Cryptonomicon

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With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the priváté 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 somé 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 ehess match between Waterhouse and his Germán 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... Tovább

Fülszöveg

With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the priváté 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 somé 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 ehess match between Waterhouse and his Germán 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 serutiny. 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, Cryptonomkon 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 iconodastic imagination working with white-hot intensity.
Praise for Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH "Brilliantly realized." -The New York Times Book Review "Masterly conceived...A cross between Necromancer and Thomas Pynthon's Vineland. This is no mere hyperbole." -San Francisco Bay Guardian "Fastforward freestyle mail mythology for the 21SI century." -William Gibson "Like a Thomas Pynchon növel with the brakes removed." -Washington Post "Stephenson has not stepped, he has vaulted onto the literary stage." -Los Angeles Reader Praise for THE DIAMOND AGE "Stephenson, author of 1 992's genre-busting Snow Crash, has gotten even better. His new book envisions the next century as brilliantly as Snow Crash did the day after tomorrow." -Newsweek "Together [The Diamond Age and Snow Crash] represent a new era...People who plow through these mind-bogglers will walk around slack-jawed for days and reemerge with a radically redefined sense of reality." -Bruce Sterling, Details "Stephenson [is] a literary visionary of the technological future." -Seattle Weekly "A densely plotted, multifaceted gem." -The Village Voice "Establishes Stephenson as a powerful voice of the cyber age and shows that his 1992 bestseller, Snow Crash, was no fluke. The Diamond Age is at once whimsical, satirical, and cautionary." -USA Today Vissza