The Hacker Hemingway

Unlike his high-flying novels. He produces them in longhand, transferring the text to a computer running the geek's delight: the Linux operating system. "Cryptonomicon" is his most ambitious, a Pynchon-esque tour de force with a David Foster Wallace playfulness. Its dual plots include a World War II tale of codebreaking, espionage and Nazi gold; and a contemporary tale of a software startup trying to establish a Data Haven on a remote Pacific island. (There was a third plot but Stephenson, warned that he was pushing the limits of bookbinding, is holding it for a sequel.) The opening scene, involving a prewar currency crash in Shanghai, came from former Citicorp CEO Walter Wriston, whom Stephenson sat next to at a dinner party.

The book even has a built-in hack. At one point two characters in a jail communicate with Solitaire, an actual cryptosystem based on cutting a desk of cards. Since "Cryptonomicon" includes Solitaire's computer code, electronic versions of the novel can't be shipped out of the country, because munitions law forbids the export of strong ciphers.

Stephenson's publisher hopes "Cryptonomicon" will be his breakout book. The tech set will devour it, of course--it's cracked Amazon's top 10 list before publication--but its ambition, style and depth might well win over newbies, too. One early reviewer griped that its digressions "might appeal to NSA chiefs, computer nerds, and budding entrepreneurs, but ordinary readers are likely to balk." Extraordinary readers, however, should seek out the best novel ever written on a Linux box.

© 1999