Book: Cryptonomicon

[liv]

Author: Neal Stephenson

Details: (c) 1999 Neal Stephenson; Pub Avon Books 2002; ISBN 0-06-051280-6

Verdict: Cryptonomicon is nearly enough fun to make up for its ludicrous parts.

Reasons for reading it: I've enjoyed several other things by Stephenson, and fans seem to regard this as the most quintessentially Stephenson of his writing.

How it came into my hands: I was very pleased to find an edition of this almost small enough to be portable, in one of the nice second hand bookshops rysmiel brought me to in Montreal. And it seemed a particularly good choice for a chunk of time when I was making lots of long flights. It took me about a month to get through, though, and the last 30 pages or so I kept putting off reading because I didn't want to carry a 1200 (!) page book around just to read 30 pages.

The saving grace of Cryptonomicon is a really engaging narrative voice. A really good proportion of it was laugh out loud funny, or tender, or just generally readable that I was willing to forgive the many flaws. Most notably that it's a couple of hundred pages of really quite decent novel, very nearly suffocated under a thousand pages of Stephenson just holding forth about stuff he finds cool or ranting about stuff he finds annoying. Much of the enthusing and ranting is quite enjoyable, so reading it was like being at a party where there's someone completely dominating the conversation and not giving anyone else a chance, but who you reluctantly admit is witty and erudite and worth listening to.

The interweaving of stories about WW2 with an emphasis on the cryptography elements, and the contemporary quest to find the Axis' stash of gold bullion, work pretty well in spite of the really incredible amount of excess verbiage. I did enjoy the gradual drawing together of apparently disparate threads to form a really dense mesh of interconnections which didn't seem too forced. As war novels go, this does a good job of portraying the complexity, both moral and situational, of war, and maintains the excitement of the story while staying aware of the human suffering.

Most of the viewpoint characters are definitively geeks, and are well-drawn portraits of such. It's a little bit of a wish-fulfillment thing in its emphasis on said geeks winning the war and making loads of money and getting together with unreasonably sexy women, but there are plenty of books out there overstating the importance and success of their heroes.

It is very clear that the intended audience is, well, late 20^th century American geekboys. The book makes a credible effort to present a world which is broader than just America, for example having a major section set in the Phillipines, and presenting WWII from Japanese and German as well as American viewpoints. But it doesn't quite live up to its noble intentions, because everybody who is not a geekboy (whether women or foreigners or anyone who's at all different from the norm) is presented as something for the geek protagonists and presumed readers to enjoy for their exotic flavour. Since one of the topics Stephenson rants against is "political correctness", or making any effort at all to consider the feelings and perspectives of people who are not white, middle-class, educated, computer-literate, youngish American males, it's not very surprising that many of these portrayals skirt close to the edge of being stereotyped and often fall over it.

The thing that made me come close to just giving up on the book was the over-exposition, though. Obviously I wouldn't read Stephenson if I had major objections to exposition, but the multiple page explanations of things like eating cereal, checking email or solving a high-school level mathematical problem got annoying, in spite of the wit and humour. So in many ways Cryptonomicon typifies both the positive and the negative points of geek culture. It's filled with joy and wonder at how cool and interesting the world is, and values intelligence and creativity, and respects intelligence and integrity over the superficial traits that human primates usually regard as markers of status. But at the same time, it lacks empathy for people who aren't at least able to pretend to be from the same background as a typical geek, and it sometimes assumes that every idea is so fascinating in its own right that detailed explanations will always be welcome in all situations.

Comments

[rysmiel]

That seems an entirely fair review; I think I find the witty erudite rants a major plus point, but you're entirely right about its flaws (and there are a couple of relatively small ones you don't mention that also bug me, like his total research failure on RPGs and CCGs, and his completely cuckoo set of Tolkien metaphors.) I really like the way that the book takes on something of the large-scale plot elements of a quest fantasy in some ways, cache of treasure in location it's a lot of effort to get to, frex, without hammering that comparison home. I also kind of liked it for doing people with an attitude to new information I can relate to as heroes, which is not a thing I have seen that much of.

While I would in theory be interest in your take on the Baroque Cycle, the sheer size of the thing mitigates against me feeling that confident in recommending it to you.

[rysmiel]

Also, while I can see your point wrt the female characters and many of the non-white characters, Goto Dengo did not on the whole strike me as being exoticised in the way you characterise. (Poor soul that he was - but he got a command in BASIC named after him, that's real immortality.)

[alextiefling]

The prequel, The Baroque Cycle, is much better, but also three times as long. You have been warned.