Will Byrnes's Reviews > Cryptonomicon

Pretenses are shabby things that, like papier-mache houses, must be energetically maintained or they will dissolve.

Neal Stephenson has written an overlong novel focusing on the significance of cryptography both in the world today and the time of World War II. He links the two by using multiple family generations. The predecessors inhabit the early cryptographical universe of Turing and others, dealing with cracking German and Japanese cyphers. The latter family representatives are trying to develop a secure cryptography that will support the creation of a global monetary system, based on gold stashed in the Philippines near the end of the war.


Neal Stephenson - from the LA Times

Stephenson provides considerable payload here, providing details of cryptography then and now, and considerable analysis of gold as the basis for economic structures. He also tells us much about how business is done when global actors are creating the information economies of the future.

There is no shortage of action here. But it is at the expense of character development. To the extent that the players have an inner life, it is radically overshadowed by the external events in which they are involved. The female characters are barely explored here, hardly more than window dressing to the experiences of the men, with considerable emphasis on their looks. This was unwelcome.

Still, I enjoyed the book. It is an engaging read, and worth the trip for the information it conveys.

Review first posted - February 17, 2017

Published - May 1999

PS - I received this book as a gift from a rocket-scientist nephew in 1999. I wrote most of the above back then, but it was not posted until 2017.

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Other Stephenson books reviewed
-----2019 - Fall or, Dodge in Hell
-----2015 - The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.
-----2015 - SevenEves
-----2011 - Reamde