Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson: No. I kept playing with the idea of putting that stuff in there, but it just didn’t come together; I just didn’t have the energy. Novels are hard enough to interpret sanely, especially a novel like this, without putting an encrypted message in there. Novels are kind of an encrypted message to begin with.
~
Sources: Amazon.com; Cryptonomicon.com; Guardian Unlimited (Jim McClellan, reporter); Locus Online; The Onion’s AV Club (John Krewson, reporter); Salon.com (Andrew Leonard, reporter); SF Site (Catherine Asaro, reporter). See Editor’s Note for complete source details.
Editor’s Note
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“Stephensonia/Cryptonomica” was prepared by the editorial staff of HarperCollins for the first e-book publication of Cryptonomicon (May 2003). This section combines statements from several sources, listed below, that were made by Neal Stephenson during the months following Cryptonomicon’s hardcover publication in 1999.
To enhance the general reader’s experience of this text, a statement’s source is not directly noted, ellipses are not indicated, some material has been re-ordered within a given passage, and there has been some light editing. Those with a scholarly motive for examining this section are advised to seek out the original materials.
In May 2003 the sources for these statements were posted as listed below. HarperCollins makes no guarantees, of course, that these links remain live. All text quoted is a direct statement by Neal Stephenson, and so is held in copyright by him.
Sources
“Cryptonomicon Cypher-FAQ” by Neal Stephenson: http://www.well.com/user/neal/cypherFAQ.html
“Mother Earth Motherboard” by Neal Stephenson: Wired, Issue 4.12, December 1996; http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
“Press Conference” (NB, reporters are named and interview dates are included if cited by the publication itself at the URL listed):
Amazon.com: “Neal Stephenson Decodes Cryptonomicon”: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/feature/11674/103-9956981-9521468
Cryptonomicon.com: “A Talk with Neal Stephenson,” April 19, 1999: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/chat.html
Guardian Unlimited: “Neal Stephenson’s Message in Code,” October 14, 1999; Jim McClellan, reporter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,256309,00.html
Locus Online: “Neal Stephenson: Cryptomancer,” August 1999: http://www.locusmag.com/1999/Issues/08/Stephenson.html
The Onion’s AV Club: “Neal Stephenson,” May 27, 1999; John Krewson, reporter: http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3520/avfeature3520.html
Salon.com: “Deep Code,” May 19, 1999; Andrew Leonard, reporter: http://archive.salon.com/books/int/1999/05/19/stephenson/print.html
SF Site: “A Conversation with Neal Stephenson,” September 1999; Catherine Asaro, reporter: http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm
Raves for
CRYPTONOMICON
“CRYPTONOMICON is great news. For many readers, the prospect of getting lost in a thousand pages of Stephenson’s intoxicating, roller-coaster prose will far outweigh the risk of getting compressed disks from carting the beast around… This is a big book, and so its themes are fittingly big… [It] provides the clearest vision yet of why people who care about cryptography care so very much about it, and why the people who fight it… are so frightened of its potential.”
Washington Post Book World
“Heady stuff… a surprisingly brisk read… suffused in an atmosphere of paranoia and deception… CRYPTONOMICON is actually two books in one: a historical spy thriller, and a present-day thriller involving hackers and the Internet… a cross between the conspiracy-laden ‘hidden history’ fiction of Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and the fast-paced thrillers of Michael Crichton.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Combines the best elements of espionage fiction with a geek-chic sensibility… The editors recommend CRYPTONOMICON.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Amazing… eminently readable… CRYPTONOMICON is a huge, sprawling, breezy book that encompasses both the WW (World War II) and the WWW (World Wide Web).”
Seattle Times
“Electrifying… hilarious… a sprawling, picaresque novel about code making and code breaking… [Stephenson] cares as much about telling good stories as he does about farming out cool ideas… His gargantuan novel is distinct from the other outsized slabs of post-modern fiction we’ve seen recently—David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon. For all the pleasures scattered throughout those books, they’re dry, somewhat forbidding epics… CRYPTONOMICON, on the other hand, is a wet epic… It wants to blow your mind while keeping you fed and happy.”
The New York Times Book Review
“Stephenson makes a bid for mainstream relevance with this Infinite Jest-size tome… Don’t write off his novel as just another fast-paced, find-the-MacGuffin techno thriller. It’s an engrossing look at the way the flow of information shapes history—as well as a rare glimpse into the soul of the hardcore geek. Rating: A.”
Entertainment Weekly
“The hacker Hemingway… When it comes to depicting the nerd mind-set, no one tops Stephenson… CRYPTONOMICON is the most ambitious [novel], a Pynchonesque tour de force with a David Foster Wallace playfulness… a rambling and revelatory meditation on cryptography with digressions on dental surgeons, fiber-optic cables, and the proper way to consume Cap’n Crunch cereal… The tech set will devour it, of course… but its ambition, style, and depth might well win over newbies, too.”
Newsweek
“Ambitious… hilarious… powerful… memorable… CRYPTONOMICON promises and irrevocably delivers.”
The Village Voice
“Big, complex, and ambitious, the new cyber-thriller from the talented author of Snow Crash and The Diamond Age calls to mind Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in its intense, paranoid evocation of conspiracies and secret histories… This fast-paced, genre-transcending novel is full of absorbing action, witty dialogue, and well-drawn characters… the first volume in what promises to be the most extravagant literary creation of the turn of the millennium—and beyond.”
Publishers Weekly (*Starred Review*)
“A story with scope and complexity… This best-selling epic contains its share of gripping battle scenes—not to mention Filipino treasure hunters, Cap’n Crunch-eating computer hackers, a young Ronald Reagan, and a stash of Nazi war gold.”
Chicago Tribune
“A magnum opus, a powerfully imagined story revolving around World War II codes, a vast conspiracy affecting history, and different generations in one family who attempt to unravel its secrets.”
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Stephenson’s new book proves he is the rarest of geniuses.”
New York Post
“This great fat volume should be read and reread and passed along because it’s stuffed full of clever, ironic, mordant, and flat-out hilarious writing… It’s a multithematic paean to engineering, scientific and technological literacy, where readers get rewarded for knowing about Magic and microcode and the U.S. Marines instead of for spotting references to Milton.”
Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A sprawling, densely woven tale bridging the recent history of codes and code breakers with a near-future where citizens’ data need a haven from prying governments.”
Boston Herald
“Startlingly original… Imagine Tom Clancy turning to cyberpunk and you have some idea of its broad potential appeal… Stephenson mixes historical and contemporary settings, handling both with great skill, as he presents a large cast of vividly imagined characters… and makes both the tale’s technologies and its conspiracies highly believable… This is a book that should be bought for the sake of saying that you have it and read, however long it takes, for the pleasure and intellectual stimulation it is likely to give to most readers.”
Booklist
“Compulsively readable
(with the Read This Part Out Loud alarm sounding every few pages), very smart, very funny, and just as often very grim… It feels something like Catch-22 reworked by Thomas Pynchon, with dashes of Vonnegut and Tom Wolfe.”
Locus
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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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 Root’s 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 one’s debts in this way can easily lead all the way back to Adam and Eve, and so I’ve chosen to pick World War II as my gratitude cutoff date, and to divide everyone I’m grateful to into three general groups.
First: towering figures of the 1937-45 Titanomachia. Almost every family has its own small pantheon of war figures—such 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 family—which is to say, my family—and characters in this book. So, just for the record, let me state that I made all of this up—honest!—and that it is not a roman à 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 Wriston—who 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 children’s 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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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Neal Town Stephenson is the author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Zodiac, and The Big U. Born on Halloween 1959 in Fort Meade, Maryland — home of the National Security Agency — he grew up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Ames, Iowa, before attending college in Boston. Since 1984 he has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and has made a living out of writing novels and the occasional magazine article.
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First Look:
Quicksilver
by Neal Stephenson
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Quicksilver
Volume One of “The Baroque Cycle”
by Neal Stephenson
About Quicksilver
Daniel Waterhouse is a brilliant scientist, yet knows his powers are dwarfed by those of his friends Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Robert Hooke. Caught up in the conflict between science and alchemy, he is also embroiled in the bloody struggle for religious freedom…
Jack Shaftoe began his life as a London urchin, and is now a reckless adventurer in search of great fortune. The exploits of the King of the Vagabonds are quickly becoming the stuff of legend throughout Europe…
Eliza is a beautiful young woman whose ingenuity, bravery, and intelligence save her after years spent imprisoned in a Turkish harem…
Set against the backdrop of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Quicksilver tells the intertwining tales of these unforgettable main characters as they traverse a landscape populated by mad alchemists, Barbary pirates, and bawdy courtiers, as well as historical figures such as Samuel Pepys, Ben Franklin, William of Orange, Louis XIV, and many others. This breathtaking story ranges from the American colonies to Whitehall to the glittering palace at Versailles—and plays out during a singular nexus point in history, when humanity was transformed as rationality triumphed over mysticism, monarchy was overthrown, markets became free, and religious tolerance gained ground over harsh oppression.
Excerpt from Quicksilver
ENOCH ROUNDS THE corner just as the executioner raises the noose above the witch’s head. The crowd on the Common stop praying and sobbing for just as long as Jack Ketch stands there, elbows locked, for all the world like a carpenter heaving a ridge-beam into place. The rope clutches a disk of blue New England sky. The Puritans gaze at it and, to all appearances, think. Enoch the Red reins in his borrowed horse as it nears the edge of the crowd, and sees that the executioner’s purpose is not to let them inspect his knotwork, but to give them all a narrow—and, to a Puritan, tantalizing—glimpse of the portal through which they all must pass one day.
Boston’s a dollop of hills in a spoon of marshes. The road up the spoon-handle is barred by a wall, with the usual gallows outside of it, and victims, or parts of them, strung up or nailed to the city gates. Enoch has just come that way, and reckoned he had seen the last of such things—that thenceforth it would all be churches and taverns. But the dead men outside the gate were common robbers, killed for earthly crimes. What is happening now in the Common is of a more Sacramental nature.
The noose lies on the witch’s grey head like a crown. The executioner pushes it down. Her head forces it open like an infant’s dilating the birth canal. When it finds the widest part it drops suddenly onto her shoulders. Her knees pimple the front of her apron and her skirts telescope into the platform as she makes to collapse. The executioner hugs her with one arm, like a dancing-master, to keep her upright, and adjusts the knot while an official reads the death warrant. This is as bland as a lease. The crowd scratches and shuffles. There are none of the diversions of a London hanging: no catcalls, jugglers, or pickpockets.
He’s not come to watch witch-hangings, but now that Enoch’s blundered into one it would be bad form to leave. There is a drum-roll, and then a sudden awkward silence. He judges it very far from the worst hanging he’s ever seen—no kicking or writhing, no breaking of ropes or unraveling of knots—all in all, an unusually competent piece of work.
As they are cutting the limp witch down, a gust tumbles over the Common from the North. On Sir Isaac Newton’s temperature scale, where freezing is zero and the heat of the human body is twelve, it is probably four or five. If Herr Fahrenheit were here with one of his new quicksilver-filled, sealed-tube thermometers, he would probably observe something in the fifties. But this sort of wind, coming as it does from the North, in the autumn, is more chilling than any mere instrument can tell. It reminds everyone here that, if they don’t want to be dead in a few months’ time, they have firewood to stack and chinks to caulk.
How must he look to these people? A man of indefinable age but evidently broad experience, with silver hair queued down to the small of his back, a copper-red beard, pale gray eyes, and skin weathered and marred like a blacksmith’s ox-hide apron. Dressed in a long
traveling-cloak, a walking-staff and a gentleman’s rapier strapped ‘longside the saddle of a notably fine black horse. Two pistols in his waistband, prominent enough that Indians, highwaymen, and French raiders can clearly see them from ambuscades (he’d like to move them out of view, but reaching for them at this moment seems like a bad idea). Saddlebags (should they be searched) filled with instruments, flasks of quicksilver and stranger matters—some, as they’d learn, quite dangerous—books in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin pocked with the occult symbols of Alchemists and Kabalists. Things could go badly for him in Boston.
Enoch dismounts into the midst of the colonists. He sweeps the robe round him, concealing the pistols, pulls the hood back from his head, and amounts to just another weary pilgrim.
Flowing like water round the bases of the steep hills, they migrate across a burying ground on the south edge of the common, already full of lost Englishmen, and follow the witch’s corpse down the street. The houses are mostly of wood, and so are the churches. Spaniards would have built a single great cathedral here, of stone, with gold on the inside, but the colonists cannot agree on anything and so it is more like Amsterdam: small churches on every block, some barely distinguishable from barns, each no doubt preaching that all of the others have it wrong. But at least they can muster a consensus to kill a witch.
