Cryptonomicon

I read “Cryptonomicon” and remember enjoying it, but I have to say that I remember almost none of it, which is probably not a good sign. “Snow Crash” and “Diamond Age” are definitely great, sans the last thirty pages or so, as Henry said.

Thank Christ someone finally noted that Cryptonomicon is just about unreadable. I probably read 250 pages — all the while announcing to my roommate that I was losing precious hours of my life — before the same roommate informed me that I could always stop reading. Which I did. My life has improved drastically since that momentous decision.

There are large chunks of Cryptonomicon that are best seen as collections of loosely-strung-together vignettes, rather than as a novel. He’s a keen observer, and some of these are great without even having a plot (in the 1990s timeline, I’m thinking of the Captain Crunch bit — the cereal, not the phone phreaker — and the quick tours of tech startup business and politics). There are great sections of adventure-yarn in there, too, but the ending is notorious. (An early version of the book had a near-future timeline which may have resolved some of the stuff that’s left dangling at the end of the present-day stuff, but is so far unpublished).

The Baroque cycle is like cryptonomicon only more so; I remember commenting on my blog that it is a text which is perfect for hypertext presentation, so the reader could pick and choose the interesting digressions.

Stop reading. Terrible book. My one-sentence review: “Preaching to the converted, a big sausage party for the D&D crowd with a more than a few pop culture witticisms tossed in to expose the author’s linguistic bravado (extended discussion on Cap’n Crunch cereal anyone?), Cryptonomicon engages like a Tom Clancy novel with a dash of code, like the stuff William Gibson would produce if forced to watch Patriot Games thirty times at gunpoint and paid by the word.”

I dunno, I enjoyed the heck out of it.

If you don’t like it now, then you should definitely stop reading. I thought the beginning was the best part, and it was downhill from there.

Philoillogica is clearly of the school of thought that the only valid audience for a book is himself/herself.

I found the book perfect for a long (really long) plane trip. Lots of interesting-ish stuff that you can read as you drift in and out of sleep, parts that you can skip if you want without losing the plot. And it has that rarest of literary qualities, a book that you won’t regret reading but also will feel no qualms about abandoning in a strange airport.

Reading Furst’s Dark Star right now. Much better.

I liked it just fine. Flawed but ambitious, fun, and intermittently brilliant.

Kieran, I wonder if you’re not seeing Mary Sues where t’aren’t any? It’s true that Ms. Sue gets around, yes she does. But I have trouble seeing it in characters as disparate as Waterhouse gran-pere, Waterhouse fils, and Shaftoe. Turning a character into an Authorial Voice and having him/her win arguments is a related but distinct sin of authorship.

All three of the characters are a mixture of brilliance and cluelessness. You seem to be getting annoyed by the brilliant bits, and yes they do carry a rather heavy hand of authorial fiat, don’t they? But the clueless parts are as important, and will come into play. Here’s a minor one: not one of the three all-male POV characters understands women, and not one of them is ready for a mature, lasting relationship with someone of either sex. That’s going to come out and affect the plot in a variety of ways. And it’s not really a Mary Sue kind of problem.

Here’s what you get if you keep reading. The characters firm up at least a bit, and Bobby Shaftoe becomes downright engaging. The WWII section does indeed develop into a crackling good globetrotting romp of an adventure tale, with everything from Hermann Goering to melancholy Finns to desperate submarine escapes.

There will be a lot of authorial digressions, of varying degrees of erudition, accuracy and wittiness. At their best, these are excellent. Even the bad ones are IMO readable. Of course, if you hate authorial digressions in the first place, you won’t much like these regardless, but that’s something else again.

There will be various games played with structure, some obvious, some less so. These seem to have been almost entirely overlooked by reviewers. Go figure. People seem to either enjoy or not-enjoy the book; hardly anyone seems to analyse it very deeply, other than in a fanboy continuity sort of way. But Stephenson is a writer who takes his craft seriously, and he put a lot of effort into the structural stuff.

(One example: things crash constantly in that book. Zeppelins, jet planes, submarines, computers. “Crash” as metaphor gets worked over in a variety of ways, and then of course the crashes serve as markers for various plot turns. There’s a /bunch/ of stuff like that. I’m not even going to mention all the alchemical references. Man, don’t get me started on the alchemical references.)

There will be two or three absolutely priceless scenes. I’m thinking right now of the one where Douglas MacArthur’s eyes mist up, but there are at least two others.

There will be some pleasantly tangly plotting.

It’s a book that’s best in the middle, less good at the beginning and end. That said, both the beginning and the end look less weak if the book is considered as a companion volume to the Baroque Cycle trilogy.

I’d say, give it another hundred pages. If it’s still not working for you, then it’s not. But there is some great stuff in there.

Doug M.

I frequently recommend it and think it’s quite good, don’t really have the time to write an argument/review for why you should keep reading. Though I was hooked on it from the start, so maybe its a de gustibus etc. case.

The last 800 pp is much like the first 100. I enjoyed reading it, didn’t find it tedious at all, but I thought the ending was banal and lame. Parts were utterly predictable, one part was utterly unpredictable, and none of it seemed to amount to anything. A great yarn, not a great novel.

I quite enjoyed the trilogy (Quicksilver, etc), but in 2002, when I started reading Cryptonomicon, I bounced off it. I didn’t actually read more than a few pages.

It just seemed like such a creature of the 90’s, Wired magazine fads wrought into a novel. I decided I had zero interest in reading about a “data haven”.

Being, at the time, a long-term unemployed dot.com veteran, I guess I was rather turned off by the romanticization of the internet.

So I left my copy on a bench outside my hotel in Great Falls, before leaving. Damn book took up a lot of room in a Volvo S40.

I may try again at some point.

I’m pretty shocked that anyone could dislike Cryptonomicon that much. Stephenson strikes me as one of the few speculative fiction authors who has ever had a job doing something related to what they write about, and he manages to not take himself overly seriously.
Compared to Gibson he seems much more grounded in the reality of technological constraints, and much less obsessed with expounding some self important notion of “art” for what is essentially a pulp genre.
Plus who could read the aside about the dentist and not fall in love with it?
I will say that there are certain issues involving the female lead which read like they were written by a heavy breathing 17 year old but otherwise the book was great. I’ve bought every Stephenson book since Crypto on the day it was released, and read them more voraciously than anything else in memory.

Kieran, it sounds like you are not reading the book so much as trying to compete with it. You are as smart as Stephenson — and that might well be true. But you will never enjoy a novel in that mood. Coleridge was right about having to bring certain moods to literature. Although, given the aggressive IQ mannerisms of certain writers — DFW is one — there are provocations that could turn the novel into Jeopardy. It does destroy the necessary empathy.
It doesn’t sound like you are going to like the novel much.

one of the best books i ever read. beats the crap out of many celebrated contemporary authors. i don’t get why some people don’t get it.

Well, it’s one of my favorite books ever, but then, I seem to be his exact target audience.

I’m about his age, and, as a boy in the ’60s, I seem to have read all of the same books – – The Boy’s Big Book of WWII / The Boy’s Big Book of Secret Codes and so forth – – that Stephenson did. His retelling of these tales in a modern vernacular felt like hearing them from an old friend.

To top it off, I went to a geek college in the ’70s, just as the PC revolution was starting, and watched all my pals take their places in the IT world. Simultaneously, the Enigma secret became public knowledge, and all the interesting coincidences of WWII became comprehensible: it really was the pencil-necked geeks who gave the Allies the edge they needed to defeat the Axis

So most of my circle views the world in the same way that Stephenson does, and we were ready and waiting for Cryptonomicon. I found it to be annoying in spots, but the book closest to my world-view of anything I’ve ever read. YMMV.

I generally like Stephenson, but I wish he could keep up that “wow!” brilliance–the fresh ideas, the cleverness, the interesting take–for an entire novel, instead of the first, oh, third or so. I like his nonfiction. I don’t like it so much when it’s plopped down in the middle of his fiction.

I put down Cryptonomicon early, too, when I realized that my ability to see if it got any better was losing out to the fact that I couldn’t have cared less about any of the main characters.

Wait until you get to the sex scene in the latter portion of the book. Stephenson seems to recycle the same bizarre sex scene in almost all of his books.

I thought Snow Crash was utter crap, for much the same reasons: shabby pseudo-erudition (the linguistics), petty and malicious score-settling (made me feel vaguely sympathetic to the US government, which is, I suppose, some kind of accomplishment), feeble character, plot and so on.

Anyway, there should be a “most shameless Mary Sue” competition. I open by nominating Marie Corelli for “The Sorrows of Satan”.

I’ve read Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. The former struck me as an amusing rip-off of William Gibson. The best parts of Cryptonomicon are fairly entertaining – as others have said, the WWII stuff is the best, but other parts are also good. I did think the book went on way too long, and yes, the ending is disappointing.

Oh – I am reminded by John Kozak’s post about the linguistics of Snow Crash. Yes, that is utter crap. That book would be much better if the linguistic nonsense had been left out entirely. (To clarify my criticism, the linguistic hypothesis is that all languages are evolving towards a universal language that is so compelling that it overwhelms the brain. This is a truly nonsensical idea.)

“The prose is flat.”

“Stephenson keeps lathering-in in chunks of his background reading.”

“a strong whiff of Mary-Sue wish-fulfillment pervades the whole thing”

It’s science fiction. It’s not Jane Austen (er maybe a bit of Mary-Sue there though).

Science fiction writers are doing it for the ideas, not for the character development, leak-proof plot, or well crafted discourse.

If you go into Cryptonomicon (and even more, the Baroque Cycle) expecting it to work as a novel, you’re going to be disappointed. Structurally, the models for these works are books like Tristram Shandy, Byron’s Don Juan, or Swift (Gulliver’s Travels and Tale of a Tub in particular). (Frye called this form a “Menippean satire”, despite the fact that this actually refers to a mixture of prose and verse in telling the same story.) Digression isn’t extraneous to the form – it’s integral (culminating in Swift’s “A Digression in Praise of Digressions”).

One of the things I think that you may be missing is the element of mockery / mild satire in the book (which, again, ties it to its literary predecessors). Stephenson pushes virtually all the situations and characters just beyond the boundaries of realism to do some implicit criticism of what they represent. They certainly aren’t Mary Sues.

This seems to be a kind of work off which some people just bounce. I liked Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle as wholes, although I can see their weaknesses (although I note that weaknesses in endings seem to be endemic to the form). If you don’t like the first couple of hundred pages, you probably won’t like the rest.

I really enjoyed Cryptonomicon and just ignored the irritating bits because the entertaining bits are REALLY entertaining. And I will NOT spend anymore time wondering how Julieta Kivistik could have raised such a useless asshat as G.E.B.

I read Cryptonomicon first, then the Baroque Cycle, then Snow Crash, and finally Diamond Age. As I read these, I assumed they were in their own separate-but-similar universes (except for Crypto/Baroque Cycle), but now I think they are all set in the same universe. Some historical fudging is required, since Crypto and Snow Crash are set in the late 90s, but I believe that widespread use of the spoiler, which will come about very quickly due to the discovery of the spoiler, could lead pretty quickly to the completely defanged US gov’t. We even see Stephenson playing with some of the same ideas, such as a hive mind, in different books.

It’s escapist fiction – a summer blockbuster with geniuses, heroes and things blowing up, with bits of things he’s picked up about this place or that thrown. You do learn a few interesting facts, but those expecting deep thoughts or compelling characters are bound to be disappointed. Those who enjoy the occasional guilty pleasure will enjoy, as I did.

> One of the things I think that you may be missing
> is the element of mockery / mild satire in the
> book (which, again, ties it to its literary
> predecessors). Stephenson pushes virtually all the
> situations and characters just beyond the
> boundaries of realism to do some implicit
> criticism of what they represent. They certainly
> aren’t Mary Sues.

True hackers from the 1970s and early 1980s (disclaimer: I knew true hackers; I was never more than a wannabe myself) were well aware of their own shortcomings and quirks and loved to make fun of themselves (as opposed to allowing others to make fun of them). Those who assume that the various Waterhouse characters are Stephenson will miss the self-deprecation, bumbling, pratfalls, and stupid mistake inherent in those characters. They will also miss the accomodations that the Waterhouses realize they must make to those around them who are not like them – who are often the powerful and the extroverts. Nerds lost in superman fantasies generally do _not_ come to this realization.

By the way, most of those hackers were male and did eventually find girlfriends / get married. And while those girlfriends were seldom quite as desirable as Amy Shaftoe, they were typically NOT introverted nerds; more often than not they were theatre or artist-types. Why people make the assumption that people seek out like mates, when in my experience opposites attract more often, is a mystery to me. In fact my own spouse made the “he would never get Amy” comment until I laughed so hard she finally realized she was more like the Amy character than not and I managed to get her!

Cranky

I think the best thing Stephenson has written was the profile of the FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe) project in Wired. A John McPhee for cyberspace, who missed his calling.

One thing not to miss in Cryptonomicon: the corporate Mission Statement for the startup, where they commit themselves to burning down their competitors’ homes, salting the earth, and selling the wives and children into slavery.

With a pseudo idiot savant Pearl Harbor xylophonist/coder, the nerdy unix hacker->adventurer, the drug addict/hero marine, and the secret religious/academic society monk, if you can’t find a character you are interested in, then you are reading the wrong stuff.

You can put all kinds of gee-whiz tags on a character or throw labels into a blender. That doesn’t make the character interesting or somebody about whose fate you give a hoot. (Which is not to say that *nobody* could possibly care about the characters, just that I didn’t find them compelling, and when I get the point in a book where I’m turning pages purely to see if it ever gets interesting, I put it down.)

I’m also not buying the argument that Stephenson has re-invented the genre, such that if you didn’t like the book, it’s probably that you’re just too stuck with the conventions of traditional lit. I mean, come-freakin-on, people. The Cryptonomicon is Swift? Don’t think so.

Science fiction, by the way, is still fiction. An author who merely wants to write about ideas can write non-fiction (which Stephenson does a bang-up job of, IMO). “It’s about ideas!” is not an excuse for things like bad plot, cardboard characters, leaden dialogue, etc.

I loved it. Read it after Snow Crash which I loved. Hated Quicksilver.

Mythago:

You dismiss my “gee whiz” tags, which was my shorthand way of suggesting that there were some worthwhile characters in the book. I think that a couple of ways to create interesting characters is to have them evolve or embody contradictions, i.e., a computer geek who ends up trekking through the Philippine jungle; a war hero who is also a morphine addict, etc.

To suggest that these characters were just “labels in a blender” or otherwise underdeveloped in the course of a book criticised for its length is hard to understand.

It’s all a matter of taste, I guess, but I liked ’em.

I had a hard time getting through Quicksilver, but found the other two in the Cycle to be an easier read.

Nice to see that I’m not alone in being disapointed with Cryptonomicon. In fact, I never finished the book, which is very unusual for me. This is why I’ve not even attempted reading his Baroque trilogy.

I wholeheartedly embrace the idea of criticizing things on the appropriate level. But even in that context all of the Stephenson books I’ve read are very flawed.

Having said that, the first thirty pages of Snow Crash was a virtuosity of science-fiction inventiveness combined with wit. The Diamond Age was also on the whole astonishingly inventive. I think Stephenson deserves a great deal of credit for the things at which he is truly good.

I’m relieved to find I’m not the only who bogged down and just plain stopped. I liked Stephenson’s earlier books, but Cryptonomicon just didn’t work for me, and the comments on the Baroque Cycle suggest that it wouldn’t either.

Of course I’ve been reading less sf in general in recent years, and on the whole am tending toward tight, often )(but not necesarily) short books.

it is indeed a rubbish book. as are all his others, really – it’s just pulp with nerd appeal.

however, having said that, i’ve been thinking about snowcrash recently – i picked up kripke’s little book on the private language argument, and it struck me that i was seeing almost exactly what was described in the book. reading the first chapter i had the disturbing impression that wittgenstein had infected kripke with something that had stopped him from thinking clearly, and that kripke was now doing his utmost to pass the confusion on.

“if the SF people keep telling me their stuff is literature (they do, and it is) then it gets applied the same standards as everything else I read.”

“Science fiction, by the way, is still fiction. An author who merely wants to write about ideas can write non-fiction (which Stephenson does a bang-up job of, IMO). “It’s about ideas!” is not an excuse for things like bad plot, cardboard characters, leaden dialogue, etc.”

Yes yes yes, no excuses, it should attempt hold up to all the standards, yes. But the reality is is that it often doesn’t. SF is notorious for those faults, so now you know not to be surprised by them, be pleased when they are overcome, and enjoy its strengths.

You don’t go to a Jackie Chan movie for character development or plot, but for kick-ass acrobatics.

Mitch: But within the realm of highly stylized conventions, it canb e done well or badly.

A Bullet in the Head says things about honor, revenge, and sacrifice that Naked Killer does not, even though the original subtitles of the latter had the line “I still have time for the gastric lavage” and no John Woo movie does.

Setting aside Raymond Chandler here as a special case, Dashiell Hammett did things with the conventions of hard-boiled PIs that Mickey Spillane never did, and is a better writer of the same kind of stuff.

Wil McCarthy and Linda Nagata write better sf than Stephen Baxter does, both for their prose skills and for their grasp of human nature and characterization. Both can portray no-good boring shitheads without makign them the examplars of the whole race.

Simon and Garfunkel made better folk pop than a lot of other folks doing the same kind of thing at the same time, by virtue of superior craftsmanship and talent in the performance.

Stephenson is working in a well-established style. The big book full of exegetical ramblings and world tour is…well, take a look at Moby Dick, as well as Foucault’s Pendulum or Illuminatus!. It’s a kind of thing a lot of writers like to tackle.

As a non-nerd, with no significant knowledge of science or math (indeed, I never took math after high school), I love Neal Stephenson. He made me interested in calculus in a way I have never been, and I just may just take up the subject. I think that says something for Neal Stephenson as a teacher.

It’s simply wrong to say that he doesn’t plot. His plots are certainly not simple and straightforward, and do not always have an obvious payoff, but lots of stuff happens in his works. I love the scene in Quicksilver where Shaftoe escapes from shackles in a stable of a French nobleman and enters the house to find a costume party–with everyone assuming he is in costume, playing the character of himself, the famous Vagabond, which the nobleman intended to play. We had been set up for that scence for quite a long time, as we learned how Shaftoe was a vagabond of some repute whose actions always took on legendary proportion afterwards. But that scene was quite legendary without needing to be transformed by storytellers! How is that not plot? Do contemporary literary writers plot? Really? (I write this as someone with an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing, but who loathes the artistic pretensions of those in that field).

Of course, I love Tristram Shandy and other novels that digress, so perhaps Stephenson plays to my preferences. My course in 18th century literature was by far my favorite literature course in college. And I love 1,000 page novels, too; why does everyone want books to be short? And works on a grand scale–why does everyone nowadays want to work in miniature? Sometimes it’s useful to get the sense of much of the whole, of the movement of many pieces across time. But it’s more than that. Stephenson does present a vision of history that I have never gotten anywhere else–perhaps you all have, but I don’t read engineering and economics that much, it’s not an area of expertise–and I feel that I learn from reading him. Especially about the importance of this sort of history. And as someone wrote above, he has a sense of the interconnectedness of all these strands of knowledge and history that is quite impressive–most people don’t have enough broad interdisciplinary knowledge to see the connections that he sees. Who has time to study all these different sorts of fields? What sorts of academics–at least the average ones–see these connections? It’s not the sheer amount of facts–it is the way they are put together. I’m sorry, I think the guy is brilliant.

And I think too he will be around for some time. Many people who might like him have not yet even heard of him–there are many non-science fiction readers, like me, who might cross over to read his books, but have no idea who he even is, yet. If you look on Amazon, the aubrey-matarin series readers (I’ve tried but never read them) are praising the Baroque Cycle. There are quite a few of them. And there are other categories of readers as well out there as well, I believe. who just might not know about his books.

I remember liking Zodiac… did noone else read that?

lisa sg – if you liked the doorstops for their ideas, read Braudel’s _Civilization and Capitalism_, a big triple-decker history book. It was reprinted recently, is available in used and remainder bookstores. Terrific narratives of history, many illustrations which are both memorable and informative; one of the main sources for the _Quicksilver_ books. Really quite fun. Attaches to all sorts of interests.

Better, Braudel didn’t add anachronisms to make his Silly Valley fan crowd feel as though the world had always revolved around them. When you find a prefigurement of this decade in Braudel, which you probably will, it’s a lot more trustworthy.

Why did you read any more after the 1st, if that was your opinion?

stupid hope and a penchant for pulp?

and why do i have the funny feeling that if i’d only read one, you’d have said that was insufficient for me to form an opinion?