I've wanted to ready this one for a long time, but didn't want to commit the time. Now it's done. I like it, but i think i like Anathem better. The author has had time to develop... The 2 books have much in common, and both start real slow and eventually build to a frenzy.
The computer stuff in Cryptonomicon is interesting and almost right, but i know too much about computers and encryption to find this stuff cool. The really cool thing about this book (as it is about Anathem) is how Stephenson is able to build a crazy alternative world that is completely insane and also completely real, so much that you start to question the reality of the so-called real world. Did it really happen this way? Well, didn't it?
Quotes:
As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could ever hope to meet.
Fifteen seconds later, Randy was out on the sidewalk, swiping his card through a pay phone like an assassin drawing a single-edged razor blade across the throat of a tubby politician.
As soon as he got through the formalities at the airport, he perceived that the Philippines are, like Mexico, one of those countries where Shoes Matter.
Bobby soon learns the trick that his father and his uncles and granduncles all knew [about war], which is that you never talk about the specifics of what happened over there.
Waterhouse has been trying to invent a new cryptosystem based upon alternative systems of pronouncing words and hasn’t said anything in quite a while.
we find ourselves in the oddest situation that has ever faced a pair of allies in a war. We know everything, Commander Waterhouse.
He knows that these demure girls, obediently shuffling reams of gibberish through their machines, shift after shift, day after day, have killed more men than Napoleon.
“Windows 95, for games and when I need to let some lamer borrow my computer temporarily,” Avi says. “Windows NT for office type stuff. BeOS for hacking, and screwing around with media. Finux for industrial-strength typesetting.”
It would be an idyllic tropical paradise if not for the malaria, the insects, the constant diarrhea and resulting hemorrhoids, and the fact that the people are dirty and smell bad and eat each other and use human heads for decoration.
THE UNITED STATES Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization.
“It seems that, while I have been sneaking around the Atlantic, doing my duty—the Führer has come up with a little incentive program.” (Bishop)
Two large black Mercedes issue from the forest, like bad ideas emerging from the dim mind of a green lieutenant.
“Well the short answer is that we won because the Germans worshipped Ares and we worshipped Athena.” (Enoch Root)
“Gold is the corpse of value,” says Goto Dengo.
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