Funny - there are a lot of humorous bits in Cryptonomicon.

But the main historical person in Cryptonomicon is Alan Turing

There’s a brief but hysterical cameo appearance by a very young Ronald Reagan a not at all funny cameo by Herman Goering and several mentions of Winston Churchill and Admiral Yamamoto. It has a dozen major characters and scores of minor characters (including some historical people.

Complicated - Cryptonomicon has 3 plot lines, set in two different time periods (late 20th century and World War II).

But rather than tell you about the plot, I am structuring this review a little differently. Along the way, Cryptonomicon covers many subjects including codes, genocide, prejudice, cryptocurrencies, war and more. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty.or to universal totalitarianism reborn.Ī breathtaking tour de force, and Neal Stephenson's most accomplished and affecting work todate, 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 begins with a Marine writing haiku while on the running board of a careening jeep. But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702 linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa.

As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails grandaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi sumarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. 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.įast-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. The mission of Watrehouse and Detatchment 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 an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse - mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. 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.

Stephenson neal cryptonomicon