Cryptonomicon (1999) (edit title/settings)

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Robert "Bobby" Shaftoe: A gung-ho, haiku-writing United States Marine Raider.
• Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse: An American cryptographer/mathematician serving as an officer in the United States Navy.
• Günter Bischoff: A Kapitänlieutnant in the Kriegsmarine, who commands a U-Boat for much of the story, and later takes command of a new, advanced submarine fueled with hydrogen peroxide.
• Rudolf "Rudy" von Hacklheber: A non-Nazi German mathematician and cryptographer, who spent time attending Princeton University, where he befriended Waterhouse and Turing.
• Earl Comstock: A former Electronic Till Corp. executive and US Army officer, who eventually founds the NSA and becomes a key policy maker for US involvement in the Second Indochina War.
• Julieta Kivistik: A Finnish woman who assists some of the World War II characters when they find themselves stranded in Sweden, and who later gives birth to a baby boy (Günter Enoch Bobby Kivistik) whose father is uncertain.
• “Uncle” Otto Kivistik: Julieta's Finnish uncle, who runs a successful smuggling ring between neutral Sweden, Finland, and the USSR during World War II.
• Mary cCmndhd (pronounced "Smith"): A member of a Qwghlmian immigrant community living in Australia, who catches the attention of Lawrence Waterhouse while he is stationed in Brisbane.
• Glory Altamira: A nursing student and Bobby Shaftoe's Filipina lover. She becomes a member of the Philippine resistance movement during the Japanese occupation. Mother of Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe.
• Randall "Randy" Lawrence Waterhouse: Eldest grandson of Lawrence and Mary Waterhouse (née cCmndhd) and an expert systems and network administrator with the Epiphyte(2) corporation.
• Avi Halaby: Randy's business partner in Epiphyte(2), of which he is the CEO.
• America "Amy" Shaftoe: Doug Shaftoe's daughter who has moved from the U.S. to live with Doug in the Philippines, who becomes Randy's love interest.
• Dr. Hubert Kepler, aka "The Dentist": Predatory billionaire investment fund manager, Randy and Avi's business rival.
• Eberhard Föhr: A member of Epiphyte(2) and an expert in biometrics.
• John Cantrell: A member of Epiphyte(2), a libertarian who is an expert in cryptography and who wrote the fictional cryptography program Ordo.
• Tom Howard: A member of Epiphyte(2), a libertarian and firearms enthusiast who is an expert in large computer installations.
• Beryl Hagen: Chief Financial Officer of Epiphyte(2) and veteran of a dozen startups.
• Charlene: A liberal arts academic and Randy's girlfriend at the beginning of the novel, who later moves to New Haven, Connecticut, to live and work with Dr. G.E.B. (Günter Enoch Bobby) Kivistik.
• Andrew Loeb: A former friend and now enemy of Randy's, a survivalist and neo-Luddite whose lawsuits destroyed Randy and Avi's first start-up, and who at the time of the novel works as a lawyer for Hubert Kepler.
• Goto Dengo: A soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army, subsequently an engineer in the Japanese Army and involved in a Japanese wartime project to bury looted gold in the Philippines. Later (in the modern-day storyline) a successful businessman in the Japanese construction sector who becomes an ally of Epiphyte(2).
• Enoch Root: A mysterious, seemingly ageless priest serving as a chaplain with the ANZACs during World War II, and an important figure in the Societas Eruditorum. Also present in Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle.
• Wing: A wartime Chinese slave of the Japanese in the Philippines and later a general in the present-day Chinese army. Wing is the only other survivor besides Goto Dengo of the Japanese gold burial project, and he competes with Goto and Epiphyte(2) to recover the buried treasure.
• Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe (named after General Douglas MacArthur): Robert Shaftoe's and Glory Altamira's half-Filipino, half-American son. He is introduced near the end of the World War II storyline where his father briefly meets him as a toddler. In the modern-day storyline he is a retired U.S. Navy SEAL, who lives in the Philippines and operates an underwater survey business with his daughter Amy, conducting treasure hunts on the side.
• Dr. Günter Enoch Bobby "G.E.B." Kivistik: He is introduced in the modern storyline as a smug, Oxford-educated liberal-arts professor from Yale who recruits, and later seduces, Randy Waterhouse's girlfriend, Charlene. In the World War II storyline he is the unborn son of Julieta Kivistik and one of three possible fathers (hence his unusual name). His is a minor character in Cryptonomicon, but both his <impending> birth and his participation in Charlene's "War as Text" conference catalyze major plot developments.

Quotes edit see section history

• “Enoch Root has wedged himself into the back of the fuselage, where it gets narrow, and is perusing two books at once. It strikes Shaftoe as typical—he supposes that the books say completely different things and that the chaplain is deriving great pleasure from pitting them against each other, like those guys who have a chessboard on a turntable so that they can play against themselves. He supposes that when you live in a shack on a mountain with a bunch of natives who don’t speak any of your half-dozen or so languages, you have to learn to have arguments with yourself.”

• “Lord Woadmire is not related to the original ducal line of Qwghlm, the Moore family (Anglicized from the Qwghlmian clan name Mnyhrrgh) which had been terminated in 1888 by a spectacularly improbable combination of schistosomiasis, suicide, long-festering Crimean war wounds, ball lightning, flawed cannon, falls from horses, improperly canned oysters, and rogue waves.”

• “This allowed Shaftoe to do some serious inferring. To be specific, he infers that the men of Detachment 2701 are expected to spend most of the next three weeks trying as hard as they can not to freeze to death. This will be punctuated by trying to kill a lot of well-armed sons of bitches.”

• “Concerning the possibility that I am ‘an old enemy’ of yours, I’m dismayed that one so young can already have old enemies. Or perhaps you are referring to a recently acquired enemy of advanced years?”

  root@eruditorum.org

• “(re walking in a dangerous city) He would get more respect if he went to work on a pogo stick with a propeller beanie on his head. Every morning the bellhops ask him if he wants a taxi, and practically lose consciousness when he says no.”

• “Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it.”

• “The gaffer says something longer and more complicated. After a while, Waterhouse (now wearing his cryptoanalyst hat, searching for meaning midst apparent randomness, his neural circuits exploiting the redundancies in the signal) realizes that the man is speaking heavily accented English.”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• Ask a Soviet engineer to design a pair of shoes and he’ll come up with something that looks like the boxes that the shoes came in; ask him to make something that will massacre Germans, and he turns into Thomas Fucking Edison.

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• The room contains a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced.

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• This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.

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• One of the most frightening things about your true nerd, for many people, is not that he’s socially inept—because everybody’s been there—but rather his complete lack of embarrassment about it.”

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• It is a marvel that can only be explained by the power of brain over body, and, in turn, by the power of cultural conditioning over the brain.

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• Having now experienced all the phases of military existence except for the terminal ones (violent death, court-martial, retirement), he has come to understand the culture for what it is: a system of etiquette within which it becomes possible for groups of men to live together for years, travel to the ends of the earth, and do all kinds of incredibly weird shit without killing each other or completely losing their minds in the process.

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• Later, he was to decide that Andrew’s life had been fractally weird. That is, you could take any small piece of it and examine it in detail and it, in and of itself, would turn out to be just as complicated and weird as the whole thing in its entirety.

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• “Wealth that is stored up in gold is dead. It rots and stinks. True wealth is made every day by men getting up out of bed and going to work. By schoolchildren doing their lessons, improving their minds. Tell those men that if they want wealth, they should come to Nippon with me after the war. We will start businesses and build buildings.”

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• Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.

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• “Just kill the one with the sword first.” “Ah,” Reagan says, raising his waxed and penciled eyebrows, and cocking his pompadour in Shaftoe’s direction. “Smarrrt—you target them because they’re the officers, right?” “No, fuckhead!” Shaftoe yells. “You kill ’em because they’ve got fucking swords! You ever had anyone running at you waving a fucking sword?”

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Manila
• Tokyo
• Bletchley Park
• Shanghai
• New Guinea
• Luzon
• California
• Corregidor
• Sweden
• Guadalcanal
• Kinakuta
• Brisbane
• Seattle
• London
• Golgotha
• Pacific
• South China Sea
• Virginia
• Rabaul
• Taiwan
• Atlantic
• United States
• Berlin
• Norrsbruck
• England
• Singapore
• Norway
• Hong Kong
• Princeton
• Germany
• Washington
• Tojo River
• Palawan
• Australia
• Finland
• Europe
• Asia
• Makati
• San Francisco
• Vietnam

First Sentence edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Galvanick Lucipher: Firstly, the Galvanick Lucipher does not exist, and is not based on an existing device. It does however vaguely resemble some technology, which was never recorded to be used for any practical applications.When asked, Neal stated that he intended the thing to be representative of the extravagant Victorian-era technological items that belonged to the more self-sufficient, less commoditized households of that period's gentry. Cost and ease-of-use were not really issues for many such items, because there were often no cheaper or easier options available.
• Humanitarianism and Humanism: The protagonists in this book either do not care for money, and work out of a sense of duty to, ultimately, humanity, or they care less for money than for said duty. While this is a dogmatic duty in Bobby Shaftoe and Enoch Root, we find it to be very self defined and perpetuated in Avi, and to a lesser extent Lawrence and Randy Waterhouse.We also see the struggle between duty that conflicts with more humane inclinations, in Goto Dengo.Enoch Root's character very strongly suggests the value of a philosophical position that stresses the autonomy of human reason in contradistinction to the authority of the Church. This is communicated through this lack of concern for his official association with the church, and his personal motivation to do good, which seems more important to his character than any dogmatic obligation to do good.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by Stardust, and followed by World War Z.

Preceded by The First Deadly Sin, and followed by The Brotherhood of the Rose.

Preceded by The Romantics, and followed by As If I Am Not There.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Neal Stephenson (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Locus Science Fiction Award (2000, Winner)
• Arthur C. Clarke Award (Finalist, 2000)
• Prometheus Hall of Fame Award (2011, nominee)
• Prometheus Award (Finalist, 2000: Best Novel)
• Hugo Award (Finalist, 2000: Best Novel)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: 99011685
• Dewey: 818'.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

Contains war scenes, somewhat frequent expletives and occasional descriptions of sexual acts.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Authors, A-Z › ( S ) › Stephenson, Neal
• Books › Science Fiction & Fantasy › Science Fiction › High Tech
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Genre Fiction › Historical
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Mystery & Thrillers

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon cyperFAQ

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

Books That Cite This Book edit see section history