Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
finds its excuse for its 918 pages in the fact that it is actually at least two novels. One takes place during World War Two and the other during present day, circa 1999. They are, of course, randomly interspersed, and they both are complex in their own right.
Barely connected literary thought
‘Main characters’ is a very vague way to denote what I'm trying to get at, the characters whose thoughts and actions are followed most closely; ‘protagonist’ seems to get at the same idea of leading figure and comes with the further baggage of implying an antagonist. The person whom a book is centered on may not be, in many ways, the most important or leading character. I want something to call the character that is followed through the book. I’m sure that English-major geniuses have already come up with the right word, of foreign origin one would hope, but I'm putting in my bid: “thread characters”.Whom I would call the thread characters are Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe, and to a lesser extent Goto Dengo during World War II; and Randolph Lawrence Waterhouse in the present day. There are many more main characters (I’m not even going to mess with the concept of protagonist), extremely important and well-developed ones, but these three or four are the ones that we truly follow.
Stephenson’s book has a lot of wit and some true humor. You learn a bit and mostly it’s just fun and, for 918 pages, fast-paced. One thing Stephenson did that I didn’t like at all was credibly describing how a character died and then having that character be alive later. I also differed with the socio-economic-political worldview occasionally hinted at in the book, which - while understanding what much of what that reality in the world is - leaves the United States no role in creating and sustaining that reality.
My excerpts are oddly chosen, I freely admit, and all I can say is that they do not follow the plot or show the characters or anything useful.
I highly recommend that you read this book and DO NOT read these excerpts or my comments.
I knew the guy mentioned here was Alan Turing while Lawrence was still calling him Al. This is fiction (Stephenson spends a paragraph in the Acknowledgements trying to make it clear that he made it all up), but Alan Turing was homosexual.
Alan and Rudy’s relationship seemed closer, or at least more multilayered, than Alan and Lawrence’s. Lawrence concluded that Alan’s penis scheme must have finally found a taker.
It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offsprinng? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.
The only think he could work out was that it was groups of people—societies—rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn’t have kids as long as he was up to something useful.
Page 11
Those last two paragraphs sum up a whole section of Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature
Soon, Alan got his Ph.D. and went back to England. He wrote Lawrence a couple of letters. The last of these stated, simply, that he would not be able to write Lawrence any more letters “of substance” and that Lawrence should not take it personally. Lawrence perceived right away that Alan’s society had put him to work doing something useful—probably figuring out how to keep it from being eaten alive by certain of its neighbors. Lawrence wondered what use America would find for him.
Page 21
It sure is a shame when any society, or society as a whole, fails to find a use for all of its members.
The conventional wisdom circa the early nineties had been that the technical wizards of Northern California would meet the creative minds of Southern California halfway and creat a brilliant new collaboration. But this was rooted in a naive view of what Hollywood was all about. Hollywood was merely a specialized bank—a consortium of large financial entities that hired talent, almost always for a flat rate, ordered the talent to creat a product, and then marketed the product to death, all over the world, in every conceivable medium. The goal was to find products that would keep on making money forever, long after the talent had been paid off and sent packing.
Page 79.
Pigeonholed is what Randy objects to in denying being a technocrat while attacking the stupid ‘Information Superhighway’ metaphor, but he should have stayed away from talk of credentials and labels alltogether, and really stayed away from arguing that he made his way, anyone can.
Actually, they [Alan and Lawrence, reunited in England at long last] have not been talking so much as mentioning certain ideas and then leaving the other to work through the implications. This is a highly efficient way to communicate; it eliminates much of the redundancy that Alan was complaining about in the case of FDR and Churchill.
Page 170.
“We know the economics of these startups,” Eb says. “We begin with nothing bit the idea. That’s what the NDA [nondisclosure agreement] is for—to protect your idea. We work on the idea together—put our brainpower into it—and get stock in return. The result of this work is software. The software is copyrightable, trademarkable, perhaps patentable. It is intellectual property. It is worth some money. We all own it in common, through our shares. Then, we sell some more shares to an investor. We use the money to hire more people and turn it into a product, to market it, and so on. That’s how the system works[. . .]”
Page 190.
That’s when the system is working perfectly. There has to be a better way. One that involves less secrecy and less suing.
Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge“how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man’s face as he listens to himself speak.
Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren’t necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.
[. . .]
“So what’s the point?” Shaftoe asks.&nbs; He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually whan men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that’s not Root’s agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.
Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads#0151;and not in the slow way of a man saying “no,” but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don't know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.
Pages 372 and 374.
Pesky untermenschen! They’ve really gone and done it now! It won’t be twenty-four hours before the milchcow is located and sunk by the Allies. There is a good chance that a few U-boats will be hounded to their deaths as part of the bargain. That is not a good way to die—being chased across the ocean for several days, suffering the death of a thousand cuts from strafings and bombings. Stuff like this really drives home, to the common ordinary Obertorpedomaat, the wisdom of the Führer’s plan to go out and find all of the people who aren’t Germans and kill them.
Page 377.
“My comrade attempts to drown himself,” he explains.
“Is that even possible?” asks Kapitänleutnant Beck.
“He and I were just discussing that very question.”
Beck checks his wristwatch. “He must want to kill himself very badly,” he says.
“Sergeant Shaftoe takes his duty very seriously. It’s kind of ironic. His cyanide capsule dissolved in the seawater.”
“I am afraid that all irony has become tedious and depressing to me,” Beck says, as a body breaks the surface nearby. It is Shaftoe, and he seems to be unconscious.
“You are?” Beck asks.
“Lieutenant Enoch Root.”
“I’m only supposed to take officers,” Beck says, casting a cold eye in the direction of Sergeant Shaftoe’s back.
“Sergeant Shaftoe has exceptionally broad responsibilities,” says Lieutenant Root calmly, “in some respects exceeding those of a junior officer.”
“Get them both. Revive the sergeant,” Beck says. “I will talk to you later, Lieutenant Root.” And then he turns his back on the prisoners, and heads for the nearest hatch. He is going to spend the next few days trying very hard to stay alive, in spite of the best efforts of the Royal and United States Navies. It’s going to be quite an interesting challenge. He should be thinking about his strategy. But he can’t get the image of Sergeant Shaftoe’s back out of his mind. His fucking head was still underneath the water! If they weren’t about to fish him out of the ocean, he would have succeeded in drowning himself. So it was possible. At least for one person.
Pages 380-381.
Randy grins, because he knows that Doug Shaftoe is about to enumerate the three reasons. Randy has spent almost no time around military people, but he is finding that he gets along with them surprisingly well. His favorite thing about them is their compulsive need to educate everyone around them, all of the time. Randy does not need to know anything about the ROV, but Doug Shaftoe is going to give him a short course anyway. Randy supposes that when you are in a war, practical knowledge is a good thing to spread around.
Page 435.
Neal Stephenson does a good deal of compulsive educating as well, telling us the readers many things that we don’t need to know at all for the story and other things that we don’t really need to know. I like it, but I imagine it could get on some people’s nerves.
Doug holds the book up beneath the television monitor and rotates it, comparing the lines of a U-boat to the shape on the screen. The latter is rugged and furry with coral and other growths, but the similarity is obvious.
“Why is’t it lying flat on the bottom, I wonder?” Randy says.
Doug grabs a plastic water bottle, which is still mostly full, and tosses it overboard. It floats upside-down.
“Why isn’t it lying flat, Randy?”
“Because there’s an air bubble trapped in one end,” Randy says sheepishly.
“She suffered damage to the stern. The bow pitched up. There was a partial collapse. Seawater, rushing into the breach at the stern, forced all of the air into the bow. The depth is a hundred and fifty-four meters, Randy. That’s fifteen atmospheres of pressure. What does Boyle’s Law tell you?”
“That the volume of the air must have been reduced by a factor of fifteen.”
“Bingo. Suddently, fourteen-fifteenths of the boat is full of water, and the other fifteenth is a pocket of compressed air, capable of supporting life briefly. Most of her crew dead, she fell fast and settled hard onto the bottom, breaking her back and leaving the bow section pointing upwards, as you see her. If anyone was still alive in the bubble, they died a long, slow death. May God have mercy on their souls.”
In other circumstances, the religious reference would make Randy uncomfortable, but here it seems the only appropriat thing to say. Think what you will about religious people, they always have something to say at times like this. What would an athiest come up with? Yes, the organisms inhabiting that submarine must have lost their higher neural functions over a prolonged period of time and eventually turned into pieces of rotten meat. So what?
Page 441.
(I’d like to point out that there is nothing to prevent an athiest from expressing sorrow and sympathy and distress over the anguish of fellow humans and the waste of lives that had their own intrinsic value and would have brought something to the lives of others. But “May God have mercy on their souls” works too.)
Aging Filipinas in prom dresses have come and gone across the lobby of the Manila Hotel for as long as Randy has known the place. He hardly noticed them during the early months when he was actually living there. The first time they appeared, he assumed that some function was underway in the grad ballroom: perhaps a wedding, perhaps a class-action suit being filed by aging beauty contest contestants against the synthetic fibers industry. That was about as far as he got before he stopped burning out his mental circuits trying to figure everything out. Pursuing an explanation for every strange thing you see in the Philippines is like trying to get every last bit of rainwater out of a tire.
Page 481.
Lieutenant Colonel Earl Comstock of the Electrical Till Corporation and the United States Army, in that order, prepares for today’s routine briefing from his subordinate, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, much as a test pilot readies himself to be ripped into the stratosphere with a hot rocket engine under his ass. He turns in early the night before, wakes up late, talks to his aide and makes sure that (a) plenty of hot coffee is available and (b) none of it will be given to Waterhouse. He gets two wire recorders set up in the room, in case either goes on the fritz, and brings in a team of three crack stenographers with loads of technical savvy. He has a couple of fellows in his section—also ETC eployees during peacetime—who are real math whizzes, so he brings them in too. He gives them a little pep talk: “I do not expect you fellows to understand what the fuck Waterhouse is talking about. I’m gonna be running after him as fast as I can. You just hug his legs and hold on for dear life so that I can sort of keep his backside in view as long as possible.” Comstock is proud of this analogy, but the math whizzes seem baffled. Testily, he fills them in on the always-tricky literal vs. figurative dichotomy.
Pages 590-591.
There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, at least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream scinec education[ . . . that] results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls to the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus.
Pages 621-622.
It is an oddity of the law in many jurisdictions that, while carrying (say) a concealed one-shot .22 derringer requires a license, openly carrying (e.g.) a big game rifle is perfectly legal. Concealed weapons are outlawed or at least heavily regulated, and unconcealed ones are not. So a lot of Secret Admirers—who tend to be gun nuts—have taken to going around conspicuously armed as a way of pointing out the absurdity of those rules. Their point is this: who gives a shit about concealed weapons anyway, since they are only useful for defending oneself against assault by petty criminals, which almost never happens? The real reason the Constitution provides for the right to bear arms is defending oneself against oppressive governments, and when it comes to that, your handgun is close to useless. So (according to these guys) if you are going to assert your right to keep and bear arms you should do it openly, by packing something really big.
Page 687.
Actually, come to think of it, unconcealed weapons are much better at protecting you from assault by petty criminals than concealed weapons are. I could support a gun law that let you carry guns out in the open but never hide them. What reason is there for hiding your gun?
The fact that Randy has logged on has now been recorded by the system in several locations on the hard drive. He has, in other words, just slapped big greasy fingerprints all over a weapon that the police are moments away from seizing as evidence. If Tombstone is shut down and grapped by the cops before Randy can erase those traces, they will know he has logged on at the very moment that Tombstone was confiscated, and will put him in prison for tampering with evidence. He very much wishes that Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe could somehow be made aware of what a ballsy thing he is doing here. But then Doug has probably done all kinds of ballsy things of which Randy will never be made aware, and Randy respects him anyway because of his bearing. Maybe the way to get that kind of bearing is to go around doing ballsy things in secret that somehow percolate up to the surface of your personality.
Page 691.
Some of the Palawan’s rivers run blue and straight into the ocean and carry enormous plumes of eroded silt that feather out into the ocean and are swept up by the shore currents. In Kinakuta there is less deforestation than there is here, but only because they have oil instead. All of these countries are burning resources at a fantastic rate to get their economies stoked up, gambling that they’ll be able to make the jump into hyperspace—some kind of knowledge economy, presumably—before they run out of stuff to sell and turn into Haiti.
Page 740.
Money and what backs it.