Linux is alluded to, but Stephenson changed it to Finux so that nerds wouldn't tear the details to shreds. To my memory, the closest it comes to something like this is in the Van Eck Phreaking chapter, where I believe Microsoft Word was mentioned. No one in Cryptonomicon looks something up on Yahoo! (or Google for that matter). Stephenson could have easily name-dropped many things here, but didn't. YouTube, Twitter, and Zoom are all mentioned several times in the book - the last being the most egregious, as it ties into the previous point about the pandemic.Ĭontrast with Cryptonomicon - a book written in 1999, and set sometime in the very early 2000's. Not to mention constant references to 2020-2021 web culture. Maybe it would have been a more enjoyable read when it came out, but the book is less than two years old! The constant references to people wearing masks and social distancing to prevent spread of COVID already feel dated. Specifically, frozen in time in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic. The book is set perhaps 10-20 years in the future (I didn't catch the exact date if he mentioned it), but it's almost as if culture and technology are frozen in time. However, when reading this book, I'm constantly annoyed and distracted at certain things. The Diamond Age remains my all-time favorite book, and I've read Cryptonomicon more times than should be allowed by law. AND it's written by one of my favorite authors. Instead, it seems to try to simply explore the incentive systems at play, and the relevant engineering problems, social problems, and international game theory as to how this would actually work out. It's a novel about a libertarian Muskesque billionaire undertaking a solar geoengineering project to cool the Earth, and the attendant geopolitical consequences of such a project, which does not attempt to simplify or promote any particular viewpoint on the matter. It's dense speculative fiction about a pressing topic. On paper, Termination Shock is a book that I should really enjoy. I'm mostly wondering if others feel the same way.

Cryptonomicon book