#19: Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson

Genre fiction! But which genre, exactly?—that’s the tricky part. “Speculative fiction” is one term I’ve seen in a couple of places. But what exactly is speculative fiction?—I think it’s fiction that seems sort of like science fiction, but isn’t quite. I guess that’s an adquate category, except what fiction isn’t speculative—if it isn’t speculative, is it fiction? Stephenson’s books are chock full of science and are written with a pronounced scientific orientation, but they aren’t set in the future and they lack any of the obvious hallmarks of the science fiction genre—space travel, aliens, sentient robots that want to rebel against their human masters, etc. They’re genre fiction, but they’re not formulaic.

Here’s how I came to read this book. Two and a half years ago when we were living in Denmark an English-language bookstore opened in a neighborhood near us. Of course we were there the week they opened. But they only had maybe 85 books in the place and they were all $30 or $40 each. But we got to talking with the owners and one of them saw me looking at a 900-page Neal Stephenson novel with a very pretty cover. He said it was a wonderful book and guaranteed I would love it too. I wasn’t so sure but I wanted to be agreeable and we did want to support the venture, so I bought it. A few months later I picked it up and read it. I didn’t expect to like it, but I did. This was volume one in what is called “The Baroque Cycle,” set in the late 17th and early 18th century. Full of details about various scientists and scientific trends of the times—also full of adventure and entertaining characters. Over the course of a few months I purchased and read all three novels in the cycle—each about 900 pages long.

Cryptonomicon is set in the 20th century and was written before the Baroque Cycle, but its characters are the decendants of the characters in the Baroque Cycle, so it’s a kind of a prequel, except that it was written first (1998).

Same basic formula—a dollop of science education (mostly cryptography in this case), plus a cast of characters pursuing different adventures that eventually turn out to be related. About half the book is set during World War II; the rest in the “present day.” The present day parts funtion in part as a kind of advertisement for the wonders of technology circa 1998. It’s funny how dated this part of the book, which deals with internet technologies and entrepreneurship, now feels. It’s pre-Google! It doesn’t help that it’s written with a kind of gee-whiz “we are the techo-elite” kind of boastfulness.

But now that’s I’ve taken a potshot at Stephenson, I have to confess that I have been impressed and entertained by his books. They’re like big-budget Hollywood extravaganzas, full of glitzy special effects, clever dialogue and farfetched, intricate plots. Except they were written by one guy sitting in a room. A much better carbon footprint.