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

[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.