There's a lot about how to stop people from decrypting your stuff. There's a lot of encrypting and even more decrypting in this books. If you want to know that you enemy is up to, it's a really good idea to try to decrypt their messages. If you are afraid that somebody will try to steal your business plan, it's a really good idea to encrypt them. A lot of this is straight forward business thriller stuff, except that it's linked to the above mentioned stories and then there's the paranoia.Īnd that's where the cryptography comes into the picture. A place where people can place their data, without fear of the local police coming by and confiscating their hard drives or taking them as evidence just because, they may contain something that might be illegal. He's even fairly good with people, but luckily he has a partner who's really good with people and fairly good, at running a business. Randy is good at cryptography, he's good at math and he's good at computers. Then there's Shaftoes Japanese friend Goto Dengo, he's good a digging tunnels, so he gets to dig a lot of tunnels for the Japanese during the war.Īll these stories are, of cause, connected to the main story, which takes place in the present.
Then there's the story of Lawrence Waterhouse, who's a good friend of Alan Turing, they both get to work on cracking German and Japanese codes during the war. The WWII stories include the story of Bobby Shaftoe, an American Marine (is there any other kind?) who gets a special job in a special unit. A deep sense of paranoia might be a good enough substitute for one of these interests, but then again I think that it might be rather unhealthy, to read Cryptonomicon if you are paranoid.Ĭryptonomicon is told as a small handful of stories, most of them takes place during WWII, but the main story takes place today. The problem is, I'm not sure that this book is for everybody, you have to have some kind of interest in mathematics, cryptography or computers for it to be interesting. Luckily for me, Cryptonomicon is a wonderful book that lived up to all my expectations. It's would be so disappointing if one of his books where bad. The thing is, I tend to build up enormous expectations for, low output, but high quality, authors like Stephenson. What if I didn't “get it” or even worse didn't like the book?
Also Cryptonomicon is about mathematics and it's about cryptography, and while I know math, I know nothing about cryptography, but I find the subject fascinating. Neal Stephenson is a bit like Vernon Vinge – they both make wonderful books, and they both take their time about it. I've been a bit apprehensive about starting on Cryptonomicon. Cryptonomicon is a speculative fiction novel by the American author Neal Stephenson.
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