Yesterday, I finally finished Cryptonomicon, the 1200-page epic by Neal Stephenson. The story takes place in two time periods--World War II and the present day--and deals primarily with two families, the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes.
The plot is incredibly convoluted, but it deals with cryptography and cryptanalysis (that's the sciences of code-breaking and code-writing, respectively), and their roles in fighting the Japanese and Germans during WWII; a mission to hide and then uncover a vast store of stolen gold; an American soldier's attempt to return to the Philippines and find his lover amidst the tumult of WWII; the invention of the first digital computer; and a modern-day businessman's attempt to set up the world's most secure data haven against an army of rivals and lawyers.
The book is heavily steeped in technical jargon and concepts. Stephenson does an excellent job at distilling the more complicated concepts in the story, but people without any sort of technical background would probably not follow some of his explanations. There's a four-page description of how one of the characters eats Cap'n Crunch.
That said, I DO have a technical background, and I really enjoyed the somewhat long-winded technical and mathematical descriptions of otherwise mundane or confusing concepts. However, the book is really long...REALLY long, and I was ready for it to be over a couple hundred pages before it was. Maybe that's just my short attention span coming through, but 1200 pages is a lot of pages.
I have another book of his, Snow Crash, which is set in the future but is also filled with technojargon and lots of roundabout explanations of obscure concepts. (I'm seeing a trend here.) Great stuff! If you can handle it. I've got another one or two books of his in my wish list, so this won't be the last I read of Stephenson. If you like Tom Clancy but you prefer technical computer stuff instead of "military porn," Stephenson is your guy.
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3 comments:
Hey! Dad's reading something by him right now. Never noticed the title, just the author.
He was reading "Quicksilver" by Stephenson a couple of years ago, when we went to A&A's house in Nac for T'giving. He's a good writer! But he's not for everybody.
I've read "Cryptonomicon." Same reaction to yours. It was fun to read juts because it was sooo far outside of my reading comfort zone, so to speak, and I did learn SOMETHING about code-breaking. Let me know how Snow Crash is.
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