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Cryptonomicon Mass Market Paperback – November 5, 2002

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 8,155 ratings

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With this extraordinary first volume in an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.

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From the Back Cover

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse—mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy—is assigned to detachment 2702. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702—commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a "data haven" in Southeast Asia—a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty...or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.

About the Author

Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . .Was the Command Line. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ William Morrow Paperbacks (November 5, 2002)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 1168 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060512806
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060512804
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1.75 x 6.75 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 8,155 ratings

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Neal Stephenson
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NEAL STEPHENSON is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. (with Nicole Galland), Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, Zodiac, the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning . . . Was the Command Line, and Some Remarks, a collection of short fiction and nonfiction. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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4.5 out of 5 stars
8,155 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book interesting and well-written. They appreciate the educational value and insights into the world and characters. The characters are described as interesting and well-developed. The humor is witty and entertaining. However, opinions differ on the plot complexity - some find it intriguing and engaging, while others feel it's overly complex and hard to follow.

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580 customers mention "Readability"523 positive57 negative

Customers find the book interesting and well worth reading. They appreciate the historical details that make the story riveting and believable. The author does a great job of telling individual stories. Overall, readers find the story enjoyable as it blends history.

"...A wonderful book!" Read more

"...It was so inauthentic. It's a magnum opus for sure. Worthy of its recognition and probably worthy of 5-stars...." Read more

"Incredibly well worth reading if you like multiple disparate plots going on during more than one time period on various parts of the earth with some..." Read more

"...hundred books you should read before you die." It is highly entertaining, extremely well written, and fast moving from start to finish...." Read more

183 customers mention "Writing quality"146 positive37 negative

Customers find the book well-written and engaging. They appreciate the author's different writing styles for different chapters. The prose is tight, fun, and witty, with an easy read that can be squeezed in between tasks. The narration is superb and the language makes it more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow.

"...It really was a great story, well-told...." Read more

"...It is not a difficult read, by any means, but despite my own inflated sense of being a highly educated person with a pretty vast vocabulary, I was..." Read more

"...should read before you die." It is highly entertaining, extremely well written, and fast moving from start to finish...." Read more

"...Stephenson is a master of carrot-on-a-stick writing...." Read more

178 customers mention "Educational value"178 positive0 negative

Customers find the book educational and insightful, providing an understanding of how mathematicians think. They appreciate the visionary and relevant content that engages the larger context. The book covers mathematics, computers, and many other subjects of interest.

"...This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times...." Read more

"...Told from multiple points of view, alternating between WWII and present day (late '90's) this is a really complex novel about ... stuff...." Read more

"...crawl right into the brain of the main character, a likable, very intelligent fellow, who hasn't been the brightest bulb with social skills on..." Read more

"...The book also gives an insight into how mathematicians' minds work, with humerous illutrations such as one of the WWII characters mathematically..." Read more

155 customers mention "Character development"141 positive14 negative

Customers enjoy the well-developed characters with real personalities. They say the characters exist in at least five dimensions and stick with them for a long time. The stories feature interesting people whose lives are either envied or enjoyed.

"...The characters were great, and fully developed...." Read more

"...He also has a knack for interweaving lives of characters from all over the planet with a wide array of background, including Americans, Brits,..." Read more

"...His characters exist in a t least five dimensions and will stick with you from a long, long time...." Read more

"...Dentist, and many others who were well developed and given real personality by the author...." Read more

130 customers mention "Humor"127 positive3 negative

Customers find the humor in the book witty and entertaining. They describe the dialogue as funny and engaging, though some find it too similar. The tone is wry throughout, with serious issues balanced by lighthearted moments. Overall, readers find the book an enjoyable read with likable characters and well-developed plot elements.

"...And the book is so terribly funny...." Read more

"...Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read...." Read more

"...allow the reader crawl right into the brain of the main character, a likable, very intelligent fellow, who hasn't been the brightest bulb with..." Read more

"...the book deals with serious issues, but the underling tone throughout is one of wry humor...." Read more

290 customers mention "Plot"200 positive90 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the plot. Some find it interesting and well-done, going beyond typical cyberpunk novels. The storyline constantly bouncing between the modern and WW2 stories. However, others feel the plot is overly complex and hard to follow, with disjointed scenes and weird characters.

"...Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read...." Read more

"...The book gives good historical insight into the massive contribution Allied cryptographers made to the war effort in breaking German and Japanese..." Read more

"...The tie-in is extremely disappointing; it is not thought-provoking in the least, nor did it produce any kind of "Ah, I see where he was going this..." Read more

"...Stephenson is a master of carrot-on-a-stick writing. The storyline is constantly bouncing between the modern story and the WW2 story and oftentimes..." Read more

216 customers mention "Complexity"147 positive69 negative

Customers have mixed opinions about the book's complexity. Some find the mathematical and cryptological concepts interesting, weaving them seamlessly into amazing storylines. They appreciate the author's eye for detail and imaginative writing style. However, others feel the book gets lost in its own details and is long and involved, with a lot of elaboration on geeky subjects like cryptographic methods. The book includes highly technical topics, involving encryption or hacking, and while it's fun to read, it doesn't encourage deep thinking.

"...Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read...." Read more

"...The author certainly has an eye for detail...." Read more

"...both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking...." Read more

"...you get from Stephenson's Roman-candle style, his highly original metaphors and similes, and his ironic sense of humor, you're gonna learn a lot..." Read more

109 customers mention "Length"44 positive65 negative

Customers have different views on the book's length. Some find it long enough to learn the characters and appreciate its complexity. Others find the first half difficult to read due to excessive descriptions and a lack of focus. Overall, opinions are mixed on whether the book is engaging or too long.

"...A few times in the book I thought the descriptions were a bit too lengthy (Just get on with it!)..." Read more

"...in a t least five dimensions and will stick with you from a long, long time...." Read more

"...It is over 1000 pages of addictive reading." Read more

"...This book is a work of nearly one thousand pages which involves a host of different characters spanning an historical time period between..." Read more

spine is ripped at the top :(
4 out of 5 stars
spine is ripped at the top :(
The lesson- buy books on kindle and not paperback :(
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on July 4, 2008
    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!
    58 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2022
    FYI - Kindle version ends at 87% with the rest of the book being appendix and ebook extras. The LAST thing I wanted after reading this book was 13% more reading about code. :-)

    Wow, what an intense, laborious, interesting, pedantic, read. Told from multiple points of view, alternating between WWII and present day (late '90's) this is a really complex novel about ... stuff. Lots and lots of stuff and detail about said stuff. Obviously, it was about breaking code in the war, also, breaking code as a hacker. It was about war and the effects of war, and the creation of the first digital computer, and the proper way to eat Captain Crunch. And some Greek mythology. Money. Cyber-everything. All over the place. It even included some hints at the creation of the NSA, which was interesting. Particularly since it's very clear to see the need for code-breaking in the war, and what it has "morphed" into.

    It really was a great story, well-told. I'm glad I slogged through but I would really only recommend this book to people who like to know how things work, to the last detail. The characters were great, and fully developed. I found myself rooting for almost everybody, good guy or bad, and I suppose there's something to that as well. Just because someone is ostensibly on a side you are not on, doesn't mean they aren't on your side.

    I had a lot of difficulty with the rotating POV's which is part of what made this slow for me. You'd get into a storyline, and then BAM pulled out of it, and who knew when you'd get back to it. Those types of structures don't generally bother me, but in this case it sort of always left an easy stopping point. Also, this book needed editing like NOBODY'S business. You don't have to go step by step decoding an ENTIRE message for me to get the point. And there was one scene (a prison exchange) where it got so didactic they actually spelled out the real definition of a word conversationally. It was so inauthentic.

    It's a magnum opus for sure. Worthy of its recognition and probably worthy of 5-stars. But I just couldn't get past the bog of excessive detail enough to give it the full 5.
    29 people found this helpful
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  • Yadnyesh Bharatjuvekar
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good Read
    Reviewed in India on July 29, 2023
    Interesting story line. Challenging to complete in one sitting.
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    Yadnyesh Bharatjuvekar
    5.0 out of 5 stars Good Read
    Reviewed in India on July 29, 2023
    Interesting story line. Challenging to complete in one sitting.
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  • Satin
    5.0 out of 5 stars Satin
    Reviewed in Germany on November 23, 2022
    Man liebt es oder man hasst es! Ich gehöre zu denen, die begeistert sind. Tolle spannende Geschichte
  • L. Pope
    5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 'social commentary'
    Reviewed in Canada on November 9, 2016
    If we lived in a fair world Neal Stephenson would receive Pulitzer Prize for literature . But of course we don't live in a fair world ! Very interesting to me that this book is classed by Amazon as social commentary because as I was reading it I was sitting through the final throes of the 2016 election for the presidency of the USA . This book is so much more than social commentary but it's really beyond description of most of Neals works are.

    This is a reread for me and I specifically rerouted at this time because of all of the events seem to be centering on us at high-speed . Between Snowden and the NSA, Homeland security , and a federal election in the US, and commemorating DDay just seemed like a good time to take a walk down memory lane.

    Of course when this book was written we had already entered into a full-blown information age but I think since then we have gone beyond all of that into a truly scary future . One in which during the reading of this book I googled bitcoin just to see what I might learn . What is truly fascinating is that within 12 hours my Twitter account showed an ad for Masters of Science in digital currency .

    There's a chapter in this book in which the character Enoch gets along and detailed account of the Greek gods of Ares and Athena . This was so wildly apropos given the Trump versus Clinton election that was one day away that I felt like I was swept into a history of archetype and myth.

    If you haven't read this book read it, if you've read it before reread it.

    That is really what this book is about it's archetype it's myth it's storytelling at its very best , and it's really beyond description . I have read that Neal writes his books and longhand spiral notebooks and then have to have them transcribed by only one person who can actually make sense of them . Given the labyrinthine plots of these books it just is so perfect to imagine them written longhand and decrypted by the only person who can make sense of them ! I readily admit to being a geek fan of Neil Steffensen.
  • andrew
    5.0 out of 5 stars Best read in years, great plot.
    Reviewed in Australia on March 14, 2021
    Surprising funny. The multiple timelines were not confusing at all. I didn’t understand half the math, but that was no hindrance to my enjoyment. I loved all the accurate historical and geographical references (aside from the Fremantle thing). Kindle is great for checking details and meanings on the fly. Ascot is a lovely place to live, now air-conditioning is widespread.
  • fairault
    5.0 out of 5 stars Ebourrifant !
    Reviewed in France on December 22, 2016
    Une extraordinaire saga historico / technico / espionnage s'étalant sur plusieurs générations de personnages et quatre continents. Un petit chef d’œuvre dans lequel il fait bon se laisser porter. Le format Kindle est vraiment TRES pratique compte tenu des presque mille pages du bouquin. L'anglais de Neal Stephenson est ici facile à lire (à l'instar de "Zodiac" par exemple, à l'opposé du verbiage de l'épopée "Baroque").