For a long time, I considered Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon my favorite book of all time. I loved the way it used two different timelines to show how the events of the past inform the technology of the present. I’m currently re-reading it for my third or fourth time (ok, I’m listening to the audio book) and I think it’s going to be my last.
This book is ROUGH. I am so over how smugly this book regards its own relationship to technology, and how it reveres the characters who have a close relationship to technology over those who don’t. The way the voice of the book constantly looks down its nose at folks who aren’t ready to embrace computers and the internet, as if anyone who doesn’t might as well still be banging rocks together. Stephenson’s writing also seems absolutely in love with his own intellect as he writes, and want s you to be similarly ensorcelled by his intellect. I’ve since learned in life that the smartest folks in the room generally aren’t the ones talking. They’re the ones who are listening and asking questions. This book’s exposition of intellect becomes positively eye-rolling.
But that’s not even half as bad as its portrayal of women. Women seem to be only in this book for one purpose: they’re there so one of the protagonists can have sex with them, or to present behaviors so bizarre and inexplicable that the might as well be a different species and should be rightfully studied. The only character who seems to have any real agency in the story, Amy Shaftoe, seems to only have that agency because it makes the payoff of one of the protagonists finally getting to fuck her all the more rewarding, I guess.
At one point, Cryptonomicon even contains the framework of Incel theory. Lawrence Waterhouse is incapable of doing his all important work unless he is able to have sex on a regular basis. As he comes to this realization, he is also in the care of a woman whom he is not having sex with, but matriarchally and prudishly controls his access to sex. He begins to form a theory that it’s the women who maintain the control of men’s access to sex, and because he can’t have sex while under her care, she is the enemy!
I’m still enjoying the parts with Goto Dengo, but even they have a worryingly colonial vibe. After all, Goto is the only Japanese person who seems capable of thinking like a westerner, and as a result, he’s the only Japanese person who seems capable of getting out of his own way. Those traditional Japanese values! They’re so backward and wacky!
And yet, this book still contains one of my favorite quotes, which las long informed my beliefs about the value of the work that humans can do: “Gold is the corpse of value.”
Alas.
by No_Tamanegi