Earn Cryptonomicon Authored By Neal Stephenson Offered In Physical Book

A gtpage tech infodump comfort read, Yes, comfort read,

I think this is my fourth read of this wonderful novel and it just keeps on giving.
I'm still picking up new subtleties, offhand comments that I missed, imagery that was lost on me on the last time through.
There is a reason why this is one of my favourite novels and why Stephenson is my favourite author.


Cryptonomicon is the story of money, value and information, Lawrence Waterhouse, a math genius, works alongside Alan Turing at Bletchley Park and responsible for misinformation and broadening the bellcurve.
Alan cracked the codes, but how do we not let the enemy know we have broke the codes Along comes Corporal Bobby Shaftoe and Detachmentto ram battleships into Sweden, plant fake listening outposts and search for morphine at every chance.




In the lates Randy Waterhouse, Lawrence's grandson, is setting up a tech business with an old buddy in the aims of setting up a data haven in a fictional asian sultanate.
They get embroiled with some dodgy characters and make a business deal with Bobby Shaftoe's son and granddaughter.
Underwater salvage.

There is much overlap here, with WWII events directly impacting on thoses events, It's dense, erudite, full of what many would call "too much information", but any decent nerd will bask and revel in.
It's not a book you read for a while, it's a book you live in for a month.
You'll be thinking about it at the bus stop, It will sometimes stop you in your tracks hours after reading,



“Ronald Reagan has a stack of threebyfive cards in his lap, He skids up a new one: "What advice do you, as the youngest American fighting man ever to win both the Navy Cross and the Silver Star, have for any young marines on their way to Guadalcanal"

Shaftoe doesn't have to think very long.
The memories are still as fresh as last night's eleventh nighmare: ten plucky Nips in Suicide Charge!

"Just kill the one with the sword first.
"

"Ah," Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe's direction.
"Smarrrtyou target them because they're the officers, right"

"No, fuckhead!" Shaftoe yells, "You kill 'em because they've got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword”

This book is a treasure.
It is pure fun and escapism into a crude, adventurous world of maths, espionage and hidden messages, Myedition with biblethin paper is battered, folded, yellowed and as floppy as you'll feel when you finish it.

I'm shocked by the critical acclaim this book received in the scifi category but I suppose even a turd can float.
Two is really pushing it, Maybe a star for the number of laughs I got perpages, This is the work of a technically inept egomaniac, He does have some technical background he drops Unix hints and anagrams the name of a supposed deity who dies and then later comes back w/ no explanation However, it's not enough “savoir faire” for any of the content

to make sense.
It might sound dangerous to some but just plain stupid to computer geeks such as myself, It's obvious that this is not his first book by the way that the author is allowed to recklessly abandon the main plot or any of thesporadic narratives forpage tangents.
If he hired a first yr EE student to clarify some basic principles, snipped aboutpages and got some ritalin, this book might be tolerable.
Like many technical books or movies, I was utterly disappointed,

Why did I continue First, it was a gift and I would feel ungrateful if I didn't give it a fair chance.
Secondly, there are many alternating plots that the reader would naturally be led to believe that the lives of these men parallel each other in a different time and place.
If you like mysteries, you can almost imagine how these people are related, This would have made the book entirely more interesting, But then nothing. I finished the book and whipped it across the room, Later, I skimmed the last half of thisPAGE SLEEPER to see if there was an overlooked morsel of evidence that made all these separate lives connected which would have made all of the silent pain and suffering from that book worth something.
Nothing. Exactly what I got from the book: nothing,
One of the problems when reviewing Cryptonomicon is that you could easily end up writing a short novel just trying to summarize it.
Heres my attempt to boil the story down to its essence,

During World War II, Lawrence Waterhouse is a genius mathematician who is part of the effort to break Japanese and German codes, and his job is to keep them from realizing how successful the Allies have been by faking events that give the enemies reasons other than compromised codes to pin any losses on.
Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe had to leave behind the woman he loves in the Philippines when the war broke out in the Pacific and after surviving some brutal island combat, he finds himself assigned to a unit carrying out dangerous and weird missions that seem to have no logical goals.


In the lates, Waterhouses grandson Randy is an amiable computer geek who has just cofounded a small company called Epiphyte that has big plans revolving around the booming Internet in the island nations of southeast Asia.
As powerful people with hidden agendas begin showing an interest in Epiphytes business plan, Randy hires a company in Manila owned by former Navy SEAL Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe to lay an underwater cable.
Thats just a sideline for Doug and his daughter Amy who primarily work as treasure hunters, When they make a startling discovery, it links the personal history of the Waterhouses and the Shaftoes to a lost fortune in Axis gold.


That makes it sound like a beach thriller or airplane read by someone like Clive Cussler, right

But I didnt mention all the math.
And code breaking. And the development of computers, And economic theories. And geopolitics circa. And how it was ahead of the curve about personal privacy, And its about a thousand pages long, And there's some other stuff, too,

Plus, Neal Stephenson doesnt feel the need to conform to anything close to a traditional three act narrative structure.
Hes also often the writing equivalent of Clark W, Griswald in the movie Vacation since hell cheerfully divert his readers four short hours to see the second largest ball of twine on the face of the earth.


Sprinkled among all this are appearances by real historical figures like Alan Turing and Douglas MacArthur.
So what you get is a book that should be a mess of infodumps and long tangets that ultimately dont have anything to do with the story.
And quite frankly, the ending is kind of a mess, too,

So whenever I read criticism of Neal Stephenson, I shrug and concede that there are many things about the guy that should make me crazy as a reader.
However, the really odd thing is that he doesnt, Ive pretty much loved every book of his Ive read despite the fact that I could list his literary sins at length.


Whats great to me about Stephenson is that its so obvious that he loves this stuff.
When he takes up a whole chapter laying out the mathematics behind code breaking, its his enthusiasm for the subject that helps carry my mathchallenged ass through.
Hes not giving us elaborate histories or explanations because he did the research and wants to show off, hes doing it because hes a smart guy who is excited about something so he cant help but go on at length about it.


The other factor that redeems him for me is his sense of humor, No matter how enthused Stephenson is, itd still break down in the delivery if he didnt pepper his books with some hilarious lines.
Sometimes even his long digressions are done solely in the interest of delivering the funny like a parody of a business plan that includes gems like this:

“Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a halfblind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear missile submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document.
Please dispose of it as you would any piece of highlevel radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets.
This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company which went bellyup and only returned her ninetynine dollars.
Ever since then the government has been on our asses, If you ignore this warning, read on at your perilyou are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
”

Its also easy to overlook how these seeming digressions help build the entire story, When Randy is trying to retrieve some of his grandfathers papers from an old trunk, he gets embroiled in his familys attempts to divvy up his grandparents belongings.
Since the family is made up of academics a whole chapter becomes a description of a mathematical formula based on an xy grid laid out in a parking lot that allows family members to place items according to both sentimental and economic value while Randy has to try to find a way to diplomatically claim the papers.
Theres no real reason for this scene, and it could have been cut entirely or boiled down a few lines about a family squabble.
But the whole chapter is funny and tells us a great deal about Randy and his background by putting him in this context.
It doesn't accomplish anything else plot wise, but its the kind of scene that makes this book what it is.


Even as a fan of the way he works, I still wish Stephenson could tighten some things up.
The goals of Epiphyte and Randy shift three or four times over the course of the novel, and the drifting into and out of plots gets very problematic late in the game.
It also seems like Stephenson had a hard time determining exactly who the bad guys in thestory should be.
The stuff with Andrew Loeb, a litigious asshole who once drove Randy into bankruptcy, showing up as an arrow shooting/knife wielding attacker wearing a business suit in the jungle at the end seems to come out of the blue since hes really only appeared in flashback form before that.
Even though he's the lawyer suing Epiphyt there aren't any scenes directly showing him in action except for Randy viewing him from a distance during the raid on their server.
And while most of the book seems to operate under the idea that the rich dentist is the main threat to Epiphyte, he suddenly tags out and a Chinese guy that weve only seen as a slave during WWII is revealed as the hidden hand behind it all very late in the book, yet we have no present day scenes with him.


I should also note that although this is billed as a scifi novel as well as being nominated for and winning some prizes like the Hugo and the Locus, it really isnt.
Theres one small supernaturalish element that gets it that reputation, but Id call it historicalfiction if I had to put a genre on it.


Even though this is a book that really shouldnt work, the great thing about it is that it mostly does, and its just so damn clever at times that I cant help but admire Stephenson.


Related material: The Baroque Cyle is the followup/prequel to this that delves even further into the history of the Waterhouse and Shaftoe familes.
These are my reviews to the three hardback editions, but those were such kitten squishers that it was also broken up into a longer series of paperbacks.


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