Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson (4 stars)

 

One of the things that I have pretty much not done in these reviews is rate something that I just read. This was partially due to convenience (who can read an entire book in a day and/or stagger their reading so that they can get one done daily?) but also due to the fact that I find that I actually have a better sense of the quality of a book a month or two after I’ve read it rather than right after I’m done. One book which I have not yet reviewed here, Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem, suffered from this; I wrote a review on Amazon about an hour after I’d gotten done with it and, looking back, I think I rated it too low.*

It’s also entirely possible that I am basking too deeply in the afterglow of Cryptonomicon to give it the kind of objective rating that it deserves. I’m really thinking not, though. This book has pretty much all of the things that makes my inner 8 year old squeal:

• A winding, conspiratorial plot
• A sardonic authorial tone that keeps you from treating a book like this as a Serious Great Work, which for me anyway is something I have the habit of doing when the page count is up over 1000
• A historical setting which actually works in the historical sense (I mean, I want to like historical fiction but when you give Confederate troops AK-47s**
• Cool technology (which would seem to contradict the last point, except that a. there are parallel storylines and b. just read the book, OK?)
• GOLD (okay, maybe that’s not a real priority)

I realize, looking at that list, that my inner 8 year old is a damn nerd. I am surprised that I was not given atomic wedgies on a daily basis, to be perfectly honest.

The particular field of study that Stephenson tackles in this book is cryptography, which sounds dry, but trust me, is kind of awesome. Okay, it’s dry as heck. But Stephenson is a very competent sentence-to-sentence and scene-to-scene writer, and unlike some authors I know, either manages to avoid falling so in love with his own writing that he can’t drag himself out of it or else has a good editor who is able to point out to him where this happens. There is one scene in particular involving a small subset of the hacking style known as “phreaking” that is a lot of fun to read but which actually does not, for a change, violate Chekhov’s Rule of the Gun or whatever it’s called.*** I won’t give away spoilers this time around but trust me: stuff happens here which actually pays off later on.

Like you would kind of expect from a high-technology book written in the late 90s, some of the tropes used are a little dated. I guess hackers still love Unix, but even people who use C++ don’t treat the now-30-year-old system as a “newer” programming language. To be honest, though, I was a little surprised at how well a lot of stuff has held up. My job only very rarely and tangentially deals with security and encryption but I know that the 4096 bit encryption schemes the main characters used in the novel, which was supposed to be outlandishly heavy then, is still considered pretty strong (to the point that it slows things down unnecessarily for most peoples’ purposes) today, a decade and a half after the book came out. Most of all, what puts the book squarely in the 90s, aside from the occasional question about Windows 95, is the fact that several of the main guys are World War II veterans at the very end of long careers – if you set the book in 2013, all those guys would be dead or very, very old.

One of my readers (apparently I have more than one on this site; it’s called trolling forums, people, and it’s how you get hits) feels a lot differently about Infinite Jest than I do and has, in defense of that horrible, horrible book, posted some comments by David Foster Wallace about wanting to create something that doesn’t talk down to its audience. I actually completely agree with those statements and intend to respond to them with that book in mind in particular, but in my opinion this book right here is a great example of how a good author can make something which is smart and which challenges you to keep up with it mentally but which at the same time is actually, you know, readable and stuff. If that’s the kind of thing you’re into… okay, that was a passive aggressive statement. You should read and like this book and if you don’t you are a bad person with bad tastes.

*In other words, it is the Wilco of books.

**Yes, that’s a thing. Harry Turtledove did it in some book of his. I probably will not be reviewing it because I put it down after 50 pages and I generally like to finish books that I review. Call it an idiosyncrasy of mine.

***”If you show a gun in Act One, it has to be fired in Act Three.”****

****I don’t know why I enclosed that in quotations. I don’t remember the original actual quote at all and anyway it’s in Russian.

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card – 3 Stars

I can’t believe I’m doing this, but what the heck… there is a movie in the works for this book, and it’s definitely one of Orson Scott Card’s better ones, so I will make him my very second writer to be featured twice. You may remember him already from a Scholastic Saturday on Characters and Viewpoint. Well, this is him writing narrative.

OSC is, frankly, a bit of a jerk. I would strongly recommend against reading his blog if you are anywhere to the left of Fred Phelps and wish to attempt to enjoy his writing on its own merits. As I said earlier this week in the Flannery O’Connor piece, there should ideally be nothing outside of the text. That being said, we aren’t perfect and so I say don’t even put his execrable politics into your mind, at least not after you’ve read this book and maybe a few others (I’m partial to his short story Euripides in the Fourth Floor Lavatory).

Okay, so enough about Card. Let’s talk about Card’s writing. I am not by habit a really big fan of fantasy and science fiction. I mean, I am a veteran of Dungeons and Dragons and like all geeks/nerds of my age I loved me some Star Wars when I was a kid, and so I’m not averse to the genres per se. At the same time, though, an awful lot of the genre doesn’t do much else than provide escapist fantasy for the reader. Okay, that’s not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Sometimes it’s nice to pretend to be somewhere else. The thing is, I can do that just as easily with War and Peace as I can with the tales of Drizz’t,* and I can get more out of War and Peace at the same time.

Okay, I’m beginning to sound like some sort of hipster intellectual type. If all you want is said escapist fantasy, great, more power to you. Personally, it’s not my bag.

Anyway, all that being said, one of the nice things about Card is that he *does* add theme to his stories. Ender’s Game is on the highest level about a small group of kids beating back an alien race. On another level, there’s some interesting material in here about the effects of technology on dehumanizing the enemy, material which is if anything even more pertinent now than it was when OSC wrote this book. There’s also a lot in here about the kinds of qualities that make someone a hero in wartime but a horrible, horrible person in other situations (to that point, there are a couple parts in here – I’ll warn you now – where actions of the eponymous character will make you cringe). There’s even perhaps something to pull out of here about what happens to children when they’re put into roles only adults ought to be put into.

There are several books that come after this which work only to varying degrees. Game is far and away the standout of the series. It’s really the standout of OSC’s work as a whole, frankly. But it is a very good book, I have to give it that.

*If you don’t know, you don’t want to know either.

Short Story Sunday: Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut – 4 stars

I admit that I do sometimes tend towards hyperbole. However, this book is in my mind the very best collection of short stories there is. With apologies to Chekhov or Flannery O’Conner (coming soon!) or Hemingway, there may be individual stories that outshine some of the ones in this book but at this point I can’t even think of an anthology of collected writers’ work which, top to bottom, stacks up to this bad boy.

In a sense, it’s unfair because after all there only ever was one Kurt Vonnegut. When I was younger and less appreciative of his work, I used to think that all of his talent was in the short stories and he just didn’t do particularly well at sustaining his narratives beyond 20 or 30 pages. I have since moved far, far away from that benighted position but the point still remains that in terms of pure enjoyability, there probably isn’t a single novel of old Kurt’s that stands up to this one. And Vonnegut’s books are nothing if not enjoyable.

I’ll quickly list a couple of my favorite stories from this book and will reserve the right to talk about them in some more depth later on in this project:

Harrison Bergeron: If you are a budding libertarian, forget about Ayn Rand. Her books are just not very well written and frankly the philosophy sucks as well. If you want a short story which is funny and yet rams home the potential dangers of government-enforced equality, this is the story for you.

All the King’s Horses: I don’t think this has been expanded into movie form, and that to me is a shame. This story concerns a general who is captured by the enemy and forced to play a deadly game of chess.

The Kid Nobody Could Handle: There is a whole series of short stories revolving around the fictional band director George Helmholtz, who also has a cameo in Slaughterhouse Five (Vonnegut did like to bring back his favorite characters). I’ve always wanted to try and cobble together a screenplay based on these stories. This one would be the centerpiece; it’s about a kid… well, you can read the title. The ending has to be right about my favorite Vonnegut scene of them all.

Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog: Sometimes a story should just be silly.

If you want to get really depressed, go look up this book on Wikipedia and see where these stories were originally published. Could you imagine today’s Cosmopolitan featuring the work of Kurt Vonnegut? “Six Ways To Dazzle Your Lover… In Trafalmadore.” Or The Ladies’ Home Journal? And yet, 50, 60 years ago, these places paid good money for short stories that people actually did read. About the only name I recognize on that list that ever publishes short stories anymore is Playboy. Which I read for the articles, you must understand.