Above is the book cover for the First Edition
Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson published in 1999.
Just last night I finished this extraordinary novel. (Like so many recently read books, it's part of a series. The Baroque Cycle is set in past and Jipi and the Paranoid Chip continues in the future.) It is interesting in so many ways. When my initial confusion with the first chapter finally started to fade, there was an "ah-ha" moment that came together as "historical novel" maybe?
But it's so much more than that. The historical novel is just one of the time lines in the story. That story line is set in World War II. It's main characters all have decendents in the second, a modern time line.
A central theme in both time lines is cryptography. The title, Cryptonomicon, is a ficticious book compiled of the years to include all knowldege of secret code writing and code breaking.
The novel won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel in 2000 and nominated for two other sci-fi awards, the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. That was a surprise to me because sci-fi wasn't a genre that I would have considered. At least Wikipedia agrees with me and calls it "...closer to the genres of historical fiction and contemporary techno-thriller than to the science fiction setting of Stephenson's two previous novels..."
In addition to Wikipedia, there are other sites worth mentioning. Neal Stephenson's website. The Harper-Collins site has the first chapter for you to read here.
Below is the book cover for the Kindle e-book that I read.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment