Deep code

He's never actually annoying. He's quite civil, and he seems genuinely apologetic when our time runs out. But you sure don't want to ask him dumb questions. Like, is he happy with the comparison to Pynchon?

"I'm not unhappy with it," he says. He doesn't actually roll his eyes, but you can feel him thinking, "Well duh, what ambitious writer who just wrote a technologically obsessed book set partially in WWII wouldn't want to be compared to Pynchon?"

Well then, what about the problem of whether mainstream readers will be taken aback by the lectures on the mathematics underlying cryptographic theory, which Stephenson includes in his novel. Did he worry about that?

"Not really," he says. "When it comes down to it, the few pages of the book that have equations on them don't contain a whole lot of plot or character development. So if you skip over that stuff you miss very little."

Indeed, to refrain from including the hard stuff, says Stephenson, would be tantamount to giving into what he sees as a popular reluctance to face up to the implications of technological progress.

"To me it seems like there is a kind of a strange denial in a lot of our culture, about just how important science and technology have been this century," says Stephenson. "There's just an unwillingness to come to grips with it at all. I don't deprecate people who feel that way, but I do think that at the end of a century like this one it's not the end of the world if you toss an equation into a work of art."

"Cryptonomicon" is a book about many things -- World War II, the Philippines, venture capital and the high-tech economy, to pick just a few -- but the axis around which everything revolves is precisely that issue of how important science and technology have been -- as viewed from "the end of a century like this one." The novel's journey back in time follows directly, Stephenson says, from his ruminations about the future.

"The more I thought about the future of computing the more interesting it was to consider the history of it. This is true not only in computing but in a lot of areas. Maybe we could have known more about what was going to happen in the Balkans if we paid more attention to the history there. I started feeling the need to put things in a longer historical context."

Part of that historical context is the rise of what Stephenson calls "hacker culture." Until very recently, the culture generated by computer hackers was an underground phenomenon, usually misunderstood by the mainstream as something illicit and vaguely dangerous.

Stephenson's own success is one sign of the changing times. Before the emergence of the Internet as a mainstream phenomenon, before Wired Magazine suddenly promoted the prominence of the computer geek as a cultural icon, publishing "Cryptonomicon" as a major hardcover release would have made no sense. But the undeniable importance of techno-culture at the close of this century has spawned a widespread popular desire to understand how we got here. "Cryptonomicon," which Stephenson envisions as just one installment of a series of novels taking place in the past, present and future, makes eminent sense when seen as a response to this social hunger.

Both the novel and the hubbub of contemporary computing culture are fueled by the energy that seethes though one crucial contradiction -- the computer's significance as a tool for both hiding meaning from view and for enhancing access to information. The word "code," after all, can refer to something that has been encrypted and hidden, but it also refers to the basic building blocks of a program -- something that, with a little knowledge, is right out there in plain view.

Next Page: "In the Beginning was the Command Line"

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