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Image courtesy of Amazon
Last year I had a few posts I was working on around my eighth Cryptonomicon re-read that never really came together; they’ve been sitting in my drafts gathering dust for quick a while now. Here’s the condensed version!
My thoughts on this book, and Neal Stephenson as a whole, are complex. On the one hand, there’s aspects of his books and characters that evoke a particular kind of male nerd perspective that I find quite grating. Being a male nerd myself, I’ve met quite a few people who think and act this way and they’re often, in a quite earnest way, awful to be around. Unconscious misogyny, unexamined bias… the whole nine yards with a strong dose of intellectual superiority thrown in to boot.
But at the same time, he’s an incredible writer. Enormous amounts of research, fantastic turns of phrase, and a good amount of humor thrown in. I’ve bounced off a few of his more cerebral books (Anathem comes to mind and Seveneves wasn’t a whole lot better for me) but Snow Crash, Reamde, and Cryptonomicon are some of my favorite books.
And there’s echoes of myself that I can see in his characters, particularly the ‘smart but detached from reality’ sort. Sometimes Stephenson will say something like this and I could swear he was talking about me:
“… but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in.” (Cryptonomicon)
Or:
“An idea springs out of his forehead fully formed, with no warning. This is how all the best ideas arrive. Ideas that he patiently cultivates from tiny seeds always fail to germinate or else grow up into monstrosities. Good ideas are just there all of a sudden, like angels in the Bible. You cannot ignore them just because they are ridiculous.” (Cryptonomicon)
Or:
“His feeling of disappointment that accompanies this action has nothing to do with the contents of the safe. He is disappointed because he has solved the problem, and has gone back to the baseline state of boredom and low-level irritation that always comes over him when he’s not doing something that inherently needs to be done, like picking a lock or breaking a code.” (Cryptonomicon)
It’s a continuous series of “recognition of self in the other” in almost every book I’ve read. Which is probably a big part of why I keep coming back, and why I’ve read Cryptonomicon eight times. It doesn’t hurt that Stephenson is very aware of the aforementioned male nerd tendencies and tends to call them out actively in his own characters, reducing that pain a fair bit.
This time around I also took advantage of some extras in my eBook copy and read the entirety of Neal Stephenson’s 1996 article “Mother Earth Mother Board” about the laying of the then-longest wire on Earth. Thankfully it has not succumbed to link rot.
It’s a monster of an article, clocking in at over 40K words (essentially the length of a short novel) and it’s a fascinating insight into everything from the history of submarine cable-laying to the technology involved and the political battles at play. It’s the kind of thing I’ll probably need to read a few times before I fully grasp everything it contains, which is fairly typical of the things Neal Stephenson writes.
Anyways, now that I’ve got this out in the world I can finally clear out that drafts folder. A good feeling all around.
:)
Thanks for reading!
