Cryptonomicon

Neal Stephenson

1999

The Year: Now.

The Location: The Philippines Archipelago.

When Randy Waterhouse is contacted by an old school friend in order to set up a new computer company, he's quite happy to go along with the project. First to set up a feed to the Philippines so that the islands could be part of the information highway which would enable their company to act as a communications hub for the masses of Philipinas and Philipinos working abroad.

But this was not their sole plan and once it was up and running they turned their attention to the provision of a secure data storage facility that anyone could use any time as the securest bank on the planet.

There are problems though; one of their backers reckons that the directors were being both too cautious and too wild. Legal shenanigans follow that land Randy in a Philipino jail where he has to try and find the location of a legendary Japanese hoard from WW2.

Time: World War 2

Location: Theatres of Action through-out the world

Lawrence Waterhouse was considered to rather a dreamy sort of person, not rooted in the real world. While growing up, he had become interested in the mechanics and mathematics of music which led to a engineering course which was unfinished. While at Princeton, he tried to interest the many famous people in his mathematical proposals, but they failed to share his delights - all except a rather strange Englishman by the name of Alan Turing and a German by the name of Rudy.

When he is called up by the Navy he's given a job in Nevada's band and he looks like he'll be spending most of his service plinking away at his glockenspiel. Until December 7th 1941 when the Nevada, along with her sister ships, went up in smoke. Out of a job Lawrence is introduced to America's premier code breaker and finds his metier.

While Lawrence is stuck in a cubicle running code intercepts for the Allies, Bobby Shaftoe's fighting his way through the islands of the Pacific back to his Philipina lover and their son but it's a long track leading through all the possible theatres of war as he's caught up in the embrace of Section 2702.

 The book very successfully winds its way through these people's lives and that of a Nipponese engineer as it explores the mechanics of code breaking and making back in the second world war and the present day bringing it to a glowing climax on an abandoned mine in the Philippines jungle.

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