book about computers, nerds, war heros, and codes. We're talking solid, well-written entertainment, though there may be a spot or two that seems a little dry to readers more interested in plot than technical details.

One of the premises of Cryptonomicon is that your true nerd is both a curious and fascinating oddity capable of incredible and fascinating feats of mental gymnastics, and simultaneously labored and extended single minded concentration of the sort that would drive most humans to insanity, suicide, or sleep.

Cryptonomicon gets inside the mind of the nerd and shows you how, and why, they do what they do.

Even a nerd needs a little outside stimulation now and then though, and Cryptonomicon provides enough blood-and-guts war action and business intrigue on the side to keep you turning the pages.

Rating:
Summary: Everyone needs to read this book.
Review: First off, I have to say that I loved this book. I have told just about everyone that I know to read it. It has gotten me interested in World War II history, cryptography and what the heck is exactly going on inside these boxes we use to email our friends and look up porn.

I'm rather surprised at a lot of the dissenting opinions about Cryptonomicon. It seems that a lot of what people were annoyed with, I liked the most. I liked that the author chose to explore all the details about how to dig a tunnel in Phillipine mountains and how the mathematical algorithms generate the crytography in the book and even the four page description of how to eat a bowl of Cap'n Crunch. I think that not talking down to the reader is an admirable quality, and I liked learning some new things while enjoying the story and characters.

Neal Stephenson does a great job maintaining a constant level of tension throughout the book by jumping back and forth between the present an WWII. He does a great job balancing these two ongoing (but connected) storylines and they both maintain the same level of interest. Oh, and it's often hilarious. Graphing the intellectual productivity vs. time since last orgasm of one of the major characters is just one of the many funny moments.

I can't wait for the next installment to come out, this is going to be one of the greatest SF/fantasy series out there, ranking up there with the Illumitatus Trilogy.

Rating:
Summary: Cypherpunk not Cyberpunk
Review: Cryptonomicon is an amazing book that oozes personality and detail. Quite possibly Stephenson's best work to date, Cryptonomicon weighs in at a moster ~1000 pages. Is it worth it? Quite simply yes. The book takes som time to get going, but when it does it truly hums. The only part that I found to be disappointing is the ending, but hopefully that will be aleviated sometime in the near future when Stphenson publishes the sequel.

Rating:
Summary: Almost a 'Great Novel'
Review: I have a confession to make. I never liked Snow Crash. I thought it was poorly written at times and the author too obsessed with his own cleverness.

But people grow and change especially, one hopes, writers. The Diamond Age was wildly inventive and enjoyable but flawed. Crytonomicon is another massive step forward for Stephenson, but it still has its irritating aspects.

A novel of this sort - multiple plot lines, multiple times and places, linking real and fictional characters through time and space - is very difficult to handle effectively, to organise so that it all hangs together. It is a real tribute to Stephenson's growing skill that Cryptonomicon does manage this task. His writing can be superb. He has mastered an ironic, faux-pulp style that mixed with the cryptography and various language-styles of the characters, makes for both entertaining and challenging reading.

Some of Crytonomicon's characters are memorable and sensitively-handled, both those invented, like Randy, Lawrence Waterhouse and Bobby Shaftoe, and real, particularly his portrayal of Alan Turing, revealed properly as eccentric, brilliant and thoroughly queer. He also manages the very rare feat of using characters as representatives, as symbolic figures, and also as real and sympathetic people.

However...

Stephenson seems to be willfuly irritating in some regards. He sometimes appears to find it hard to differentiate between an in-joke or very personal humour and things that a wider audience will find amusing, and can sometimes appear overly impressed with his own wit and wisdom. Sometimes he lays on the farcical and eccentric aspects of particular situations too thick: the overly bizarre Scottish island communities featured on which Lawrence and Unit 2702 are imposed, is a case in point. Stephenson is clearly not a very good editor of his own work - very few authors are - he badly needs a sympathetic editor.

He also has a real problem writing believable female characters. This is a book about men and about very male communities (soldiers, scientists, computer hackers etc.) - but even when female characters do appear they do so as symbols or as one-dimensional people. Even Amy Shaftoe is there in the end purely so that the Geek can get the Girl.

Overall, Crytonomicon is a valiant but failed attempt to write a truly great novel. Personally, I have no doubt that Stephenson can do it. He's getting closer with every book. But, he needs to get a bit of outside editing help, stop letting his own belief in his undoubted cleverness get in the way of his writing, and learn a bit more about women! You should certainly read it, but also expect better in the future from this talented author.

Rating:
Summary: A dissenting opinion
Review: ...If a writer seems to feel he is smarter than his readers, then everything is lost.

This book is well on its way to becoming as well-loved as Stephenson's earlier "Snow Crash," but while the praise for that book is merited (it's excellent, by the way, one of the ten best books I've ever read, and I'm not an SF fan), it's misplaced here. Often plodding, "Cryptonomicon" buries its best ideas under a meaningless tide of jargon and concepts that seem designed by the author merely to show off the fact that he did his research. Do we really need so many pages on the science of digging tunnels into mountains? Perhaps in a civil engineering textbook; certainly not here. That's what "Cryptonomicon" feels like far too often: a textbook, not a novel, and that's a shame--there are bursts of real genius here, particularly in some of the action sequences (the torpedo assault on a Japanese boat is as well written a scene as any I've read).

"Cryptonomicon" merits three stars for its sheer ambition. But I dock it two stars for having an excessive ego. Interesting, but not up to the standard Stephenson reached with the superlative "Snow Crash."