Neal Stephenson came along a little late in the game to be considered one of the Web's genuine prophets. His first novel, a spiky academic satire called ''The Big U,'' was published in 1984 -- the same year William Gibson, in ''Neuromancer,'' coined the term ''cyberspace.'' Stephenson didn't plant both feet in science fiction until 1992, when his novel ''Snow Crash'' -- a swashbuckling fantasy that largely takes place in a virtual world called the Metaverse -- became an instant, and deserved, cyberpunk classic.
''Snow Crash'' remains the freshest and most fully realized exploration of the hacker mythology. Set in a futuristic southern California, the novel rolls out a society in ruins. Citizens live in heavily fortified ''Burbclaves,'' pizza delivery services are run with military precision by a high-tech Cosa Nostra, and the Library of Congress (now comprising digital information uploaded by swarms of freelance Matt Drudge types) has merged with the C.I.A. and ''kicked out a big fat stock offering.'' In reality, Stephenson's hero delivers pizza. In the Metaverse, he's a warrior on a mission to squelch a deadly computer virus.
Sounds perfectly preposterous -- and it is. But Stephenson, a former code writer, has such a crackling high style and a feel for how computers actually function that he yanks you right along. Despite all the high-tech frippery, there's something old-fashioned about Stephenson's work. He cares as much about telling good stories as he does about farming out cool ideas. There's a strong whiff of moralism in his books, too. The bad guys in his fiction -- that is, anyone who stands in a well-intentioned hacker's way -- meet bad ends. In ''Snow Crash,'' one nasty character tries to rape a young woman, only to find out she's installed an intrauterine device called a ''dentata.''
Stephenson's antiquated commitment to narrative, his Dickensian brio, is part of what makes his gargantuan new novel, ''Cryptonomicon,'' distinct from the other outsize slabs of post-modern fiction we've seen recently -- David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest,'' Don DeLillo's ''Underworld,'' Thomas Pynchon's ''Mason & Dixon.'' For all the pleasures scattered throughout those books, they're dry, somewhat forbidding epics that beckon industrious graduate students while checking the riffraff at the door. ''Cryptonomicon,'' on the other hand, is a wet epic -- as eager to please as a young-adult novel, it wants to blow your mind while keeping you well fed and happy. For the most part, it succeeds. It's brain candy for bitheads.
''Cryptonomicon'' could have easily been titled ''Incoming Mail.'' It's a sprawling, picaresque novel about code making and code breaking, set both during World War II, when the Allies were struggling to break the Nazis' fabled Enigma code, and during the present day, when a pair of entrepreneurial hackers are trying to create a ''data haven'' in the Philippines -- a place where encrypted data (and an encrypted electronic currency) can be kept from the prying eyes of Big Brother. It is, at heart, a book about people who want to read one another's mail.
''Cryptonomicon'' is so crammed with incident -- there are dozens of major characters, multiple plots and subplots, at least three borderline-sentimental love stories and discursive ruminations on everything from Bach's organ music and Internet start-ups to the best way to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal -- that it defies tidy summary. Suffice it to say that some early scenes are set at Princeton University in the 1940's, where an awkward young mathematical genius named Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse befriends the computer pioneer Alan Turing. (Turing's interest in Waterhouse goes beyond their bicycle rides and theoretical discussions; he makes ''an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and stuttering.'') When war breaks out, Turing is dispatched to Bletchley Park in Britain, where he helps break Enigma. Waterhouse is ultimately assigned to a top-secret outfit called Detachment 2702, led by a gung-ho marine named Bobby Shaftoe, whose mission it is to prevent the Nazis from discovering that their code has been cracked wide open.
Stephenson cheerfully stretches historical plausibility -- there are some absurdly heroic (if electrifying) battle scenes, hilarious cameos by Ronald Reagan and Douglas MacArthur, and shadowy conspiracies involving U-boat captains and fallen priests -- but plays the mathematics of code breaking straight. We witness, in detail, Turing's early attempts to create a bare-bones computer that will help decode Nazi messages, and are plunged into the organized chaos at Bletchley Park, where ''demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.'' (...)
Stephenson intercuts these wartime scenes with chapters about Waterhouse's grandson, Randy, who works for a start-up company called Epiphyte that plans not only to create a data haven but also to use a cache of gold buried by the Japanese Army during World War II to back an electronic currency protected by state-of-the-art encryption. These chapters are the book's shaggiest and most winsome, if only because Stephenson is so plugged into Randy's hacker sensibilities. As he skims along, Stephenson riffs on everything from Wired magazine -- here called Turing, with the motto ''So Hip, We're Stupid!'' -- and Microsoft's legal team's ''state-of-the-art hellhounds'' to pretentious cultural-theory academics and Silicon Valley's interest in cryogenics. (Some hackers here wear bracelets offering a $100,000 reward to medics who freeze their dead bodies.) That ''Cryptonomicon'' contains the greatest hacking scene ever put to paper, performed by Randy while under surveillance in a Philippine prison, should further endear this novel to computer freaks on both coasts. I expect to see, for the next decade or so, dogeared copies of this novel rattling around on the floorboards of the Toyotas (or, increasingly, Range Rovers) that fill Silicon Valley parking lots.
Should anyone else bother with it? My answer is a guarded yes. Stephenson could have easily cut this novel by a third, and it's terrifying that he imagines this 900-plus-page monster to be the ''first volume'' in an even longer saga. Worse, he strains too hard at reconciling the book's multiple plot strands. We can understand the subtle links between World War II code breaking and today's politicized encryption battles -- and the spiritual links between cryptographers in the 1940's and hackers in the 1990's -- without the nonsense about secret gold deposits and coded messages that filter down (improbably) through generations. Stephenson, I suspect, simply can't help himself; he's having too good a time to ever consider applying the brakes.
''Snow Crash'' remains the freshest and most fully realized exploration of the hacker mythology. Set in a futuristic southern California, the novel rolls out a society in ruins. Citizens live in heavily fortified ''Burbclaves,'' pizza delivery services are run with military precision by a high-tech Cosa Nostra, and the Library of Congress (now comprising digital information uploaded by swarms of freelance Matt Drudge types) has merged with the C.I.A. and ''kicked out a big fat stock offering.'' In reality, Stephenson's hero delivers pizza. In the Metaverse, he's a warrior on a mission to squelch a deadly computer virus.
Sounds perfectly preposterous -- and it is. But Stephenson, a former code writer, has such a crackling high style and a feel for how computers actually function that he yanks you right along. Despite all the high-tech frippery, there's something old-fashioned about Stephenson's work. He cares as much about telling good stories as he does about farming out cool ideas. There's a strong whiff of moralism in his books, too. The bad guys in his fiction -- that is, anyone who stands in a well-intentioned hacker's way -- meet bad ends. In ''Snow Crash,'' one nasty character tries to rape a young woman, only to find out she's installed an intrauterine device called a ''dentata.''Stephenson's antiquated commitment to narrative, his Dickensian brio, is part of what makes his gargantuan new novel, ''Cryptonomicon,'' distinct from the other outsize slabs of post-modern fiction we've seen recently -- David Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest,'' Don DeLillo's ''Underworld,'' Thomas Pynchon's ''Mason & Dixon.'' For all the pleasures scattered throughout those books, they're dry, somewhat forbidding epics that beckon industrious graduate students while checking the riffraff at the door. ''Cryptonomicon,'' on the other hand, is a wet epic -- as eager to please as a young-adult novel, it wants to blow your mind while keeping you well fed and happy. For the most part, it succeeds. It's brain candy for bitheads.
''Cryptonomicon'' could have easily been titled ''Incoming Mail.'' It's a sprawling, picaresque novel about code making and code breaking, set both during World War II, when the Allies were struggling to break the Nazis' fabled Enigma code, and during the present day, when a pair of entrepreneurial hackers are trying to create a ''data haven'' in the Philippines -- a place where encrypted data (and an encrypted electronic currency) can be kept from the prying eyes of Big Brother. It is, at heart, a book about people who want to read one another's mail.
''Cryptonomicon'' is so crammed with incident -- there are dozens of major characters, multiple plots and subplots, at least three borderline-sentimental love stories and discursive ruminations on everything from Bach's organ music and Internet start-ups to the best way to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal -- that it defies tidy summary. Suffice it to say that some early scenes are set at Princeton University in the 1940's, where an awkward young mathematical genius named Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse befriends the computer pioneer Alan Turing. (Turing's interest in Waterhouse goes beyond their bicycle rides and theoretical discussions; he makes ''an outlandish proposal to Lawrence involving penises. It required a great deal of methodical explanation, which Alan delivered with lots of blushing and stuttering.'') When war breaks out, Turing is dispatched to Bletchley Park in Britain, where he helps break Enigma. Waterhouse is ultimately assigned to a top-secret outfit called Detachment 2702, led by a gung-ho marine named Bobby Shaftoe, whose mission it is to prevent the Nazis from discovering that their code has been cracked wide open.
Stephenson cheerfully stretches historical plausibility -- there are some absurdly heroic (if electrifying) battle scenes, hilarious cameos by Ronald Reagan and Douglas MacArthur, and shadowy conspiracies involving U-boat captains and fallen priests -- but plays the mathematics of code breaking straight. We witness, in detail, Turing's early attempts to create a bare-bones computer that will help decode Nazi messages, and are plunged into the organized chaos at Bletchley Park, where ''demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.'' (...)
Stephenson intercuts these wartime scenes with chapters about Waterhouse's grandson, Randy, who works for a start-up company called Epiphyte that plans not only to create a data haven but also to use a cache of gold buried by the Japanese Army during World War II to back an electronic currency protected by state-of-the-art encryption. These chapters are the book's shaggiest and most winsome, if only because Stephenson is so plugged into Randy's hacker sensibilities. As he skims along, Stephenson riffs on everything from Wired magazine -- here called Turing, with the motto ''So Hip, We're Stupid!'' -- and Microsoft's legal team's ''state-of-the-art hellhounds'' to pretentious cultural-theory academics and Silicon Valley's interest in cryogenics. (Some hackers here wear bracelets offering a $100,000 reward to medics who freeze their dead bodies.) That ''Cryptonomicon'' contains the greatest hacking scene ever put to paper, performed by Randy while under surveillance in a Philippine prison, should further endear this novel to computer freaks on both coasts. I expect to see, for the next decade or so, dogeared copies of this novel rattling around on the floorboards of the Toyotas (or, increasingly, Range Rovers) that fill Silicon Valley parking lots.
Should anyone else bother with it? My answer is a guarded yes. Stephenson could have easily cut this novel by a third, and it's terrifying that he imagines this 900-plus-page monster to be the ''first volume'' in an even longer saga. Worse, he strains too hard at reconciling the book's multiple plot strands. We can understand the subtle links between World War II code breaking and today's politicized encryption battles -- and the spiritual links between cryptographers in the 1940's and hackers in the 1990's -- without the nonsense about secret gold deposits and coded messages that filter down (improbably) through generations. Stephenson, I suspect, simply can't help himself; he's having too good a time to ever consider applying the brakes.
by Dwight Garner, NY Times | Read more:
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[ed. I stumbled across Snow Crash and Neil Stephenson just a few months ago and am now deeply into Cryptonomicon. It's a wonderful (and wonderfully dense) novel, full of intrigue and history. So delighted to find someone of this literary talent that I'd somehow overlooked all these years.]
