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Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
Bob Paquin
With e-commerce on the rise, many governments, large corporations, and a slew of little known high-tech start-ups have been striving to perfect an uncrackable code to ensure that digital financial transactions remain privy to the parties involved. Cryptography, which came into its own during World War Two, has never been more closely studied or eagerly pursued than it is today. During the transition to a cashless society the stakes are huge, and whoever wins this race will be in a commanding position over a profoundly transformative period in global commerce. And with winnings this rich, the shadiest of characters are sure to come circling in.
Neal Stephenson, author of two acclaimed technologically-oriented science fiction novels, has written a gripping historical adventure-thriller, with an exploration of cryptography, and its myriad uses, at its core. Reading Cryptonomicon is like riding two horses charging down separate but parallel tracks. Flashing back and forth between settings, we meet and follow some of the characters involved with setting up and running the Allied encryption unit during WW2. We are subsequently introduced to a few of their descendants who, fifty years later, try to create an offshore "data haven", where encrypted information, and the world's first true digital currency, may be banked. Linking the two is a fascination with gadgetry, both high and low-tech, as well as a tennis court-sized room filled with stolen gold.
Protagonist Lawrence Waterhouse enters WW2 as a somewhat clueless glockenspiel player onboard the USS Nevada, in Pearl Harbour, until his superiors realize he has a head for numbers. They quickly move him into the Japanese code-breaking unit, and he surprises everyone, most of all himself, by becoming America's brightest cracker. However, as the need is greatest in Europe, Waterhouse gets drafted into a top-secret, Allied effort to crack German codes, lay encrypted traps, and develop even greater encryption techniques for their own secret communiqués. While based in Britain, the varied actions required of this special unit, Detachment 2702, take its members all over Europe and Asia.
Fifty odd years later, Waterhouse's hacker-programmer grandson, Randy, forms a company with a group of like-minded, very entrepreneurial, rebels to pursue the creation of the "Crypt", a long-term storage space for digitally-encrypted information. The Crypt itself is located within a nuclear-shielded facility inside a mountain, in a fictional island-state in Southeast Asia. The company, Epiphyte Corporation, also plans to launch the world's first independent uncrackably encrypted digital currency, based within the Crypt. As this would jeopardize governments' ability to tax financial transactions, the company faces a conspiracy of steep and dramatic opposition from assorted foes. However, the island-state is run by a digitally visionary, autocratic monarch, with little taste for compromise, and so is likely to back Epiphyte's plans to the hilt.
The WW2 encryption unit includes Bobby Shaftoe, a battle-hardened US Marine, who knows little of the unit's official functions, who occupies himself primarily with thoughts of survival, and of a girlfriend in Manila. His descendants, Doug and Amy, Philippines-based salvagers and treasure hunters, are contracted by Randy to lay some undersea data cables, and discover something which links their ongoing search for the much-sought-after hoard of hidden WW2 Japanese gold with Bobby Shaftoe and Randy's grandfather.
All of the various subplots hang together and coalesce to a breathtaking finish.
Stephenson has undertaken an incredible amount of research, and has obviously walked all over Manila, where much of the novel is set. He displays a great respect for the reader, and makes few concessions in the way of explaining either technical details or elements of setting. One must hurry along to keep up with the pace of the story, which includes a fair amount of the quite fascinating but not overwhelming history of cryptography and its workings.
Based in Seattle, Stephenson no doubt has drawn on his own local experience: the Randy Waterhouse character has been involved in a number of start-ups, and informs the book with a series of observations on the boom and bust high-tech cycle, legal and shareholder battles, and the hacker culture in its truest sense.
Some critics are comparing the novel to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and Salon Magazine recently referred to Stephenson as the "Poet Laureate of the Hacker Culture". Cryptonomicon should cheer the heart of hacker everywhere, but as attested by its arrival on the world's best-seller lists, it will find favour with a general audience as well.
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