HACKER LAUREATE COMPANY Epiphyte, Creator AGE 39 ADDRESSwww.well.com/user/neal/ BIO No one has ever written about technology as intelligently and compellingly as
Neal Stephenson. Until 1992 Stephenson was a programmer-cum-author whose
novels reached a relatively small audience. Then he published Snow Crash, a
novel that came out of nowhere and reinvented the entire genre of cyberpunk.
This year Stephenson hacked his way into the mainstream with the sprawling,
mind-expanding and (at 1,000-plus pages) backbreaking masterpiece called
Cryptonomicon.
Cryptonomicon may be the only New York Times best seller to contain both a
complete, functioning encryption algorithm and cameos by Ronald Reagan and
Alan Turing. It's like Goedel, Escher, Bach raised to the power of Infinite Jest. The
novel focuses on two nerds from different generations--Lawrence Waterhouse,
a math genius who cracked military codes during World War II, and his grandson
Randy, a programmer struggling to launch Epiphyte, a high-tech start-up in
present-day Southeast Asia. Stephenson's genius is in his explanations: He's the
only novelist out there who not only understands network protocols and
information theory but can also explain them in a way that makes them read like
a car chase. Stephenson is writing the story of technology in the 20th century as it
happens, and it's riveting reading. BEST LINE "Ever since the Mac came out, our operating systems have been based
on metaphors, and anything with metaphors in it is fair game as far as I'm
concerned." FORWARD TILT Brace yourself: according to Stephenson, Cryptonomicon is just the
first volume of a series.
