| SF Reviews by Aaron M. Renn | By Author - By Title - By Date Reviewed |
Conclusion: Style over substance, way too long, but worth reading
The last thing in the world you want to see on the jacket of a 900+ page book is the phrase "With this extraordinary first volume...". Yikes! This is one of three? I'm dying. The amount of material in Cryptonomicon is usually one, two, and three of three.
Fortunately, there is a lot of absolutely brilliant stuff in here. When you read Stephenson's description of how Randy's girlfriend Charlene wrote a paper on the racist and sexist origins of beards, you will be grabbing at your sides in pain from laughing so hard. Stephenson is at his best when he's shooting this sort of hip, irreverant prose at us like water from a firehose nozzle placed about two inches from our noses.
Unfortunately, in between these brilliant passages is a whole lot of filler. Stephenson is in desperate need of an editor. Easily 400 pages of this book could have been left on the cutting room floor. For such a long novel, not too much actually happens. We get to follow several characters in two different time streams, the first a WW II setting revolving around code breaking, and the other featuring a group of people attempting to get rich starting yet another tech company. Naturally the two groups of people end up linked. I quite frankly wasn't all that impressed with the story, which was basically a prop for Stephenson to show off way too much of his prose, not all of which was of the brilliant variety. However, if you can last to page 650, you're home free. A few interesting things finally begin to occur, though there's not much of an ending. It's like after 900 pages of masturbating at the typewriter, Stephenson decided to take a break before plunging into volume two, boxed up what he had, and shipped it off straight to the print shop.
Is this book SF? Well, that's a good question. Mostly it takes place in the 1940's, and in a world that is approximately present day. There's nothing fanciful, and little that I could identify as possibly being made up tech. I'm not one of these people who considers anything with the slightest whiff of SF in it to be part of the genre, but in this case it's possible to shoehorn it in as an alternate history.
Being an alternate history has its plusses and minuses. The big minus for me was that since Stephenson so clearly made some things up, or otherwise transformed some commonplace elements into make believe ones, I can't trust that anything I don't already know to be true is true. As a result, I'm sure there's a lot of things I could have learned from this book that I won't be able to treat as "real". For example, in Stephenson's world, "Linux" becomes "Finux" and International Business Machines becomes the Electrical Till Corporation. If I read this book knowing nothing about any free, Unix-like operating system, I might wonder if something called "Finux" really exists, but since I know that the Electrical Till Corporation doesn't, I can't be sure if Finux really exists or if it does, whether or not it is really called Finux. This might seem like a contrived example, but I think you get the point. Stephenson tells us that we can die of starvation while eating trout three times a day. Is that true? I dunno. As I say, this really only bothers me because I'm sure there was a lot to learn in this book.
I hope for future volumes, Stephenson cuts down on the volume - or that his editor cuts it down for him. If this had been a shorter book, I'm sure I would have given it a much better recommendation.
%A Stephenson, Neal %T Cryptonomicon %I Avon %D 1999-05 %G ISBN 0-380-97346-4 %P 911 pp. %O hardcover, US$27.50
Reviewed on 1999-11-18
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