“Crpytonomicon” by Neal Stephenson – The Code to Salvation

1942: The United States are knee-deep, like many other countries, in the Second World War. A captain of the U.S. Navy, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, is seen as a real mathematical genius and prodigy, one who knows no equal.

He is assigned to detachment 2702… a detachment so secretive that only a few people even know of its existence. With the help of detachment 2702’s commander and Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe, Waterhouse is set on a mission, with the objective being to prevent the Nazis from finding out that the Allies have cracked their Enigma code.

A game of cat and mouse ensues between Waterhouse and his equal over at the German side, and three years later the war reaches the inevitable conclusion we all know: nuclear bombs. Waterhouse lived and prospered long after the war was done, even to the point of having a grandson by the name of Randy.

As it happens, Randy has somewhat followed in his grandfather’s footsteps, becoming a crypto-hacker. However, instead of fighting Nazis, Randy has a dream to achieve: the creation of a virtual place in Southeast Asia where all encrypted data could be kept and publicly accessed, free from having to follow any laws.

Needless to say, this is the kind of thing which pisses off governments and multinational companies, and soon Randy finds himself way outnumbered in his battle to create a "data haven".

Fortunately, Mr. Shaftoe also had grandkids, with one of them being Amy. As you can guess, Randy and Amy decide to team up together, and after much research, they come to the conclusion that they need the unbreakable Nazi code Arethusa to secure their data haven’s existence.

Naturally, things are far from being simple: the code is aboard a long-sunken Nazi submarine, on top of which certain people are hard at work to keep the submarine where it is.

As Randy and Amy come closer and closer to holding the key to their haven’s salvation, they start to uncover a vast governmental conspiracy which stems all the way back to, you guessed it, detachment 2702.

In the end, Randy and Amy are thrust into a situation where their decisions have an unimaginable impact on the future; they could be leading mankind to a new, golden age… or they could plunge the world into totalitarianism…

All in all, Cryptonomicon, the first volume of Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, is simply a breathtaking piece of work to behold.

Despite the fact that much of the action happens in the form of battles of wits, the story manages to be very engaging and dynamic, never dragging on more than it needs to. The focus keeps on shifting from the past to the present, going from Second World War to Randy and Amy’s attempt at changing the world.

Apart from giving us a good story though, Neal also takes great care to look into what his characters are thinking, how they reason, why they do what they do, what their private desires and obsessions are... it seems that above all else, Neal Stephenson is trying to crack the human code in an attempt to find out what makes us who we are.

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Neal Stephenson Personal site Neal Stephenson is an American writer and game designer whose many novels have touched on science-fiction, cyberpunk and historical fiction. Some of his better-known novels include Snow Crash, which earned him a nomination for the Clarke Award, and Cryptonomicon, which won him the Locus SF Award and the 2013 Prometheus Hall of Fame Award.