Cryptonomicon (149 page)

Neal Stephenson:
It’s obvious that modern folks, crypto-entrepreneurs and otherwise, lack heroic purpose. It is obvious to us and it is obvious to Randy. Randy ruminates in several places about how he and his comrades all seem like wimps and losers compared to the WWII generation.

You didn’t have a lot of time to spend gazing at your navel back in the ’40s — no hang-ups about “Am I doing the right thing?” And even if you did have hang-ups, chances are that someone was giving you direct orders and not leaving you much choice in the matter. So, yeah, it’s amazing to read about that era and see these people decisively going off and putting everything into accomplishing certain goals.

Whereas now the fashionable way to be is to have a kind of cool, jaded sort of ennui. Which is understandable, but it does make a lot of people now seem kind of
pallid compared to the people who lived in the ‘40s. And it’s almost worse for us that that generation is so cool about it, so matter-of-fact: “Oh, yeah, well, we had to, you know, defeat evil. So we went and did that. Not much to say, really.”

On the other hand, in World War II, or one of those wars, they had a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think the modern equivalent of that is that there are no jaded, bored people in the high-tech industry, in the land of really good hardcore geeks. They all have a kind of intensity about what they’re doing that makes it impossible for them to be bored or passionless. They are pretty driven, and they get a lot of joy from what they do, and it comes through, I think.

Reporter:
So to return to the original question, “Why crypto?” and to your point about not trying to set an agenda, the fact is that the reader is aware in
Cryptonomicon
of some very large things at stake involving science and technology, and that there’s also some significant history here. And we are talking about a book, after all, that has some equations in it.

Neal Stephenson:
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. 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.

As to history, 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’d paid more attention to the history there. I started feeling the need to put things in a longer historical context, and to find the people whom today we’d call hackers.

It is not difficult to find hacker-types in history — Archimedes; and even in mythology — Daedalus. Certain ancient cities, such as Alexandria and Syracuse, seemed to attract them. But in previous centuries, hackers had to build physical contraptions in order to realize their ideas. Computers changed this by making it possible for hackers to build functioning mechanisms (i.e., computer programs) out of words.

Reporter:
And central to
Cryptonomicon
is the protection of those mechanisms and their products — while also distributing the mechanism and the product.

Neal Stephenson:
That’s the basic contradiction I’m trying to deal with here. There’s always been this duality between secrecy and openness. The digital computer as we have it today was born in the attempt to deal with codes, to go into these impenetrable messages and bring back the information. In that time the codes that we were breaking were to us a sinister force. We had to break these codes or the bad guys were going to take everything over. Now, the computer is all about openness and spreading information to every corner of the world. But at the same time, we’re finding that the more we do that, the more we are perceiving a need to encrypt our stuff, to keep it out of the hands of the bad guys.

Reporter:
Are there any hidden messages in the novel itself?

Neal Stephenson:
No. I kept playing with the idea of putting that stuff in there, but it just didn’t come together; I just didn’t have the energy. Novels are hard enough to interpret sanely, especially a novel like this, without putting an encrypted message in there. Novels are kind of an encrypted message to begin with.

~

Sources:
Amazon.com; Cryptonomicon.com;
Guardian Unlimited
(Jim McClellan, reporter);
Locus Online
;
The Onion
’s AV Club (John Krewson, reporter); Salon.com (Andrew Leonard, reporter);
SF Site
(Catherine Asaro, reporter). See
Editor’s Note
for complete source details.

“Stephensonia/Cryptonomica” was prepared by the editorial staff of HarperCollins for the first e-book publication of
Cryptonomicon
(May 2003). This section combines statements from several sources, listed
below
, that were made by Neal Stephenson during the months following
Cryptonomicon
’s hardcover publication in 1999.

To enhance the general reader’s experience of this text, a statement’s source is not directly noted, ellipses are not indicated, some material has been re-ordered within a given passage, and there has been some light editing. Those with a scholarly motive for examining this section are advised to seek out the original materials.

In May 2003 the sources for these statements were posted as listed
below
. HarperCollins makes no guarantees, of course, that these links remain live. All text quoted is a direct statement by Neal Stephenson, and so is held in copyright by him.

Sources

“
Cryptonomicon
Cypher-FAQ”
by Neal Stephenson: http://www.well.com/user/neal/cypherFAQ.html

“Mother Earth Motherboard”
by Neal Stephenson:
Wired
, Issue 4.12, December 1996; http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html

“Press Conference”
(NB, reporters are named and interview dates are included if cited by the publication itself at the URL listed):

Amazon.com: “Neal Stephenson Decodes
Cryptonomicon
”: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ts/feature/11674/103-9956981-9521468

Cryptonomicon.com: “A Talk with Neal Stephenson,” April 19, 1999: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/chat.html

Guardian Unlimited
: “Neal Stephenson’s Message in Code,” October 14, 1999; Jim McClellan, reporter: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,256309,00.html

Locus Online
: “Neal Stephenson: Cryptomancer,” August 1999: http://www.locusmag.com/1999/Issues/08/Stephenson.html

The Onion
’s AV Club: “Neal Stephenson,” May 27, 1999; John Krewson, reporter: http://www.theavclub.com/avclub3520/avfeature3520.html

Salon.com: “Deep Code,” May 19, 1999; Andrew Leonard, reporter: http://archive.salon.com/books/int/1999/05/19/stephenson/print.html

SF Site
: “A Conversation with Neal Stephenson,” September 1999; Catherine Asaro, reporter: http://www.sfsite.com/10b/ns67.htm