As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoe's tough-as-nails granddaughter, Amy, to secretly salvage a sunken Nazi submarine that holds the key to keeping the dream of a data haven afloat. It is a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.įast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a 'data haven' in Southeast Asia-a place where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of repression and scrutiny. The mission of Waterhouse and Detachment 2702-commanded by Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe-is to keep the Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence has cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. It is an outfit so secret that only a handful of people know it exists, and some of those people have names like Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse-mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S.

As an added bonus, the e-book edition of this New York Times bestseller includes an excerpt from Stephenson's new novel, Seveneves. It’s that kind of kind mind bending.Įdit: thanks so much for all the comments and especially the experiences of how you came to read the book and it’s meaning to y’all personally.With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. I’m currently at the event where the shipman accidentally cuts his leg almost off and there’s a long discussion about wether to get the shipping manifest to stop the Germans from getting it or if they should kill the wounded man because he might be a spy for wanting to get the shipping manifests…to protect the US. But also excellent military commentary and laugh out loud. I’m only about half way through and my mind is blown every 10 minutes with this book. Well, what if I told you he wrote a book four times as long that has epic war scenes, the industrialized privatized fight to connect the Philippines to the internet, sex in hammocks IN A CASTLE TOWER - WITH A GERMAN SPY, Ronald Regan, a giant lizard, dismembered limbs and ALAN FUCKING TURING IMPLIED GAY SEX (also a description of how Alan Turing calculated an algorithm of when his chain would fall of his bike.) You’d want to read it, right? Of course you would. Stephenson is noted for his novel “Snow Crash” a book where a samurai pizza delivery guy lives in a storage unit and spends most of his time building a (the) metaverse and inadvertently discovers a nanshub that can scrub things from existence and the plot to destroy it.

Stephenson neal cryptonomicon