Cryptonomicon

Rating:
Summary: An entertaining, intelligent, but typo-infested read
Review: I strongly recommend Cryptonomicon to anyone who enjoys cyber/techno-fiction--like all of Stephenson's work, it's an entertaining, intelligent read. However, Cryptonomicon's first edition is the most typo-infested book I have ever seen offered by an allegedly professional publisher.

Most of the errors seem to have resulted from excessive reliance on computerized spell checking. In one typical case, the word anther appears where the word another was clearly intended. (Yes, anther is a real word. Ask a botanist.) More exotic errors also point to computerized quality control. As the title suggests, codes play a large part in Cryptonomicon. But at least two coded passages contain typos, confusing the reader. A competent human proofreader would not have missed these errors.

How badly does the abundance of typos damage the novel? For a Stephenson fan like me, it hurts the book like a scratch on the rear fender hurts your new BMW (it must be yours--it's not mine). The car still runs great, and overall it still looks fine, but whenever you think about your Bavarian beauty, you remember the scratch.

Rating:
Summary: The choppy, fast-moving waters of the very near future...
Review: One of the best blurbs I've ever seen was on the back of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

"A Hypnotist's Crystal", it said "sparkling with diamonds" -- Cryptonomicon is more like a stage magician's suitcase, a big messy dusty trunk full of rabbits, hats and handkerchieves; boxes with false bottoms and cabinets from which things might be made to disappear -- and just as if you had access to a magicians props, it also promises a chance to figure out how it's done.

Crypto, in case you don't know, derives from the Greek word for hidden or secret, and this book is all about secrets and codes. It's also a ripping good adventure yarn, the story of the invention of the computer, a love story, a book about how we won the war, and as if that weren't enough, partakes of that airport-paperback classic theme, the Hunt for Nazi Gold... The book is not only about codes, it contains its own fully-working code system and an appendix by the author of Applied Cryptography. If I tell you that in the queue to read this book as soon as I'd finished were an internet-based science writer and a hacker, perhaps that'll give you an idea...Some people may find it too much of a boy's own story, or make the quite valid complaint that the women characters in it are there only as objects of lust, adoration, or frank bewilderment, but Stevenson even covers himself there, letting us know early on that in a book about hackers, their ignorance of basic social skills, let alone the female psyche, is going to be stressed.

I got halfway through a first draft of this review before I realised that I hadn't said anything about the book having a plot -- and it does, believe me, in fact it has at a rough guess, six major plots and about twenty minor ones. It takes in parallel threads fifty-odd years apart.

In the present, people trying to redefine the boundaries of the world by creating an online nation-state with not only its own laws, but its own virtual currency. In the past, other people are engaged in a similar but more physical struggle, the second world war. The action moves between Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Manila, New Guinea, Tokyo, Cambridge, Princeton, The Outer Hebrides, Shanghai and a mythical Pacific Sultanate called Kinakuta. The cast of characters is huge and cleverly interwoven, as the characters in the 1940s gradually reveal themselves to be the parents, grandparents or other distant relatives of the characters in the 1990s. There are cameo roles and walk-ons by historical figures who range from obscure scientists to the Generals who fought the war. Stevenson's range of influence is also broad, taking in a nod to Thomas Pynchon, a hint of Martin Amis, a tip of the hat to Evelyn Waugh, and an cheery obsession with games and tricks and jokes that can't help but remind you of another uniquely qualified mathematician and fantasist Lewis Carroll.

Stevenson has attempted a rescue mission with this book -- to take Geek History out of obscurity. There were two technologies produced in the crucible of World War Two which have domniated the world since: nuclear fission and the digital computer. The story of the promethean invention of the bomb has been told and retold as everything from romance to thriller, and its key figures like Robert Oppenheimer are practically household names. The same isn't true of the invention of the first digital computers, whose job was to crack the enemy code. Stevenson doesn't exactly make geeks sexy in this book, but he does manage to show the incredibly powerful forces which are controlled by the people who control the flow of information, and the way that the same concerns which drove science and computing in the 1940s are still powerful engines of change today.

Stevenson's career has taken much the same path as that of another brilliant writer, William Gibson. When he started out, he worked in the deep oceans of the distant future, places where the map may simply be marked Terra Incognita, or Here Be Monsters -- nowadays, on the other hand, he's working in the choppier, faster-moving waters of the very near future, the place we're all living, where the implausible becomes the merely impressive and the impressive becomes the ordinary at an ever-increasing rate.

In a world where a uni dropout can become richer than a nation in twenty years, a world where Europe adopts a new currency without feeling it necessary to actually print the banknotes, where the Stock Exchanges of the world's most powerful nations are being played like slot machines by a million internet gamblers, Neal Stevenson's work doesn't seem very outlandish at all.

The definition of a cult book is one which not everyone could like, but some people will like immensely, and I'm quite aware that this is a book that not everyone could love -- but I have no hesitation, despite the fact that it's only June, in awarding this my personal Book Of The Year.

Rating:
Summary: A compulsive read
Review: This is Neil Stephenson in a techie mode, but without ever quite crossing over the line into science fiction. It's a long, but compulsive read, with some marvelously humorous writing that manages to be funny and nerdly at the same time. I kept wanting to read parts of it out loud to people. The characters are extraordinarily engaging, and the device of jumping back and forth between two generations of the same families works very well. It left me wanting more, though. The plot adequately resolves the primary plot threads, but I felt like I wasn't really through with those characters. It left me wanting to know more about what happened between WWII and the present day, and what the characters are going to do next. Stephenson has not written sequels in the past, but I hope he does for this one.

Rating:
Summary: Not the best but a must read!
Review: Stephenson ability to create a believable world with over the top characters is unsurpassed. Definitely thinking about encrypting my email. Where this book could have used a good editor, what it really needs is a great ending. Recommend this book for all the reasons we read Neal, he makes us think and laugh.

Rating:
Summary: To all adoring fans of Neal Stephenson--
Review: If you love Stephenson as much as I do, then I want to share with you another incredible author whom I find equally brilliant--Glenn Kleier. His novel, THE LAST DAY, is every bit the rush of unexpected thrills, whiplashing plot twists, and nerve-shattering suspense that is Stephenson. It was a great delight to find another author I could enjoy as much.

Rating:
Summary: Scratched an itch
Review: Good read, not long enough IMHO. I was unhappy with the fate of some of the characters (unhappy mind you, not critical). I very much enjoyed Stephensons "Mother Earth Mother Board", a sort of travelogue report on the laying of fiber optic cable that he did for Wired. I'm glad he managed to turn it into a novel. Best fiction I've read in quite some time.

Rating:
Summary: I kept waiting for it to get better - it didn't!
Review: I had already invested several hundred pages of my time here based on the pre-release reviews. In retrospect I wish I hadn't.

I kept waiting for the pace to pick up, for it to get better - it didn't.

This is definitely a book for insomniacs looking for a cure. You keep reading though, hooked just to see how someone could go on like this for about a thousand pages and never say anything significant but hoping that they do!

Rating:
Summary: A Great Read
Review: Picking up this book is daunting at almost 1,000 pages. However, I soon came to dread the end of the book; a great--and rare for me--sign that I'm enjoying the hell out of a book. Diamond Age it ain't, but one can hardly blame Stephenson for failing to top that masterpiece.

The story and characters are very interesting and believable. Stephenson is in rare form in Cryptonomicon, with his wry humor and penchant for balancing hyperbole with understatement. The story soon sucked me in and had me laughing out loud at times.

If the book has a flaw, it has to be with the spell checking. Seriously. Where the hell was Stephenson's editor? I found no fewer than 6 typos (I'm sure there were more) that, ironically, were caught by Stephenson's spell-checking program but not by the human editor who is supposed to ketch such thongs.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is involved with technology, be it working in the industry or just fascinated by it.

Rating:
Summary: Taut techno-thriller with hard-edged crypto
Review: Stephenson has now proven he can break the SF genre. His publishers would be doing him a singular disservice if they market this book as pure SF (although it clearly qualifies), since that would limit its potential readership. His travels in recent years (following a new undersea cable as reported in Wired magazine) have opened up new parts of the world to his readership.

This novel integrates World War II espionage, long buried secrets, submarine warfare, high-tech cracking and hacking, along with the Perl source code to an innovative yet effective low-tech cryptosystem. It's accessible to any mystery, adventure or war novel reader, and the technology doesn't get in the way of the action and character development.

Neal Stephenson has joined the select list of authors that I will always buy in the hardback version. His essays on technology and the Internet are worth a look at too (see http://www.cryptonomicon.com.)

Finally, as if we needed further proof that truth is stranger than fiction, check out this news story that connects with many of the themes in Stephenson's new book:

http://www.infowar.com/law/99/law_060299a_j.shtml

Rating:
Summary: A terrific book but beware -- it will devour a weekend
Review: I was a bit put off by the comparisons to Pynchon, and can report that they are wrong. Stephenson is better than Pynchon, and this is a better book than Gravity's Rainbow. It kept me reading when I should have been doing other things, and its worldview is still percolating through my brain. Buy it, read it, but set aside the necessary time!