Pros: Authentically exposes the techie view of life, science, sex, everything in a highly entertaining format.
Cons: Forgoes technical postmodernist purity for Crichtonesque readability.
The Bottom Line: Provides penetrating, highly accurate, and entertaining insight into the hacker world. Could be a classic if it weren't so Crichtonesque (i.e. readable).
benho's Full Review: Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
This cyber-thriller is one of only a few books that has ever totally and completely engaged me. For the first 80 pages, I felt the book was written for me alone to read. This seriously disturbed me.
I should explain. I have been course 6-3 (MIT code for computer science major) since I was in the womb. Taught to write “Hello World” in Basic on an Atari 400 at about age 6, I have spent the time since then trying to get away from it. Not enough to get out of majoring in course 6 at MIT, but enough to steer me to the course of graduate school in economics.
So, I pick up Cryptonomicon to find it suffused by, nay super-saturated with the world of the species homo computerhackercus – the world of late night hacking, obscure unix commands, internet startups, and cryptographic paranoia – a world I thought I had escaped. In the first 80 pages, while introducing his main characters, Stephenson liberally takes highly technical diversions into highly specialized pockets of knowledge ranging from Cantor diagnolization, to Alan Turing’s sexual orientation, to Tolkein-based metaphors of life, to an anti-relativist rant that would make Ayn Rand proud. Stephenson tested to the limits but never broke the boundaries of my knowledge, and at that point I knew the book was written for me and me alone. I saw pieces of myself in every page and was grudgingly hypnotized.
For better or worst, after Stephenson’s fiery opening salvo, the course of the novel falls from its initial lofty trajectory. Rather than becoming a highly acclaimed yet completely inaccessible timeless classic among the highly technically literate of hackerdom, it instead dwindles to Crichton-esque best-selling highly-readable mediocrity. Though still interspersed with occasional flashes of insight into the mind of the avid hard-core course sixer, the remainder of the novel becomes merely an intense and riveting story. Two parallel stories in fact, spaced half a century apart. In the first, quirky heroic World War II archetypes undertake a world and war spanning jaunt to save the planet using information as their weapon. This sets the stage for their descendents 50 years later (the novel was written in 1999), who are archetypical heroes of the information/vc/hi-tech/silicon valley/hacker age, to inaugurate a better tomorrow.
Frank realism prevents it from being great literature; it is far too blunt. Stephenson spends enough pages ranting against post-modernism to allow the style that the term great literature implies nowadays. What makes the writing special is the colorful departures from the thriller-novel prose, ranging from the inclusion of an entire perl program, the use of grep to advance the plot, a philosophical discourse on Athena: goddess of hackers and technology, a discourse on Extropianism, the complete castigation of litigation, and a mathematical analysis of libido.
If this review sounds highly confused, blame the highly confused nature of the book (nice cop-out there to excuse my MIT-minted writing style). Feel free to e-mail me (the address is above), to inquire/complain; I am more than happy to expound at length. In the end, however, Cryptonomicon has much to recommend. It is a well-written, fast-paced and action-packed thriller based on the smart, groovy premise of how cryptography, and more generally, information, won World War II, and how cryptography will change and ultimately bring out the full potential of the information age.
So don’t get me wrong, I loved Jurassic Park, and this is certainly a giant step up. Stephenson succeeds admirably at the Ulyssean task of navigating his novel between becoming an exclusive, esoteric paean of hackerdom and a fast-paced, eminently readable thriller that can bring hackerdom’s ideas to the general public.
Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that have...More at Alibris
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