Gyeagh. Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson

[gement]

I read Cryptonomicon (for those of you just tuning in, that's just over 900 pp. of WWII codebreaker conspiracy and Linux geekery) in approximately 48 hours.

That's 200 pp on Sunday, 600 pp on Monday (during which I did nothing else), and the last, fairly easy reading, 100 pp this morning. I can't say I read it that fast because I enjoyed doing so. It was more that I wanted to see where it was going, and I was afraid that if I put it down I'd never have the stamina to pick it back up again.

In short, you must be at least this geeky to ride this ride. I am barely geeky enough to ride this ride. "This geeky" translates to a complicated metric involving how much you like pure math puzzles, how much you like conspiracy theories, how much you like history, and how much time you spent in college with people who register domain names pertaining to hobbits while drunk. The fact that I'm trying to quantify such a metric in my head says a lot about the writing style of the book, in which several main characters tended to go off on stray thoughts like this all the time.

This leaves me with the compulsion to do pointless things with a deck of cards, and a few remaining burning question, which hopefully some of my much-geekier friends who liked the book can answer.

Question 1: How many of these characters existed in some form? I'm pretty sure of Turing, because things are named after him, and MacArthur and Churchill, because they're in textbooks. But what about Comstock, or Rudy? My almost Waterhousian disregard for names makes this difficult for me.

Question 2: What's up with the replaced names of companies? I mean, really. He was willing to say Microsoft and BeOS, but replaced Linux with Finux? I spent the first half of the book laboring under the impression that Finux was a distro.

Question 3: Why didn't anyone tell me this book was about me and/or Fishy? When this book was recommended to me, I was told of excessive hacker geekery, hard crypto and airplanes kept in people's dining rooms. While all these were certainly present, my reviewers failed to mention that the protagonist is:

• a native of Eastern Washington,
  
• a math graduate of UW who
  
• spent most of his college career playing D&D and
  
• then got a job with UW's interlibrary loan system.
  

Every time I was ready to give up in exhaustion, Randy would ping back in with an arresting breath of my reality, such as the use of the word "Palouse", and I kept going. Everyone agrees that "Whitman, WA" is Walla Walla, correct?

Like the book, this entry is now exhaustively long, and I have other things to get done. But I'm particularly curious about the historical figures question, so if you read the book, please ring in.

Comments

[adularia.livejournal.com]

Congratulations! You can now move up to the bigger 'n not necessarily better Quicksilver, which in the hardcover edition is several inches thick, and in any edition is even more wild and obtuse.

I also enjoyed the Washington references in there. I bet Bostonians (at least, those as geeky as we are) get a kick out of reading Zodiac.

Re:

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Zodiac is one of my five favorite books of ALL.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

From the little I know about it, Turing was portrayed fairly accurately, although fictionally, and the German test pilot, whose name I can't remember right now, also existed. I only just found out recently that the peroxide-powered U-boats did actually exist, and one loaded with many tons of gold did indeed sink in 17,000 feet of water in the Pacific heading to/from Japan in 1945, so I think there are a lot of parts that are at least closely associated with what actually happened. I am really curious, though, about the finux thing.

[zanfur.livejournal.com]

The data haven also existed. It was big news about a decade ago, but it was in an abandoned oil drill/platform thingy, not on an island. The Waterhouses existed, I'm not sure about Comstick. I'm fairly certain that all main characters except Enoch Root existed. Enoch Root is Stevenson's immortal character (literally).

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Would that be Sealand?

[shadowblue.livejournal.com]

Neal says in an interview (http://www.eventhorizon.com/sfzine/chats/transcripts/pages/042999.html):

A lot of people have asked about him. Rudy (Rudolf von Hacklheber, a German mathematician in the WWII storyline) was not a real character, he is totally made up, but I think that he is a reasonably realistic sample of the kind of guy you might have seen running around Princeton at the time Turing was there, immediately before the war.

He wrote a Wired article in the mid-to-late 90s about laying wire in the ocean around the Phillipines.. I remember reading it (not when it was originally published), but I don't remember many of the details. I guess he liked the whole situation down there.

It was such a great book, but I don't know how I ever got all the way through it. I think you're right about not being able to stop once you start for fear of not having the stamina to get through otherwise.

I want to pick up Quicksilver, his latest book (I think that's its name) but I will feel so bad if it's not as good as I want it to be.
But I'll do it anyway. Rar.

[gfish.livejournal.com]

The essay is Mother Earth, Mother Board, and I highly recommend it to just about anyone I would not throw rocks at. Quite long, but basically just one long joyful tangent from one cool thing to the next.

[diabhol.livejournal.com]

Comstock is real, but that's the extent of my knowledge. :)

[ex-eldergot.livejournal.com]

Mebbe not similar to anyone but me, but, it reminds me of Miller's description of his days working for the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company (ATT), while he freely named the club where he met Rita... *Shrug*