Cryptonomicon - Review

Reason, August-Sept, 1999 by Mike Godwin

Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson, New York: Avon, 928 pages, $27.50

No aficionado of trendy, complex contemporary novels by writers such as Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace will be terribly surprised to come across a work of fiction that traces a single thematic thread running through the lives of a mathematical genius in World War II, his slightly less gifted but equally nerdy grandson in 1999, a gung-ho Marine driven by love and morphine, and a Japanese soldier transmuted by the bestial horrors of war. What may be surprising to readers of Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, however, is that the author makes that thread cryptology - the science (or, more accurately, dual sciences) of encoding messages to keep them secret and extracting secret messages from other people's communications.

In a wide range of linked scenarios that tie WWII code breaking to the modern "cypherpunk" effort to create a currency and an economic system beyond governmental control, Stephenson's novel continually demonstrates that there's something essentially human about the process of encoding and decoding messages. It's this thesis that makes Cryptonomicon far more than simply an enjoyable, exceedingly well-written, encyclopedic, and deeply comic novel. It is, in fact, an important book that illuminates a critical public issue of our era: whether the power of encryption tools for cryptography can be trusted to individuals - tools that have, for instance, the potential to make wiretaps a thing of the past.

Cryptonomicon presents the reader with several entwined narratives, switching among them on a chapter-by-chapter basis. Most of the sections are set in World War II and follow the adventures of two men: mathematical prodigy and Army officer Lawrence Waterhouse and his near-antithesis, man of action and Marine sergeant Bobby Shaftoe. Both of these characters manage to complete grand tours of the European and Pacific theaters, but, more important, both demonstrate in their respective ways the human capacity to extract meanings from the chaotic and mysterious situations generated by a world war.

For Waterhouse, whose life is dominated by his gift for mathematical reasoning, the primary challenge is to crack Axis codes (and, secondarily, to conceal from the enemy the fact that the codes have been cracked). For the less-cerebral Shaftoe, an occasional morphine addict, the goal is more basic. Though his official mission is to assist in concealing Allied code-breaking efforts, he labors to return to the Japanese-occupied Philippines to rescue his paramour and the child he may have fathered with her. Where Waterhouse reflexively resorts to mathematical models to characterize his experiences, Shaftoe turns to poetic ones - during his time in the Far East he's learned to compose haiku. Through Shaftoe - whose individual story begins and ends with haiku - Stephenson suggests the broad application of cryptography in human life. The haiku poet, after all, encodes a deep moment of experience into three short strings of words. Similarly, it takes an experienced reader of haiku to decode such a poem.

Along with the World War II narratives is a present-day story centered on Waterhouse's grandson, Randy, a computer nerd whose own genius remains unrealized until it is unlocked by a unique business opportunity. Randy is invited by a friend to take part in a cryptographically facilitated offshore "data haven" that will become the technological platform for a totally Internet-based economic system. Backing that digital monetary system will require real-world gold. Working with Shaftoe's son and granddaughter, Randy may have a source for that gold: the code-breaking efforts of his grandfather, who 50 years ago may have uncovered a Nazi plot to collect and horde German and Japanese gold bullion.

You'd think such a web of narratives would be hard to follow. Certainly, it's difficult to summarize. But Stephenson, whose science-fiction novels Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1995) have been critical and commercial successes despite difficult plotting, has made a quantum jump here as a writer. In addition to his bravura style and interesting authorial choices (Stephenson tells each of his narratives in the present tense, regardless of when they occur chronologically), the book is so tightly plotted that you never lose the thread.

But Stephenson is not an author who's content just to tell good stories. Throughout the book, he takes on the task of explaining the relatively abstruse technical disciplines surrounding cryptology, almost always in ways that a reasonably intelligent educated adult can understand. As I read the book I marked in the margins where Stephenson found opportunities to explain the number theory that underlies modern cryptography; "traffic analysis" (deriving military intelligence from where and when messages are sent and received, without actually decoding them); steganography (hiding secret messages within other, non-secret communications); the electronics of computer monitors (and the security problems created by those monitors); the advantages to Unix-like operating systems compared to Windows or the Mac OS; the theory of monetary systems; and the strategies behind high-tech business litigation. Stephenson assumes that his readers are capable of learning the complex underpinnings of modern technological life. For the most part he's correct, although some otherwise intelligent readers may find a few of the mathematical discussions tough sledding.