His mathematical skills soon make him one of the leading code-breakers, and he contributes a great deal to the compendium of code-breaking procedures the Navy is compiling, known casually as the “Cryptonomicon.’ The story then jumps to the 1990s. Waterhouse attempts to do his patriotic duty by joining the Navy, but his unimpressive physical condition and lack of coordination land him first in the band, then in the cryptography school. He writes to Waterhouse, but it is clear from the stilted style of his letter that he is prevented from saying anything about what he’s actually doing due to government secrecy. In the next section, Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a mathematical genius attending Princeton, meets mathematicians Alan Turing and Rudolf von Hacklheber. The men working in another section of the installation are code-breakers who have been deciphering messages sent by the Nazis using their Enigma Machine, which they do not realize the Allies have cracked. The novel begins in 1945 Shanghai, where Corporal Bobby Shaftoe is part of a detail that fetches stacks of paper out of a military building and then burns the paper.
Stephenson uses many elements of magical realism as well science fiction to craft a dense narrative centered on the themes of codes and code-breaking. Describing events in two different time periods-World War II and what was then the modern era-the novel tells the connected stories of a large cast of characters (many of the characters in the modern-day sections are descended from characters in the earlier time period). Cryptonomicon is a 1999 science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson.
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