![]() ![]() Lovecraft, but the crypto- part looked less to Superman's Krypton than to the history of computers and code breaking. Its title acknowledged fantasy tradition as represented by the (entirely imaginary) Necronomicon so often mentioned in the works of H. Cryptonomicon, however, took off both in terms of size and unpredictability. Though markedly original, not to say contrarian, his first few novels could at a pinch be ascribed to recognizable SF subgenres like satire or techno-thriller and were more or less normal-sized. ![]() His whole career has demonstrated a growing indifference to (sometimes marked disdain for) both convention and verbal economy. ![]() Phrases like "six-dimensional space" are common enough in science fiction, but Stephenson really wants his readers to grasp the idea, not just take it as a datum, and he does not mind how long it takes to tell them how to catch on. N eal Stephenson's latest is a great thick brick of a book weighing in at one-and-a-half kilos, its 937 pages ending with three appendixes, or "Calcas," which are in effect geometric puzzles-cum-explanations. ![]()
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