Cryptonomicon

I discovered Neal Stephenson a little later than many of his fans, simply not being aware of him until I read an interview with another author who simply raved about him. I browsed his books to find what seemed like the best one to introduce me to him and settled on Cryptonomicon. I was very quickly immersed in it, and found it to be a mind-blowing mixture of great narrative and big ideas. Neal Stephenson has written science fiction as you would normally know it, but this comes from a different angle in that he writes about how science and technology change the world here and now. Most science fiction does the same, but portrays the future or alternative reality resulting from that progress. Here Stephenson tells the story of the moments that the world changed. The springboard for the story is Turing's development of the first computer to break the Enigma code during World War Two. From there we are given a less well-known, mostly fictional tale of people and events connected with that breakthrough - the people supporting Turing and trying to keep the existence of the ultimate code breaking machine from the enemy, and the efforts to achieve breakthroughs in cracking new codes. This story is epic enough, spanning all the theatres of war from Europe to Australia, paying special attention to the pivotal role of the Philippines in the war effort. Also interwoven with this narrative though, is the story of a new breed of technologists in the year 2000, some of whom are descendants of the characters in the wartime story. The children and grandchildren of Turing's contemporaries are engaged in a different kind of battle on a new frontier. It's still about codebreaking and communication, but now it's about data encryption, new communications technology and the digital flow of money and information around the world. The thousand page result is a complex and thrilling story - at its start, mathematicians provide the real breakthrough in the war effort more powerful than an atom bomb. What they create is a computer, and a massive leap forward in encryption and codebreaking. The result was a new era of technology, forged in the furnace of global war, transforming the world we live in. Decades later, we use the technology developed since then to explore new possibilities and break new ground; and the technology, breakthroughs, wars and developments of the past are the ancestors of the technology that runs the world in the present. In a sense the story set at the turn of the 21st century is just a function of Stephenson's big idea. We are all descended from the people who built the future, or fought for it. The technology we use is descended from the inventions and work of previous generations. The computers and communications tools in use today derive from tools built to fight the Nazis. The seas where we lay cables to send information around the world in the blink of an eye still bear the marks of the battles fought there before. The plans we hatch, the future we build, the battles we fight are one way or another a continuation of plans, futures and battles that have been in play since before we were born. It's perhaps inevitable that the invention of the first computer as a means of breaking the Enigma code, the struggles across multiple theatres of war and riding in jeeps with MacArthur or on bicycles with Alan Turing will possess more drama and weight than modern day storylines where most of the fighting is done in the boardroom or on the telephone. Perhaps the one false note in the book is Stephenson's attempt to inject drama into the more recent events so they are not overshadowed by the sound and fury of World War Two. But this story set more or less in the present is necessary for the reader to connect to the narrative, and the idea that what went before built we are today. And there is still much to savour in the modern storyline, especially as the number of connections and echoes of the wartime story begins to increase and the whole picture of Stephenson's story emerges. The criticisms in other reviews of Cryptonomicon centre around the length of the book, the events Stephenson has chosen to focus on, the ancestry of the modern characters and the sheer level of detail provided to the story. It's true the story is immensely long and detailed, the interwoven storylines very complex, with long descriptions of mathematical concepts complete with graphs and illustrations. They are fundamental to the novel, though, so it's really a case of whether you're prepared to persevere with that for the huge rewards the book has to offer. For me, the world Stephenson creates is so enthralling that I'm glad it went on for a thousand pages so I could keep experiencing it. It's full of quirks and little changes to the world we know, just to keep you on your toes - for some reason, Wales and the Isle of Man seem to have merged into one in Stephenson's reality. This book opened up a whole new world for me and I became a confirmed Neal Stephenson fan on the strength of this novel. It's also a perfect stopping off point to get you into the Stephenson universe, if you intend to read his magisterial Baroque Cycle.

Great read

Interesting story line. Challenging to complete in one sitting.

Questo libro si svolge in due tempi differenti, durante la seconda guerra mondiale e quasi ai giorni nostri, agli albori di internet (infatti il libro è di una quindicina di anni fa, e tecnologie allora all’avanguardia sono ora alla portata di tutti o quasi). Nella seconda guerra mondiale seguiamo il dottor Waterhouse, matematico amico di Turing, che diventa in breve tempo uno dei crittografi di punta degli Stati Uniti, finendo in un’organizzazione segretissima angloamericana volta a decifrare i codici utilizzati da tedeschi e giapponesi, e sopratutto a capire come utilizzare queste informazioni senza far capire al nemico che il codice sia stato bucato. Questa storyline è interessantissima, piena zeppa di riferimenti matematici e di spiegazioni, mostrandoci dei veri geni all’opera nel momento in cui il mondo più aveva bisogno di loro. Dalle discussioni matematiche di tre ragazzi in bicicletta, alla guerra di cervelli tra i tedeschi e gli alleati per decifrare i messaggi nemici e vincere la guerra. Allo stesso tempo seguiamo anche le vicende di un marine inizialmente di stanza in Asia, Shaftoe. Amico di un soldato giapponese che presto diventerà un nemico da eliminare come tutti i suoi compatrioti, coinvolto nell’inizio della guerra e sopravvissuto per miracolo, finirà con il diventare membro del gruppo di Waterhouse, uno degli operativi, incaricato di svolgere missioni apparentemente senza senso, ma orchestrate dal matematico per mascherare le loro conoscenze dei movimenti tedeschi. Con lui c’è il padre Root, personaggio misterioso dalle inifinite conoscenze, ma questa storia si distacca da quella di Waterhouse solamente quando i due incontrano Bischoff, abilissimo comandante di U-boat tenuto in grandissima considerazione dal Reich. I tre si ritroveranno presi in una morsa titanica tra la necessità sia del Reich sia degli Alleati di non far scoprire al nemico i propri segreti, che riguardano codici cifrati e lingotti d’oro. E riguardano una misteriosa organizzazione, la societas eruditorum. Nel presente invece abbiamo a che fare con un nipote di Waterhouse, Randy. Esperto di informatica, appassionato di giochi di ruolo, ovviamente agli albori del boom tecnologico è un precursore delle moderne start-up, con l’amico di origini polacche Avi, esperto businessman. I due e i loro soci sono paranoici della sicurezza e della privacy, sviluppano e utilizzano complicatissime tecnologie di crittaggio dei messaggi e si stanno imbarcando nella loro più grande impresa: la cripta. Il sogno di creare, in un piccolo sultanato compiacente, un bunker impenetrabile che diventi un rifugio digitale per i dati di ogni tipo, immune ai controlli e alle censure delle nazioni. Un sogno che ha svariate ramificazioni, dalla possibilità di creare una Svizzera digitale per ricchissimi individui desiderosi di nascondere soldi di provenienza non del tutto lecita o dimostrabile, alla possibilità di creare una valuta indipendente e robusta, digitale, che dia stabilità all’est, fino all’utopia di utilizzare il tutto per evitare che avvengano nuovi Olocausti. In questo progetto entra una compagnia di esperti subacquei, incaricati di passare i cavi sottomarini che dovranno collegare il sultanato al resto del mondo. La compagnia degli Shaftoe, Douglas (figlio di Bobby, il marine della seconda guerra mondiale, e lui stesso ex-soldato rude, minaccioso e con ampissime conoscenze) e America, sua figlia, una sorta di soldato indipendente e pericolosissimo. Ovviamente nessuno dei tre è a conoscenza del passato comune delle due famiglie, e altrettanto ovviamente tra Randy e Amy scatterà la proverbiale scintilla. Tra gruppi mafiosi che lanciano messaggi, lobby che muovono cause, avvocati che si travestono da sicari, governi che si muovono in forze per distruggerli. Aiutati solo da alcuni fantasmi che dalle nebbie del tempo, dalla seconda guerra mondiale, ricompaiono per aiutare Shaftoe e Waterhouse a distanza di due generazioni. La parte nel passato relativa a Waterhouse è illuminante. Quella relativa a Shaftoe mostra più da vicino la guerra e i suoi orrori. Quella nel presente ricorda un poco, nelle parti di paranoia (giustificata) relativa alla privacy, Doctorow. Un mosaico enorme e complesso, farcito di spiegazioni matematiche e informatiche, oltre che di discrete nozioni sulla crittografia. Una lettura davvero affascinante, consigliatissima a chiunque sia interessato alla crittografia, alla matematica o all’informatica (perché non sarà un trattato, ma queste parti a volte sono abbastanza dettagliate e chi non le apprezzi rischierebbe di stancarsi e mollare il libro, o saltare interi capitoli)

I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating. I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head. The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor." And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure." Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak". Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted. A wonderful book!