---
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title: "Cryptonomicon: From cracking Nazi Enigma codes in WWII to a modern data-haven heist―Waterhouse and Shaftoe heirs unite against a hidden conspiracy"
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# Cryptonomicon: From cracking Nazi Enigma codes in WWII to a modern data-haven heist―Waterhouse and Shaftoe heirs unite against a hidden conspiracy

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- **What is this?** Cryptonomicon: From cracking Nazi Enigma codes in WWII to a modern data-haven heist―Waterhouse and Shaftoe heirs unite against a hidden conspiracy
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## Description

With this extraordinary first volume in an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century. 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 the gung-ho Shaftoe and his forces. Fast-forward to the present, where Waterhouse's 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 Shaftoe's 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 Stephenson's 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.

Review: WOW! - I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating. I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head. The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor." And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure." Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak". Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an desertcart review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted. A wonderful book!
Review: Enjoyable but Not As Good As It Could Have Been. - First, I never would have read this book if it had not been for my Kindle. For a good number of years I have avoided lengthy books because of their weight which makes them tiresome to handle and typically the print is small which also makes them tiresome and hard to read, so the Kindle is a great tool for reading a long and heavy book like Cryptonomicon. As regards the book itself, overall I found it quite enjoyable as it blends history, technology, geography, important historical personalities, excellent writing, mathematics, computers, and many other subjects of interest to me into a package that at times reads like a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel. At times I really could not figure out how Neal Stephenson was able to come up with such original phrasing combined with a vocabulary that I must admit is well above my own. On almost every page I found it necessary to refer to the dictionary for words that I had not seen before or could not remember their meaning. In every case the word Neal used was the perfect one for the circumstance. As he is relatively young and did not get a Harvard or M.I.T. education, I can only attribute it to him growing up in a family of highly educated professionals who did a lot of his education at the dinner table. Another thing I liked about the book were the main characters Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Randy Waterhouse, Avi, Alan Turing, the Dentist, and many others who were well developed and given real personality by the author. This and the overall plot were the things that made this book quite enjoyable. On the somewhat less enjoyable side and the reason I did not give this book five stars were the following. First the ending, after asking the reader to slog with him throughout the world and all the way through World War II, I thought the ending was really weak and almost like an afterthought. It seemed like Neal ran out of writing energy at this point. It also seemed like he got kind of goofy at the end by bringing Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, and General Douglas Macarthur together in the middle of a baseball diamond during the final battle for Manila. This is fantasy that loses its entertainment value. Also I did not like the forty or fifty pages devoted to the relationships between various Greek and Roman Gods, a good editor would have gotten rid of this entire segment. Another thing I hated in the Kindle edition of this book is the two hundred page article about worldwide undersea laying of communication cables. This article is dated, more than ten years old, uninteresting, old technology, most of the companies talked about have gone out of business, and has no place at all being in this book. Maybe this tourist trip was of interest to Neal ten years ago but it really turned me off by being inserted in this book. desertcart and Neal should do us all a favor and permanently delete it as irrelevant. In spite of my complaints on these few issues, I would still highly recommend that you read Cryptonomicon. When I recuperate from reading it, I will probably read Quicksilver but it will be a few more months before I am ready for it.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | #277,519 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) #82 in Hard Science Fiction (Books) #94 in Military Historical Fiction #113 in Science Fiction Crime & Mystery |
| Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 8,454 Reviews |

## Images

![Cryptonomicon: From cracking Nazi Enigma codes in WWII to a modern data-haven heist―Waterhouse and Shaftoe heirs unite against a hidden conspiracy - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81L++lvompL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ WOW!
*by D***S on July 4, 2008*

I LOVED this book. But, for potential readers, I have a VERY large caveat: Unless you have a love of mathematics and/or cryptanalysis you're going to miss out on much that made the book, for me, so great. In fact, judging from the one and two star reviews so prevalent here, you more than likely are going to hate it and end up torching it in your back yard in frustration and dancing around the ashes. By way of anecdote, I was talking to one of my neighbours who happens to have a degree in mechanical engineering while we were out walking our dogs about a certain aspect of the book that had me puzzled for a bit, and another neighbour stopped to join us. After listening for a time, she looked at me and asked, in a semi-sarcastic, baffled tone, "Are you reading an Engineering textbook for fun?" When I told her it was a novel, she became even more nonplussed. So, the point here is, you've been warned. I happen to be an English Literature major, but I was one of those kids in school who in, say, trigonometry class just looked at a math problem, knew the answer and handed in my tests in five minutes. The words, "SHOW WORK" are scorched into my memory of adolescence. On the other hand, if you've liked Stephenson's other works, or like picaresque literary jaunts in general, you will no doubt like this one as well. You'll just have to skip the parts I found most fascinating. I can now say, though, that I understand why Stephenson fans took him to task for lack of verisimilitude in Snow Crash and the books which constitute The Baroque Cycle, both of which are a great deal of fun to read, but not terribly conducive to deep thinking. This book is so conducive, for a number of reasons, but the primary one, I should say, is that very few people realise just how WEIRD the branch of mathematics known as Statistics is. The simplest example I can think of is coin tossing: If you enter a (rather primitive) casino, toss a coin once and come up heads, your chance on the second toss of coming up heads again is 25%. It's not 50%. Furthermore, if you toss the coin and it comes up heads, then put the coin in your pocket and wait three days, three months, three years, however long, and take that same coin out of your pocket on the other side of the globe and flip it, your chances of coming up heads, after all this time, are still 25%, not 50%. I've gone out about the Math enough for this review, but the Math herein is very much concerned with probabilities like this one. It makes you start thinking, as the character Waterhouse does at one point, of the entire world as a giant probability wave. I can't tell you how many hours of sleep I lost tossing and turning with different numbers running through my head. The characters in this book, as Stephenson puts it are "people too busy leading their lives to worry about extending their life expectancy." This makes for very intriguing, if involved, reading. But the writing can also approach the poetic at times. The sinking of the Arizona at Pearl Harbor is described thusly: "A military lyre of burnished steel that sings a thousand men to their resting places at the bottom of the harbor." And the book is so terribly funny. The Englishman, Chatan's, description to Detachment 2702 of the importance of knowing the right way to, er, blow your head off if in danger of being caught by the enemy is priceless, "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure." Also, as noted by other reviewers, there are numerous in-jokes, my personal favourite being the Latin motto for the Societas Eruditorum: "Ignoti et quasi occulti." Which Enoch Root translates for Bob Shaftoe as, "Hidden and unknown-more or less," which is EXACTLY what it means! Notice the quotation marks surrounding more or less. The word "quasi," in Latin means "more or less" or "as it were" or "so to speak". Alright, I've gone on long enough, perhaps too long, for an Amazon review. For those few who might be interested, I'll try to include a simple program I came up with for solving the Turing bicycle problem, which Stephen uses to illustrate how the Enigma machine works in the Comment section once this review is posted. A wonderful book!

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Enjoyable but Not As Good As It Could Have Been.
*by L***R on March 16, 2011*

First, I never would have read this book if it had not been for my Kindle. For a good number of years I have avoided lengthy books because of their weight which makes them tiresome to handle and typically the print is small which also makes them tiresome and hard to read, so the Kindle is a great tool for reading a long and heavy book like Cryptonomicon. As regards the book itself, overall I found it quite enjoyable as it blends history, technology, geography, important historical personalities, excellent writing, mathematics, computers, and many other subjects of interest to me into a package that at times reads like a Clive Cussler Dirk Pitt novel. At times I really could not figure out how Neal Stephenson was able to come up with such original phrasing combined with a vocabulary that I must admit is well above my own. On almost every page I found it necessary to refer to the dictionary for words that I had not seen before or could not remember their meaning. In every case the word Neal used was the perfect one for the circumstance. As he is relatively young and did not get a Harvard or M.I.T. education, I can only attribute it to him growing up in a family of highly educated professionals who did a lot of his education at the dinner table. Another thing I liked about the book were the main characters Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, Randy Waterhouse, Avi, Alan Turing, the Dentist, and many others who were well developed and given real personality by the author. This and the overall plot were the things that made this book quite enjoyable. On the somewhat less enjoyable side and the reason I did not give this book five stars were the following. First the ending, after asking the reader to slog with him throughout the world and all the way through World War II, I thought the ending was really weak and almost like an afterthought. It seemed like Neal ran out of writing energy at this point. It also seemed like he got kind of goofy at the end by bringing Bobby Shaftoe, GoTo Dengo, and General Douglas Macarthur together in the middle of a baseball diamond during the final battle for Manila. This is fantasy that loses its entertainment value. Also I did not like the forty or fifty pages devoted to the relationships between various Greek and Roman Gods, a good editor would have gotten rid of this entire segment. Another thing I hated in the Kindle edition of this book is the two hundred page article about worldwide undersea laying of communication cables. This article is dated, more than ten years old, uninteresting, old technology, most of the companies talked about have gone out of business, and has no place at all being in this book. Maybe this tourist trip was of interest to Neal ten years ago but it really turned me off by being inserted in this book. Amazon and Neal should do us all a favor and permanently delete it as irrelevant. In spite of my complaints on these few issues, I would still highly recommend that you read Cryptonomicon. When I recuperate from reading it, I will probably read Quicksilver but it will be a few more months before I am ready for it.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Nerds of the world, rejoice! Stephenson pens a zinger
*by N***X on November 16, 2008*

I am 54 years old and I am a nerd. (Sounds like an AA confession or something). You may think Important People like George Bush or Bill Clinton or President-elect (at time of writing) Obama, or A. Lincoln, or Alexander or Ghengis Khan or Hitler or Nimitz or FDR or Churchill are the kind of guys who make the world go `round. Or try to stop it, as the case may be. You'd be dead wrong. An interesting thing happened in the 19th century called the Industrial Revolution. After 20,000-some-odd years of digging in the dirt the planet suddenly went high-tech. Or at least higher-tech. The IPs were shocked, SHOCKED, to find they couldn't win a war (or do much else) without tech. And where did they get their tech? From us autistic, socially-inept, outta-the-box-thinking, harmless-appearing nerds. Stephenson gets this right, oh-so-dead-on-right, in "Cryptonomicon". I almost never buy hardbacks any more except in extraordinary circumstances. Fellow serious bookworms will know why immediately - space. If the total volume in one's abode can be expressed as X, and the volume taken up in said abode by hardback books is .99999X, it becomes obvious that...well, you get the picture. (Omigawd, an equation - means 10% fewer people will read this review). Sooner or later paperbacks start looking like the way to go. When I saw the big Avon hardback edition in 1999 and took a quick look, it seemed like a possibility. But what iced the deal was the inside jacket picture of a young (maybe 10 y.o.?) NTS curled up on the couch reading Epstein's "First Book of Codes and Ciphers", a book I still have on my own shelf. Now THIS was my kinda author! Since then, I've read "Cryptonomicon" every few years and never failed to pull something new out of it. This time it was an even better appreciation of the very digressions many of the reviewers here have taken exception to. They are brilliant little jewels in their own right. To those who fizzed through the book the first time and missed them, or even skipped `em deliberately (arrrrgh!), I say, "Read it again and slow down. Smell the coffee!" The pages leading up to and including Lawrence Waterhouse's Big Insight at the organ keyboard are among the most hilarious I've ever read. Could only have come straight from a true nerd's heart. About the ending. Sometimes in real life, things don't get tied up with a then-everyone-lives-happily-ever-after ribbon, or a can-you-top-this bow. Sometimes the villain wins or the hero loses, or they both win, or they both lose. The codebreaker heroes of WWII got medals and citations they couldn't publicly acknowledge for over thirty years. Many of them worked their butts off on projects the results of which they didn't even see until such information began trickling out in the early 1970s. Many of these ops would have seemed totally absurd from the point of view of the heavily-compartmented participants. Stephenson's genius is his presentation of clandestine activities from the POVs of Bobby Shaftoe, who knows nothing, and Waterhouse, who knows everything. After the 900-page tour-de-force NTS rolls out, about the only other ending I can envision is what I call the "up-yers ending", something like this: "The Earth encounters a random black hole and falls into it. All life is squished into oblivion (including the characters you've read about for the past week) and the world ceases to exist. Thank you for buying this book." THAT would've ticked off the reviewers even more. My background includes writing ICBM flight software and service as a U.S. Navy Intelligence officer. I've read 1000s of books of all types, had three of my own published. I've never given max stars to a book before in my life. This one gets max stars. Six out of five, in fact. Stephenson wrote a book about us and he got it right. Nerds rule.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Cryptonomicon
- Snow Crash: A Novel
- Seveneves

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