Neal Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, which Joe and Garret reviewed, and The Diamond Age, which I would love to write up sometime.  He’s a great author and has a huge, nerdy fanbase.  Today’s book, however, is why am not a drooling fanboy for him the way I am for Gaiman and Gibson.

Cryptonomicon is half alternate history, half love story, half bildungsroman.  Seriously, three halves.  That’s how much story there is here.  This book could have been divided up into duology, maybe even a trilogy, and each book would have still been a really great story.  It’s all one book, though.  Like a 64 oz. steak, it looks up at you from your plate and says, “I dare  you to start me.  I’m going to own you.  When you’re done, who will be the victor?  You may consume me, but I will overtake you in the end.”  That being said, it is a fun book, if you can stand the bloated feeling you get at times.

The two most central characters are Randy Waterhouse and his grandfather Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.  The two eras are when these men are young, in the late 1990s and during World War II.  They are brilliant but socially inept.  (I can’t decide whether or not I think Lawrence has a mild case of Asperger’s Syndrome.)  Much of the story involves their social maturation.  In that vein, there are pontifications on love, courtship, masturbation, and getting blow jobs from Nazi spies.

Yet, the book is also about information technology, specifically with reference to cryptography and the art of stealing information.  Much is made of Van Eck phreaking, one-time pads, and bingo balls.  The Cryptonomicon itself is a fictional compendium of all humanity’s understanding of codes and cyphers.  If you are a mathematician, crypto buff, or just like geeking out on information theory, this book is for you.  Some of it was way over my head, but I still enjoyed it.  There’s even a special cypher involving playing cards called The Solitaire Encryption Algorithm.  If you like, an appendix teaches you how to use it.

In side stories that could be novellas themselves, Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo are WWII soldiers, American and Japanese respectively.  They play out the grunt work involved in the information war between the Axis and Allies.  This is where most of the action comes in, but they aren’t just G. I. Joe toys in writing.  Just about everyone in this book is a fully three-dimensional character.  Even Bobby’s granddaughter Amy (short for America), who becomes Randy’s love interest, has a working brain behind her lusciously tan body.

If I keep going in any one direction, this review will go on for days.  Suffice it to say that there is more.  Much more.  If you have a lot of time to kill, pick it up.  It can get a little intense, though.  Sometimes the descriptions of Lawrence’s mathematical ponderances can be tedious.  I took several years to finish it because I would read it for a few weeks and then have to go read something else for a while.

What really keeps me from being a fan of this book, though, is the ending.  One of Stephenson’s signatures, it seems, is a curtailed denouement.  Sometimes it works, as in Snow Crash.  Here, I think, it doesn’t.  The story comes to a roaring climax, but the future is left so uncertain as to leave the reader wanting.  There is so much happening, just so much story, that the resolution hinted at in the end just feels like a cliffhanger.    This may be because it was written to connect Snow Crash and TheBaroqueCycle (three links).  I don’t know.  I choose to believe this because it lets me think that Stephenson is a better writer.