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Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)

Neal Stephenson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 545 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the opening line of his breakthrough cyberpunk novel Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson plunges the reader into a not-too-distant future. It is a world where the Mafia controls pizza delivery, the United States exists as a patchwork of corporate-franchise city-states, and the Internet--incarnate as the Metaverse--looks something like last year's hype would lead you to believe it should. Enter Hiro Protagonist--hacker, samurai swordsman, and pizza-delivery driver. When his best friend fries his brain on a new designer drug called Snow Crash and his beautiful, brainy ex-girlfriend asks for his help, what's a guy with a name like that to do? He rushes to the rescue. A breakneck-paced 21st-century novel, Snow Crash interweaves everything from Sumerian myth to visions of a postmodern civilization on the brink of collapse. Faster than the speed of television and a whole lot more fun, Snow Crash is the portrayal of a future that is bizarre enough to be plausible.

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson

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Total reviews: 834 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Neal Stephenson enjoys cult status among science fiction fans and techie types thanks to Snow Crash, which so completely redefined conventional notions of the high-tech future that it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if his cyberpunk classic was big, Cryptonomicon is huge... gargantuan... massive, not just in size (a hefty 918 pages including appendices) but in scope and appeal. It's the hip, readable heir to Gravity's Rainbow and the Illuminatus trilogy. And it's only the first of a proposed series--for more information, read our interview with Stephenson.
Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."
All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties.
Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). --Therese Littleton

The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (Bantam Spectra Book)

Neal Stephenson

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Total reviews: 333 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Would get 4 stars if the ending wasn't such a wreck 3 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I'd read Snow Crash about a year ago, and despite some problems with pacing and blatant Deux Ex Machina, I liked it enough to give Stephenson another go.

I gather Diamond Age is his second novel, and he certainly has improved in style over his original offering (Snow Crash.) This book consciously imitates Victorian (late 18th-century English) prose and dialogue, which can be awkward to the unsuspecting but is very much justified by the narrative framework.

The setting was intriguing, and quite-likely cutting-edge for when it was written. Nanotechnology plays a major role, and Stephenson does a good job of running with it to show the logical conclusions: a superficial utopia that is quite dark once one delves beneath the surface. To his credit, the technology isn't heavy-handed in this, and anyone with even the most basic scientific knowledge can follow (and appreciate) what's going on. I also have a soft-spot for Chinese history and culture, so he gets a few bonus points for including it as a setting subplot. Speaking of subplots, Diamond Age includes one that at first struck me as suspiciously similar to one of the subplots of Mona Lisa Overdrive (ie: an interactive book that helps a young girl cope with her surroundings) but I quickly found the similarities were superficial and Stephenson does go into new territory with his handling of it.

That said...

The last 75 pages of this book were a jumbled mess, with key plot points being introduced way too late, others (from earlier) completely forgotten, and overall left me with a feeling of "where the heck did THAT come from?!?" It honestly struck me as if 400 pages into it, he got tired of writing it and just wound things down as quickly as he could. Ironically, there's a fair amount of padding in that last section (notably a too-long sequence of a character at an interactive theatre.) Most of my complaints about the book come from the last 75 pages, but alas, I can't give specifics without breaking my personal reviewing oath of not divulging spoilers. Suffice to say that he again resorts to intervention from the Gods of Plot Convenience **a couple of times** in ways that are as unconvincing as they are unsatisfying.

That said, if you liked Snow Crash (or presumably any of his other works) you will probably like Diamond Age. It **is** necessary to keep your expectations in check, though. On a personal level, one of the aspects I really liked about Snow Crash was the wry narrative tone woven throughout, and that was very-much lacking throughout Diamond Age (I think I cracked a smile twice.) By all means, give it a go, but beware: the ending isn't so much a "let down" as a "plummet from 75 stories up."

Editorial Review:

John Percival Hackworth is a nanotech engineer on the rise when he steals a copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" for his daughter Fiona. The primer is actually a super computer built with nanotechnology that was designed to educate Lord Finkle-McGraw's daughter and to teach her how to think for herself in the stifling neo-Victorian society. But Hackworth loses the primer before he can give it to Fiona, and now the "book" has fallen into the hands of young Nell, an underprivileged girl whose life is about to change.

Zodiac

Neal Stephenson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 92 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Believe it or not, some readers find Zodiac even more fun than Neal Stephenson's defining 1990s cyberpunk novel, Snow Crash. Zodiac is set in Boston, and hero Sangamon Taylor (S. T.) ironically describes his hilarious exploits in the first person. S. T. is a modern superhero, a self-proclaimed Toxic Spiderman. With stealth, spunk, and the backing of GEE (a non-profit environmental group) as his weapons, S. T. chases down the bad guys with James Bond-like Zen.
Cruising Boston Harbor with lab tests and scuba gear, S. T. rides in with the ecosystem cavalry on his 40-horsepower Zodiac raft. His job of tracking down poisonous runoff and embarrassing the powerful corporations who caused them becomes more sticky than usual; run-ins with a gang of satanic rock fans, a deranged geneticist, and a mysterious PCB contamination that may or may not be man-made--plus a falling-out with his competent ("I adore stress") girlfriend--all complicate his mission.
Stephenson/S. T.'s irreverent, facetious, esprit-filled voice make this near-future tale a joy to read.

Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Loved it! Where's the follow-up? 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

What an amazing, wide ranging story. Obviously well researched, well planned out and deep. The only problem is...there's no volume 2. I've been waiting since May 1999 to see how the story ends and so far - no joy. Pick it up, but be warned, you'll be left hanging.

Encryption, ice cold milk and Captain Crunch 5 out of 5 stars.
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Love the transport in time to the precusor's to IPSec and AES encryption, just not using a VPN connection. If you like encryption, World War II, anti-hero's and a really thick book, this is your cup of tea.

Editorial Review:

Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that have shaped the past century. Weaving together the cracking of the Axis codes during WWII and the quest to establish a free South East Asian 'data haven' for digital information in the present, Cryptonomicon explores themes of power, information, secrecy and war in the twentieth century in a gripping and page-turning thriller.

Criptonomicon I: El codigo Engima (Ciencia Fccion / Science Fiction)

Neal Stephenson

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Criptonomicon I: El codigo Enigma 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

It's a wonderfull book. It's very appealing for readers used to IT isues.
The story presents a powerfull description of the corporative world and the different ways the IT experts fits (or not) into it.
I endorse it enfatically to readers with math expertise.

Editorial Review:

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, mathematical genius and captain in the U.S. Navy, is assigned to Detachment 2702, whose mission is to keep Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. Sixty years later, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a data haven where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of scrutiny. Soon his scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy that originated with Detachment 2702, one that represents either a future of personal and digital liberty or universal totalitarianism reborn.

Criptonomicon: 2. El codigo Pontifex (Ciencia Ficcion / Science Fiction)

Neal Stephenson

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

It's in SPANISH! 4 out of 5 stars.
159 of 159 people found this review helpful.

It has been a couple of years since reading Cryptonomicon. When I was looking for more Stephenson books I came across Criptonomicon II and III. I assumed they were continuations of his first Crypto book. You have to read down in the details of the Amazon book description to find that these two books are just a Spanish translation of Cryptonomicon.

Hope this saves you a restocking fee.

Editorial Review:

In 1942, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, mathematical genius and captain in the U.S. Navy, is assigned to Detachment 2702, whose mission is to keep Nazis ignorant of the fact that Allied Intelligence cracked the enemy's fabled Enigma code. Sixty years later, Waterhouse's crypto-hacker grandson, Randy, is attempting to create a data haven where encrypted data can be stored and exchanged free of scrutiny. Soon his scheme brings to light a massive conspiracy that originated with Detachment 2702, one that represents either a future of personal and digital liberty or universal totalitarianism reborn.