General Musing

As an early Christmas gift my father gave me vouchers he didn’t want to get him and myself some books we would enjoy. I went out and bought Anathem – which I will discuss in a following blog – and Cryptonomicon. He was very happy with my choice, we had both enjoyed Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, and would be sure to enjoy these.

The book starts just before the age of modern cryptography, in a time when computers were people who performed computations, and weaves a story of the Waterhouse clan from grandfather’s fumbled first meetings with Alan Turing, through the cracking of the Enigma code, up to the modern age of fibre optics and Van Eck phreaking. It is ranges from witty to down-right hilarious, with lines like

“War is hell, but smoking cigarettes makes it all worthwhile.”

And it covers the art of cryptography in a way that I, a geek with some knowledge of cryptography, understand.

The story itself reads like a spy novel, with as much subterfuge in the WWII periode as in the modern age, where the discovery of information by lawyers and dentists can be as bad if not worse that the discovery by Nazis. In the end the WWII characters have died leaving legacies which ripple into the future, and those left alive are left fighting an enemy much worse than the Third Reich, corporations.

I really liked Cryptonomicon.