Cryptonomicon - SFBA Book Club

Paperback, 918 pages

English language

Published April 27, 2000 by Arrow/Children's (a Division of Random House, Random House.

ISBN:: 978-0-09-941067-6

(1 review)

Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - …

Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the US Navy - is assigned to Detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Watrehouse and Detachment 2702 - commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe - is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia - a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat.

But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy, with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring.

16 editions

Ashwin reviewed Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson

Review of 'Cryptonomicon' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Cryptonomicon is not a science-fiction novel. It has 2 parallel storylines divided in time -- one happens in World War II and the other is present day. Due to the detail it dives into while describing WWII, it's a historical/techno-thriller. The book is too huge and the plot is too long and complicated to faithfully describe here. The WWII storyline revolves around 3 mathematicians, Turing (yes, the real Alan Turing!), Waterhouse (an American) and Rudy (a German). When Pearl Harbour happens, Waterhouse is pulled into London's Bletchley Park to help the Allied powers break the cryptographic Enigma (and other) codes of the Axis powers. While doing this, Waterhouse and Turing help build some of the earliest computing devices in human history. A large part of the story takes place in Asia, where Shaftoe (an American soldier) is fighting the Japanese. This takes him from China to Philippines. In the parallel …

Cryptonomicon is not a science-fiction novel. It has 2 parallel storylines divided in time -- one happens in World War II and the other is present day. Due to the detail it dives into while describing WWII, it's a historical/techno-thriller. The book is too huge and the plot is too long and complicated to faithfully describe here. The WWII storyline revolves around 3 mathematicians, Turing (yes, the real Alan Turing!), Waterhouse (an American) and Rudy (a German). When Pearl Harbour happens, Waterhouse is pulled into London's Bletchley Park to help the Allied powers break the cryptographic Enigma (and other) codes of the Axis powers. While doing this, Waterhouse and Turing help build some of the earliest computing devices in human history. A large part of the story takes place in Asia, where Shaftoe (an American soldier) is fighting the Japanese. This takes him from China to Philippines. In the parallel current-day storyline (which is told in alternating chapters), the descendants of the above WWII characters are part of a Silicon Valley startup named Epiphyte that specializes in cryptography. They're setting up secure data havens in Philippines and Kinakuta (a fictional name, but it's nothing but Brunei) to act as new Internet backbones and also for Internet banking. These hackers soon run into some WWII artefacts which as they slowly decrypt leads them them to a treasure of unimaginable proportions hoarded by the Japanese towards the end of WWII. It will lead them to discover some startling revelations about their grandparents and their roles in WWII.

With one book, I'm a convert. At 918 pages and 108 chapters, it's long, but ah so delicious! Cryptonomicon is satisfying at all levels, what's not to like! The WWII storyline starts from Pearl Harbour and goes on upto the defeat of the Japanese, thus ending the war. My WWII knowledge jumped by several magnitudes due to the detailed descriptions of the German and Japanese cryptosystems, their war strategies and how they failed. Especially enlightening was the tons of information about the Japanese-American conflict that happened in Asia. The other current-day storyline can't compare to this, but is still engaging enough to be a page turner. This is a real techno-thriller since Stephenson doesn't hold back from smattering his pages with formulas, graphs and details of cryptosystems when they're needed. Linux, UNIX, Windows NT, actual Perl scripts, Turing machines and the wickedly cool Van Eck phreaking all play a part! Also, Bruce Schneier contributed a new encryption algorithm named Solitaire for this book, which can be used to encrypt messages using a deck of playing cards. This is used as a major plot device in the book and Schneier describes the system in the Appendix at the end of the book. Cryptonomicon is badass, I look forward to reading more Stephenson and cyberpunk now!