The Cryptonomicon from Neal Stephenson is a book that took me a really long time to go through. Not that it was not interesting, oh no! I read it slowly because this is a heavy 1000 pages condensed piece of science with more details than the panorama picture of Paris I currently have as a Windows background.
The story takes place in two different time frames with related characters.
- The first part follows the actions of Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse both soldiers, respectively a US Marines and a US Navy Cryptographer, as they fight their way through the Second World War. Lawrence is a first class code breaker working directly with (among others) Allan Turing, the inventor of the “Turing Machine”. But he is also responsible for analyzing Allies actions and organizing “dummy/cover operations” in order to try to hide the fact that the Allies have broken German and Japaneese cryptographic codes. Bobby Shaftoe is part of the team used for those cover operations which will drive him all around the globe and specially in Asia where most of the story takes place.
- The second part takes place nowadays as Randy Waterhouse (grandson of Lawrence and a modern computer scientist) and Avi Halaby build a new company. The company, named Epiphyte(2), operates in both cryptography and Internet and rapidly becomes the center of a financial/political shareholder battle. Both partners are later joined by Doug and Amy Shaftoe (son and granddaughter of Bobby) as the “old and new” storylines begin to merge.
I cannot tell you much more than this without risking spoiling some key elements. I found the science part of the book being the most interesting one. Everything is plausible if not mathematically proven in the book, no special technology appearing “to serve the story”, no shortcuts used to hide a weak technical point… this is true mental masturbation material for a scientific mind like mine >_<. The modern story, even if not as interesting as the old one “at first”, ends up being really exciting when we finally understand how the first storyline serves the second one.
Unfortunately, switching from one chapter to another is a real mess. It’s not unusual to wait a couple page before being certain of which storyline it belongs to… which is kind of annoying. A simple date with the chapter title would have been enough to help the reader feel at home. This is mostly true at the beginning where the names are still a mess in one’s head and when new characters are constantly popping up.
Nothing more to say: overall this was a great book that I really recommend… to scientific minds :]
(Img Griffey on Flickr)