City Travel Guides
Home Page > Go back a page
Books : Cryptonomicon Mm
Search Books - select a category
See Larger Image |
Cryptonomicon Mm by: Neal Stephenson List Price: CDN$ 10.50 City Travel Guides Price: CDN$ 9.45 You Save: CDN$1.05 (10%)Prices subject to change. |
|
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Binding: Mass Market Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780060512804 ISBN: 0060512806 Label: Avon Manufacturer: Avon Number Of Pages: 1168 Publication Date: October 17, 2002 Publisher: Avon Studio: Avon Sales Rank: 30456 Related Items:
Related Items:      see moreBrowse for similar items by category:
Editorial Review: From Amazon.com: Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson. Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious." All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties. Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Woe to Hyse!I have been saying this (woe to hyse) outloud for over a year now and still get a kick out of it (read it-you'll get it). So much so that I am re-reading the novel. Before derailing into incomprehensible semi pretentious litterary babble (see Quicksilver & co.), Stephenson created a gem with Cryptonomicon. The style is a notch away (above?) from mainstreem thrillers. The digressions are hilarious. The observations keen. The humour witty and tongue in cheek. The history informative. The breeziest 1200 page read ever. Does with words what Bach did with notes. All in all a terrific effort worth all the praise it has garnered. Woe to Hyse! Rating: - Easily the coolest book I've ever readI've read Cryptonomicon twice now and am convinced that while this is very tough read, it is both highly entertaining and extremely educational. Stephenson has a tendency to weigh the reader down with minutae, but it's the kind of information that'll make you hit the internet to learn even more about. The plot switches back and forth between two eras: 1940s in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters of WWII and in present day. If you're a technically minded person interested in historical fiction, cryptography, and the evolution of currency (i know, sounds weird but is highly interesting written by Stephenson), this is a must read. Rating: - High entertainmentI enjoyed this book from start to finish, and went right to the computer to order more books by the author. The style can be a little trying -- the metaphor density is about 6 to the page -- and it can get a little arch. Still, most of the flourishes are pretty fresh, while some are genuinely startling. One review on this site complained of the overly "freakish" characters. That's certainly fair. If your taste doesn't run to characters who are extreme outsiders, you won't enjoy the book. Personally, I found the characters engaging. Science fiction writers like to work a Theory of Everything into their plots. This author has a handful of Theories of Everything. I didn't mind. Most of the theories ... Read More: Rating: - "Glory"Plot Summary: How to summarize this plot...Well, It starts with 2 professors and 1 student riding bikes at a late 1930's Princeton talking about zeta functions and building a machine to do calculations. Then there are WWII stories from Bobby Shaftoe's and Lawrence Waterhouse's (the student above) very different perspectives. They are both part of a code-breaking part of the US military where Waterhouse is one of the chief enemy code crackers, along with Alan Turing for the British from the bike ride above, and Shaftoe one of the soldiers carrying out seemingly strange orders to make the results of these cracked codes look like random occurances. It takes a long time in the book for Shaftoe to realize the true agenda behind 90% of his missions. Waterhouse ... Read More: Rating: - A Post-Modern Masterpiece.This is a large, messy post-modern masterpiece. The novel's nearest comparisons are not science fiction (since this is not a SIFI novel or not much of one) but other novels that take a single intellectual point of inquiry and run a universe around that point (e.g., Dellio's Underworld or Pynchon's Mason and Dixon). The advantage Stephenson has over Dellio is that the central idea (how life is one big information system) is more interesting than the one in Underworld and the novel is just plain more fun. This is one of my favorite post-modern novels, and one that I think about often. |
|