I am so mixed on this book at the moment. I love all the stuff with Bobby and Waterhouse and Goto adventuring through WW2. But then there’s fucking **Randy**.
Everything with Randy is such a steep drop in quality from the rest of the book, with weird 7-page digressions into proper cereal-eating technique–admittedly a hilarious prank to play on the reader–to Randy jerking off in a bathroom, to pillories of 1990s “politically correct” academic types. The “Randy” half of the book is pervaded by a technofetishistic adulation of Really Smart Tech Dudes with all the “Maker” and “Taker” subtext of an ayn rand novel.
And it needs to be said, the book’s relationship with women is…*really* not great. There’s basically only one woman in the entire book who matters, an exotic half-Filipina Not-Like-Other-Girls deep-sea diver with a hatred of digital watches who just *happens* to fall madly in love with Randy…for some fucking reason. The other women in the book are exclusively objects for the protagonists to fuck, or obstacles that prevent the protagonists from fucking the objects. I’ve read enough of Stephenson’s work to know he’s not actually a weird creepy incel *himself*…but I can definitely see why so many creepy incel weirdos say Cryptonomicon is their favorite book.
If there was an abridged copy of the book that just focused on the adventures of Bobby, Larry, and Goto through ww2 it’d be one of my favorite books of all time–and those parts are still good enough that the book as a whole is probably worth reading.
But fuck Randy, man.
by addy-Bee
7 Comments
Great book, especially as it spawned his massive compendium that is The Baroque Cycle.
Read the Baroque cycle, its the adventure parts but all set in the 1600s
Try The Diamond Age. It’s way different, not as many strawmen and several major characters are women. Also fantastic world building.
Randy is the fucking worst. Randy voted for Ron Paul. Randy got pissed and didn’t vote after Andrew Yang dropped out. Randy pays for multiple substack subscriptions which he is extraordinarily cagey about revealing which specific ones. Randy absolutely has used the word “spermjacking” unironically in a post.
Sounds like a personal problem. But I didn’t like his love interest… textbook case of /r/menwritingwomen
I mean, I enjoyed the book, but you’re not wrong. Agreed with others that Baroque Cycle is good, but if you were turned off enough by this one, you do you.
I loved it the first time I read it. I suspect I’d have a very different reaction these days.