Thursday, January 11, 2007

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

Super cool read, with a very strong geek appeal. The book may seem a bit schizophrenic in that for a while at least three independent threads go on without much hint of when and where they intersect. It's a bit of a tome with over 1,000 pages, but it turned out to become one of my favorite reads.

One plot line is about WWII history: you get to learn a little bit about how code making and code breaking went. Just a little, but enough to get you excited about that mathematical cloak and dagger. Stephenson did his research well and explains certain mathematical concepts so clearly that I use a passages about Turing's bicycle when I talk about modulo arithmetic in my classes. The thread that discusses WWII intelligence gives you a glimpse of Ultra, Bletchey Park, Enigma codes, and even Alan Turing. How cool is that for a book? And that is only part of it. The other plot line talks about a geek duo in modern times wading through the cesspool of the corporate world and making big business in Asia. Their biggest idea is centered around the "Crypt", a big, secure, data repository.

All in all, I found this book to be a geek's dream come true. It gets a bit technical when the plot calls for it, but almost always in a cheeky, self-deprecating way. It celebrates geek sub-culture. It show that knowledge of science and technology buys one the admission fee into the uppermost stratum of an underground level of our social hierarchy. I don't know of any other work of fiction that has attempted to precisely model a man's horniness through the use of mathematical functions or to weave a lecture on modulo arithmetic into the story. Cryptonomicon does all that with enough elegance to impress the cognoscenti and, at the same time, with a simplicity of language to that does not turn off the uninitiated. Dan Brown, eat your heart out!

The best I can say to summarize what I think of this book is "wow". I enjoyed every page of it: I laughed at the geeky humor (because I'm a geek), I scratched my head at the conspiracies, I loved the fact that the technical content was well above average for a work of fiction, I appreciated the historical lessons, etc, etc, etc.

No comments: