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.
