Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon

Engrossing... insightful... fascinating and often hysterical... Cryptonomicon is really three novels in one, featuring healthy portions of World War II adventure, cryptography, and high-tech finance, with treasure hunting thrown in for good measure... But that's only half of it.
USA Today

A hell of a read.
Wired

Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash; The Diamond Age) hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped the twentieth century and that have led us into the twenty-first.

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse mathematical genius and young Captain in the U.S. Navy is assigned to Detachment 2702. 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.

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 a game, a cryptographic chess match between Waterhouse and his German counterpart, translated into action by gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces.

Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouses 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. As governments and multinationals attack the endeavor, Randy joins forces with Shaftoes 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.

But soon their scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy with its roots in Detachment 2702, linked to an unbreakable Nazi code called Arethusa. And it will represent the path to unimaginable riches and a future of personal and digital liberty... or to universal totalitarianism reborn.

A breathtaking tour de force and Neal Stephensons most accomplished and affecting work to date, Cryptonomicon is profound and prophetic, hypnotic and hyper-driven, as it leaps forward and back between World War II and the World Wide Web, hinting all the while at a dark day-after-tomorrow. It is a work of great art, thought, and creative daring; the product of a truly iconoclastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.

Intoxicating.
Washington Post Book World

A powerfully imagined story.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Gripping... A story of scope and complexity.
Chicago Tribune

Clever... and flat-out hilarious.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

There is a scope here, a wildness, that you rarely find in fiction today. Buckle up.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Also by
Neal Stephenson

T HE D IAMOND A GE

S NOW C RASH

Z ODIAC

To S. Town Stephenson,
who flew kites from battleships

CONTENTS

CRYPTONOMICON

The Solitaire Encryption Algorithm
by Bruce Schneier

Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson

Bruce Schneier invented Solitaire, graciously consented to my use of it in this novel, and wrote the appendix. Ian Goldberg wrote the Perl script that appears in Enoch Roots e-mail message to Randy.

Except for the odd quotation, the rest of the book was, for better or worse, written by me. I am indebted to many other people, though. Accounting for ones debts in this way can easily lead all the way back to Adam and Eve, and so Ive chosen to pick World War II as my gratitude cutoff date, and to divide everyone Im grateful to into three general groups.

First: towering figures of the 1937-45 Titanomachia. Almost every family has its own small pantheon of war figuressuch as my uncle Keith Wells, who served as a Marine on Florida and Guadalcanal Islands, and who may have been the first American Marine to hit a beach, in an offensive operation, during that war. But this novel is basically about the technically inclined people who were called upon to do incredibly peculiar things during the war years. Among all these great wartime hackers, some kind of special recognition must go to William Friedman, who sacrificed his health to break the Japanese machine cipher called Purple before the war even began.

But I have dedicated this novel to my late grandfather S. Town Stephenson. In doing so, I run the risk that people will make all kinds of false suppositions about resemblances between his familywhich is to say, my familyand characters in this book. So, just for the record, let me state that I made all of this uphonest!and that it is not a roman clef; this book is merely a novel, and not a sneaky way of unloading deep dark familial secrets on unsuspecting readers.

Second: acquaintances of mine who (mostly unwittingly) exerted huge influences on the direction of this project. These include, in alphabetical order, Douglas Barnes, Geoff Bishop, George Dyson, Marc and Krist Geriene of Nova Marine Exploration, Jim Gibbons, Bob Grant, David Handley, Kevin Kelly, Bruce Sterling, and Walter Wristonwho ran around the Philippines with a crypto machine during the war, and survived to tell me yarns about prewar Shanghai banking fifty years later.

Third: people whose efforts made it possible, or at least much easier, for me to write this book. Sometimes their contributions were huge outpourings of love and support, as in the case of my wife, my children, and my childrens grandparents. Others supported me through the deceptively simple procedure of doing their jobs steadfastly and well: my editor, Jennifer Hershey, and my agents, Liz Darhansoff and Tal Gregory. And many people made unwitting contributions to this book simply by having interesting conversations with me that they have probably long since forgotten: Wayne Barker, Christian Borgs, Jeremy Bornstein, Al Butler, Jennifer Chayes, Evelyn Corbett, Hugh Davis, Dune, John Gilmore, Ben and Zenaida Gonda, Mike Hawley, Eric Hughes, Cooper Moo, Dan Simon, and Linda Stone.

Neal Town Stephenson