A Foot of Neal Stephenson

I’ve got a paperback copy of Cryptonomicon. Its 1,100 pages feature a globe-spanning plot that hops between World II and the 1990s. In the past, the military launches a covert operation to keep the Germans from learning that their Enigma codes have been broken, involving staging events designed to throw off any statistical analysis. Brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse is the brains and Marine Sergeant Bobby Shaftoe is the muscle, bewildered by the seemingly ridiculous missions he and his team carry out. In the future, Waterhouse’s grandson Randy is part of an Internet startup with grand plans involving digital currency in Asia. When Randy’s company begins doing business with Bobby Shaftoe’s son, a decades-old secret involving a lost fortune in gold floats to the surface, driving a complex story that includes supporting appearances by historical characters from Alan Turing to General Douglas MacArthur. There’s also a mysterious, apparently ageless character named Enoch Root who gives the tale a sci-fi twist.

Ancestors of the Shaftoes and Waterhouses are among the main characters in Stephenson’s ambitious Baroque Cycle, which alone makes up half my foot of Stephenson. (It might have been more if I’d picked it up in the eight-paperback edition.) The story begins in Quicksilver during the Enlightenment in England. Daniel Waterhouse is an aspiring natural philosopher helping to pioneer scientific methods through his work with his friends like Isaac Newton. Meanwhile, so-called “King of the Vagabonds” Jack Shaftoe is taking part of the Battle of Vienna when he rescues a slave named Eliza from Turkish captivity, and they embark on a series of adventures together that continue in The Confusion and The System of the World. Across years, the three find themselves embroiled in various schemes regarding politics, science, religions, and economics. Once again, Encoch Root and a legendary cache of gold provide the more fantastical elements, not to mention plot connections to Cryptonomicon.

Stephenson’s next book, Anathem, doesn’t feature the Waterhouse or Shaftoes, and it’s the most purely sci-fi of his 21st century output (though he is of course best known for the post-cyberpunk classic Snow Crash). In a world where scientists have taken to cloistering themselves in monastery-like communities in order to preserve knowledge through periods of upheaval in human history, a young man and his friends are recruited from one of these compounds to combat an unknown, apparently alien threat. With Stephenson inventing a completely new society, playing with language, and noodling about with complex real-world science, this is perhaps his most ambitious novel, and probably his best.

After Anathem, the plot of Reamde sounds almost pedestrian, even though it’s another continent-skipping epic in which a small-time scheme by Chinese hackers to ransom the personal data of the participants in a popular online game leads to carnage when members of the Russian mob fall victim to the plot. With terrorists, hackers, international criminals, billionaires, and spies in the mix, Stephenson crafts a modern thriller as only he could. The book maintains its appeal to the sci-fi/fantasy crowd through a subplot revolving around the on-line game and the cyber war waged within it, sparked by a philosophical difference between the two fantasy novelists who helped design its plot. 
It’s hard to believe how much depth, how many new ideas, how much complexity and detail, Stephenson has managed to fit into a single foot. I’m looking forward to breaking into the second foot in May.
Pre-order Seveneves, available May 19.