Preliminary Thoughts On The First Installment

Well, I hope you all enjoyed the first 27 pages and are looking forward to finding out what happens next.

To start with, I should cop to thinking that Cryptonomicon is a great book, as well as an authorial tour de force.

To pick up on something that Peter says in the first post, Lawrence Waterhouse is the least believable character Stephenson gives us. He has no internal life at all. He is almost a holy fool; no idea who Einstein is but, when faced with Turing's penis scheme he immediately starts wondering what the fitness explanation for homosexuality is. (Note that his theory is more bizarre than anything OJ has come up with.) His only purpose is to get yanked from place to place in order to serve the requirements of plot and history, and then to invent the computer. As we will see when we continue on, his grandson Randy is a much more interesting, fully realized character.

Bobby Shaftoe, on the other hand, is a great character.

I'm looking forward to Bret's post about monetary theory, and the theory of money implicit in coolies rushing all over the place to trade paper for silver.

[What do people want to do with our next installment? My preference is to go one week at a time, but still keep the assigned text pretty short to allow for a close reading.]