Skip to main content

Book review: Cryptonomicon

This piece by Neal Stephenson was unadulterated fun. It was basically what I thought Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace was going to be: big, goofy, nerdy, and hilarious. (See here for my review of IJ.)

It has two parallel stories about a related sets of people in WWII and present day. The WWII story is set around a marine (Bobby Shaftoe) who works with a pioneer of cryptography and computers (Lawrence Waterhouse) to hide the fact that the Allies have broken Japanese and German codes. The present day story is set around an entrepreneur (Randy Waterhouse, the grandson of Lawrence) who is building a data haven in a fictional pacific country near the Philippines.

The plot is quite intricate, and is developed nice and slow. For someone with a weak mathematical mind (for a scientist, anyway), it was pleasingly numerate, but not so much that I was often lost. (I confess, though, that I’m still a little unclear on the Riemann zeta function.) Even for someone who is terribly frightened of math, those sections weren’t too critical—but one will enjoy the book a lot more with some mathematical background.

Like any huge book, it does drag in spots. The ending was a little disappointing as well—it felt a little forced. But overall, it was a hell of a fun read. I managed to plow through it in two days, and it is often hilarious. I was reading it during school breaks and my teachers kept asking me what the devil I was laughing at.

I keep coming back to the Infinite Jest comparison. Cryptonomicon was just superior in every way. Funnier, less pretentious, better written, better plotted, smarter, and more meaningful. Mostly I’m still pissed about the lousy ending—Cryptonomicon didn’t have a spectacular ending but it was still miles better than stopping in mid-sentence.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actual...

The Setswana Grammar Manual

One of my few successes during my service here was formatting the Peace Corps South Africa grammar manual for Setswana, written mostly by Art Chambers, an SA16 volunteer.  For anyone wanting to learn Setswana, I reckon it's a pretty good primer, so I present it for free here .  If you think it sucks and you want to make changes, or you'd like to take a look at the raw TeX file, you can find it here .

On Refusing to Vote for Bloomberg

Billionaire Mike Bloomberg is attempting to buy the Democratic nomination. With something like $400 million in personal spending so far, that much is clear — and it appears to be working at least somewhat well, as he is nearing second place in national polls. I would guess that he will quickly into diminishing returns, but on the other hand spending on this level is totally unprecedented. At this burn rate he could easily spend more than the entire 2016 presidential election cost both parties before the primary is over. I published a piece today outlining why I would not vote for Bloomberg against Trump (I would vote for Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, or Biden), even though I live in a swing state. This got a lot of "vote blue no matter who" people riled up . They scolded me and demanded that I pre-commit to voting for Bloomberg should he win the nomination. The argument as I understand it is to try to make it as likely as possible that whatever Democrat wins t...