Literature / Cryptonomicon

Published in 1999, Cryptonomicon is a 1,000+ page Sci-Fi/Historical novel by Neal Stephenson following three independent yet interrelated story arcs, two of which are set during the Second World War and the third during the first years of the twenty-first century. Although it deals with some pretty deep, philosophical themes, the novel itself never comes off as dry or preachy, largely due to Stephenson's unique style of narration. Equal parts profound and profane, Cryptonomicon tells the story of multiple generations within the Waterhouse and Shaftoe families, as well as their attempts to unravel the secrets of a vast conspiracy affecting history and society.

The Heroes:

• Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse: A young mathematician/cryptographer serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy as a part of Detachment 2702, a secret paramilitary organization created for the purpose of keeping the Axis Powers ignorant of the fact that the Allies have broken the Enigma cypher. He's prone to drifting off on tangents that are as profound as they are eccentric. His best friend is Alan Turing.
• Bobby Shaftoe: Marine Raider responsible for putting Waterhouse and company's plans into action. A headstrong and irreverent Warrior Poet, his appetite for adventure comes at the cost of his physical and mental health.
• Randall Lawrence Waterhouse: A geek with a love of mathematics and computer science. He's involved in an attempt to create a "Data Haven", where information may be freely exchanged without government interference. He is the grandson of Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse.
• Goto Dengo: A Japanese mining engineer who is sent to New Guinea. His viewpoint largely serves as a tour of just how horrible the Pacific Theater actually was.

The novel was the first installment set in a shared universe used by several of Stephenson's later works, including The Baroque Cycle, REAMDE and Fall, or Dodge in Hell, which feature ancestors or descendants of the main characters.

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This novel provides examples of:

• Action Girl: America ("Amy") Shaftoe. Naturally, since she is the granddaughter of Marine Raider Bobby Shaftoe.
• Anachronic Order: Not only does the novel interweave storylines set in WWII with ones set in the then-modern late 90s, the individual storylines sometimes bounce around in the timeline.
• Ancient Tradition: Societas Eruditorum.
• Artistic License – Engineering: Waterhouse is inspired by a malfunctioning church organ to create a form of computer memory, consisting of a tube filled with mercury in which a standing wave is excited by a "little paper speaker ripped from an old radio". Electrodes placed along the length of the tube dip into the rippling mercury and generate a pattern of 'on' and 'off' values that denote binary digits. While the contraption described resembles the actual mercury delay line memory in its general details, it would be useless as an actual computer memory, as standing waves are stationary patterns of low and high pressure, and thus Waterhouse's memory can only store bit patterns such as "010101" or "0011001100", which severely limits its potential capacity. (It should be noted that Turing later mentions that Bletchley Park intends to build a mercury tube memory in which the sound wave actually travels down the tube, instead of being a stationary standing wave, thus fitting the description of the mercury delay line memory perfectly. Waterhouse inaccurately replies that he has already done the same thing.)
• Ass Shove: Upon learning of his niece's impending engagement to Enoch, Otto Kivistik produces a ring from out of his anus for him to give to Julieta. This is explained by Uncle Otto being a jewel smuggler who keeps a small container "down there" for just such an occasion.
• Assimilation Plot: The ultimate goal of Loeb's Hive Mind project. Ultimately fails because, apart from believing that individuality is an illusion, none of its supporters can agree on anything.
• Author Avatar: There are quite a few similarities between Stephenson and Randy, including their intellectual pedigree.
• Author Tract: To almost Ayn Randian levels in some places, but most notable when Enoch Root becomes his mouthpiece.
• Bandaged Face
• Bayonet Ya: The Nipponese Army loves their banzai charges and their typical method of prisoner execution is to stab them repeatedly with a bayonet. They find out the hard way that bayonet charges are only good at killing unarmed natives, and when the war turns, end up being mowed down by mass fire from American and Australian troops.
• Blah, Blah, Blah: Waterhouse explaining the digital computer to Comstock:
  "Dr. Turing, of Cambridge University, has pointed out that bobbadah bobbadah hoe daddy yanga langa furjeezama bing jingle oh yeah," Waterhouse says, or words to that effect.
• Brand X: Randy's computer runs a very famous Finnish UNIX-like OS called Finux. The boot loader is called "FILO".
  • A more obscure one is the "Secret Admirers" mailing list. (The Cypherpunks actually debated changing the name of their mailing list to Secret Admirers because some of them thought it was a clever name.)
• Brick Joke: In an early chapter, in the modern time line, Randy's arguing with an annoying Dr. G.E.B. Kivistik. Much later in the book, in the World War II timeline, a Ms. Julieta Kivistik is pregnant, but can't be sure whether Günter, Enoch, or Bobby is the father.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Lawrence drops out of college and into the Navy because he's not interested enough in most of his schoolwork to maintain passing grades.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Both Lawrence Waterhouse and Shaftoe. Also Douglas MacArthur, who is so weird Shaftoe can't quite tell if he's hallucinating whenever the General is around. Avi to a lesser degree.
• Cassandra Truth: Randy warns his girlfriend and her friends early in the book about a minor scandal that erupts around the "War As Text" conference.
• Catch-22 Dilemma: Late in the book, Lawrence Waterhouse is dispatched to Australia, where he isn't known, and he needs to present his security clearance to the guards in order to gain entrance to the codebreaking facility there. However, he has a security clearance so high that it is itself classified, which he can't present to the guards because they're not cleared to know it even exists. He can't contact his superiors to clear this problem up until he gets into the facility.
• Chandler's Law: Near the climax, Andrew Loeb shows up and tries to kill Randy and Co. He does this even after getting his leg blown off by a mine.
• Chekhov's Gun: Quite a few minor details turn out to be important.
• Chekhov's Gunman: We first meet Goto Dengo very close to the start of the book—he's Bobby Shaftoe's friend. He taught Bobby about haiku, sushi, and "chop-socky" (judo); Bobby taught him how to throw a baseball farther than about three feet. As Shaftoe's boat is leaving the port in China, Goto Dengo throws an inactive grenade in thanks and as a joke, and that's the last we see of him for over 400 pages. He eventually turns out to be the person who designed and built Golgotha.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Lawrence Waterhouse is absolutely brilliant, but he's not really all there, interpreting events (like Pearl Harbor, while in the middle of it) rather...differently.
  Clearly, Mr. Drkh has had a long career of being the weirdest person in any given room, but he's about to go down in flames.
• Coincidence Magnet: Bobby Shaftoe. The giant Nip-eating lizards of Guadalcanal that saved his life. Being interviewed by Lieutenant Ronald Reagan (while drugged with morphine). Detachment 2702 missions (such as "Negroes of the Caribbean"). His friendship with Bischoff (a German submarine commander—Shaftoe is an American marine. All of this during WWII). And of course the really, really weird and accidental meet up between General MacArthur, Bobby Shaftoe, and Goto Dengo in the ladies' room in the middle of a battle in the Philippines. It starts to have an effect on him.
  He had slowly been gathering a reputation as a man who needed watching.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: Enoch Root is also known as Enoch the Red, and Randy compares him to a The Lord of the Rings wizard.
• Cool Old Guy: Enoch Root.
• Cool Ship: V-Million.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Lawrence Waterhouse briefly muses on the possibility that the world is actually ruled by a cabal of elderly women who influence world events by controlling how often world leaders get laid. We're mostly sure that he's just being his normal cloudcuckoolander self. Mostly.
• Crazy-Prepared: When your cast includes hackers, gun enthusiasts, and Vietnam veterans ... pretty much everyone.
  • Avi insists that Randy use a 4,096-bit key to encrypt certain corporate documents. A key that size would take a battery of then-modern supercomputers thousands of years to brute-force.
  • Comstock brings a crack team of photographers and stenographers equipped with a wide array of recording equipment and stimulants every time he briefs Waterhouse. He needs them all (see Blah, Blah, Blah above).
• Crazy Survivalist: Andrew Loeb.
  • Averted with Tom Howard, who is an enthusiastic user and collector of automatic weapons but is fairly mentally stable beyond a...quirk or two the book gets into.
• Deadpan Snarker: A fair number of the cast get in several good ones; most notably, this is Douglas MacArthur's general mode of communication with troops who have failed him in some way.
• Dinner and a Show: Randy is first introduced at a fancy restaurant being pushed over the edge by his girlfriend's friends into picking an academic fistfight.
• Ditzy Genius: Lawrence Waterhouse, exemplified when he takes a Navy intelligence test. When given a mathematical word problem, he thinks the simplified assumptions are a trick and fills reams of scratch paper working out the answer without them. In the process he proves a new theorem, but the Navy sticks him in the band because the results of his intelligence test show he's too stupid for anything else.
• Door Stopper: Sits at over 1,000 pages. Bonus points for the In-Universe Cryptonomicon being a doorstopper which is used as a literal door stop in another novel.
• Everyone Is Armed: Including the nerds.
• Everyone Knows Morse: Unusual variant: Randy uses Morse to view and enter data on his laptop when he's in prison and being monitored, using the spacebar for input and a keylock LED for output.
• Fetish: Tom Howard's chapter-long dissertation on hosiery/furniture fetishism. It's not clear whether it's sincere or not.
• Fictional Counterpart: The in-universe Cryptonomicon is basically an annotated version of Military Cryptanalysis. William F. Friedman (the author of Military Cryptanalysis) is credited, in-universe, with the original compilation of the Cryptonomicon. The Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod's firearms manufacturing guide is P. A. Luty's Expedient Homemade Firearms with the serial numbers filed off.
• Fictional Country:
  • Kinakuta is a small Southeast Asian island nation somewhere between Indonesia and the Philippines which seems to be a riff on Brunei or Sarawak.
  • Qwghlm is an archipelago off the coast of Scotland. The language's orthography parodies Welsh, but it is apparently a language isolate so difficult to understand that Qwghlmians serve as the British version of Navajo code talkers.
• Foreshadowing: After Enoch's death, Rudy stays with the body while Bobby takes the others away for coffee to help them all calm down. Not long after this, Bobby spots Rudy furtively leaving the doctor's office, accompanied by someone covered in a blanket. He doesn't think any more about this, but a Genre Savvy reader may well suspect that it's more significant than it appears. Sure enough, Enoch later turns up alive and well.
• Friendly Enemy: Waterhouse is overjoyed to learn that his opposite number for the Axis nations is none other than his old college buddy Rudolph von Hacklheber. Waterhouse works with Turing, and Turing was Rudy's boyfriend at the time.
• From Bad to Worse: Goto Dengo's whole ordeal, from when Americans attack until he meets up with his fellow Nipponese again. I mean, first the bombs, then the flaming oil everywhere, then the whole nearly-dying-of-thirst-and-exhaustion thing, then the sharks, then the other sharks, then the sharp coral, then the poisonous snake, then the cannibals, then an Australian patrol, then a death sentence for surrendering to the enemy...and then it gets even worse.
• Functional Addict: Bobby Shaftoe is addicted to morphine for part of the book. He's still plenty good at his job.
• Gainax Ending: Stephenson is famous for these. Cryptonomicon is no exception.
• Generation Xerox: Bloodlines throughout this book and continued into The Baroque Cycle all share similar personality quirks and stories.
  • The Shaftoes are headstrong, tough and irreverent types whose adventures often bring them into the worlds of war, politics and intrigue. Jack is a swashbuckling rogue, Bobby is a badass soldier and Amy is a headstrong Action Girl.
  • The Waterhouses are all very intelligent thinkers who flourish on the periphery of an important academic or technological movement and help make practical applications of the ideas and discoveries of their intellectual superiors. Daniel is a natural philosopher who aids his friend Isaac Newton and other members of the Royal Society. Lawrence is a cryptographer and early computing pioneer who helps his friend Alan Turing. Randy is Chief Technology Officer at the innovative tech company started by his friend, the brilliant Avi Halaby.
• Genius Bruiser: For all his martial prowess, Bobby Shaftoe is clearly pretty intelligent himself.
• The Gestapo: They only show up once. Rudy is less than impressed.
• Hard on Soft Science: Although really more like "Hard on Liberal Arts Academia". Pretty much anybody who has a graduate degree and isn't a scientist or working in the private sector is a Jerkass who has no comprehension of the "real" world, notably Dr. G.E.B. Kivistik and Randy's ex, Charlene. Balanced somewhat in that these people, unlike most of the hard scientists, have genuine social skills, and averted in Enoch Root, who has a mathematical background but also a strong philosophical one.
• Historical Domain Character: Alan Turing is featured prominently in early chapters, General Douglas MacArthur in later chapters. Future US president Ronald Reagan conducts an interview of Shaftoe in one chapter.
• Hollywood Encryption: Thoroughly averted. Bruce Schneier served as a consultant, and the book also draws on stuff you can find on actual textbooks.
• Hollywood Hacking: Averted to some degree; Randy goes through an elaborate (and elaborately-described) attempt to anonymize his Internet traffic in order to hack a computer, only to realize that he's spent a lot of time ensuring that the computer is pretty much unhackable, and that the only way to make the changes he needs to make is to log in with his actual user account—so after all of the work he's put into making the attack untraceable, he has to enter his own user name. He briefly contemplates leaking his username and password via an anonymous forum post, but realizes that the timing would only make it even more suspicious.
• Honor Before Reason: Douglas MacArthur thoroughly exploits Japan's dedication to "honor" during the war, brazenly blowing up targets that only Japan should know about, because MacArthur knows that no Japanese higher-up will willingly admit that their military codes have been broken.
• I Know You Know I Know: The purpose of Detachment 2702. Lawrence spends a lot of time thinking about this kind of thing.
• Incurable Cough of Death: Lawrence's mom died from what the book implies was polio. It was at least the kind of disease that puts one in an iron lung or leaves the infected with a permanent limp. This is confirmed much later in the book, when Lawrence arrives on Qwlghm. "Mrs. Qrtt...notices his slightly asymmetrical walk and manages to ferret out that he had a spot of polio at one point."
• Instructional Dialogue: A little more subtle than in Anathem, but still very much present.
• Jerkass: Earl Comstock and then some. He steals ideas from Waterhouse that would have made him millions, and uses the NSA as his own private codebreakers. His son, whom we don't see much of, is apparently worse.
• Japanese Ranguage: Upon arriving in Kinakuta, Randy meets a Nipponese businessman named Ferdinand Goto (one of Goto Dengo's younger relatives), who has the unlikely-sounding transliteration of "Goto Furudenendu" on his business card. A normal transliteration would be closer to "Goto Ferudinando".

• Mad Mathematician: Though they're harmlessly eccentric, Lawrence Waterhouse and most of his progeny are this to at least some extent.
• Mars and Venus Gender Contrast: Played completely straight. John Grey's trope-naming book even gets a Shout-Out, or even a Take That! - Randy dismissively describes it as a book ,where once you've heard the title, you don't really need to read the text.
• Metafictional Title: In-Universe, the Cryptonomicon is a comprehensive study of cryptography, both for making and breaking codes.
• More Dakka: A Vickers machine gun is described in loving detail.
• Mundane Made Awesome:
  • Cap'n Crunch cereal. Breakfast has never been so pornographic.
  • Also, the Penthouse letter.
• Mythology Gag/Continuity Nod:
  • In Rudy and Alan's dialogue about Leibniz, Rudy refers to an attempt by Leibniz to catalog everything that exists, and Alan exasperatedly comments that since no one but Rudy seems to have heard of this attempt, it can be assumed that he failed. This attempt was a sizable chunk of the plot of The Baroque Cycle, thus being a rare continuity nod forward in time (in the real world). Alternatively, it's foreshadowing something that's already happened in a book that hadn't been written yet.
  • While the two of them are in Italy on a Detachment 2702 mission, Bobby Shaftoe asks Enoch Root if he can talk to the locals. He responds in the negative, saying that his Italian and Latin are a bit muddled, and he would probably come across sounding like "a seventeenth century alchemist or something."
  • The Solomonic Gold, which so much of the plot of The Baroque Cycle revolves around, ends up on a German submarine sunk in the Philippines toward the end of WW-II, and then recovered by Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, who has no idea of its history or significance.
  • When explaining why he chose Bobby and Enoch's location as a place to flee to with Angelo, Rudy explains that he has "certain old family connections" with Enoch, adding that It's a Long Story and he would have to write a whole book.^*  Eight books, in fact, although they were originally published in three volumes. He is implied to know a lot more about Enoch than he is letting on, including the fact that he can come Back from the Dead.
• Nazi Gold: Well, Yamashita's gold—the Pacific War equivalent—is a big connection between the plot lines.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Randy is about to erase some incriminating evidence from a computer that the Feds are trying to seize when someone else, thinking that they're foiling the Feds, hits the building with an electromagnetic pulse, frying all the electronics in it and shutting down Randy's erasure of the data. They're quite pleased with themselves, and when Randy tells them that they also fried his laptop, they tell him not to worry—the EMP wouldn't damage the data stored on his hard drive. They don't realize that the same applies to the servers that the Feds are seizing.
  "I know you are expecting me to take that as good news," Randy says.
• No Communities Were Harmed: Between Qwghlm and Kinakuta, almost half the story takes place in fictional locations. Qwghlm is a small, rustic island northwest of Great Britain with a language and culture that parody Welsh. Kinakuta is an island between the Philippines and Borneo ruled by a Sultan with very IT-friendly policies.
• Noodle Incident:
  • The lengthy piece of erotica concerning antique furniture and black stockings. Reading the piece isn't much more enlightening. Really, its only function is to be memorable so that the reader doesn't forget about Van Eck phreaking.
  • Earl Comstock's fall (or possibly push) off a ski lift in Colorado in 1975 also counts. We never see it, but we know it was richly deserved.
    "My pop—" Amy does a little head-fake towards one of the photographs "—happened to be seated right next to him at the time."
    "By accident, or—"
    "Total chance. Not planned."
    "That's one way to look at it," Randy says, "but on the other hand, if Earl Comstock went skiing frequently, the probability was actually rather high that sooner or later he'd find himself sitting, fifty feet off the ground, next to a Vietnam combat veteran."
• Obfuscated Interface: Randy intentionally obfuscates his computer's interface with lots of random pop-up windows in order to prevent the baddies who are spying on him from figuring out what he's doing. And what's worse, he wasn't even looking at the screen. The computer told him secret information by blinking Morse code through the capslock lights.
• Obstructive Bureaucrat: An entire family of them, the Comstocks.
• Ocean Madness: Goto, having learned to swim in flooded mineshafts and caves, an Okinawan, who grew up by the sea, and a man from Tokyo who can't swim but is strong enough to stay afloat until he learns to swim all manage to swim several miles from open sea to New Guinea after their troop transport is sunk while many other survivors are killed by drowning, injuries from the wreck, the elements, or sharks.
• Oh, Crap!: At one point, Bobby Shaftoe flips the bird to what he thinks is a mannequin of Douglas MacArthur that Japanese planes are shooting at during an air raid. Then the 'mannequin' swivels it's head and looks right at him...
• Passive Aggressive Combat: When Randy refuses to shave his beard, Charlene launches into an in-depth study on the psychology behind men's beards. When Amy discovers it, she asks if that was the way she and Randy fought.
• Powerful People Are Subs: An extremely wealthy character known only as "The Dentist" opposes the protagonists because he is a submissive under the control of his Filipino dominatrix wife, who in turn takes orders from conspirators opposing the protagonists' attempt to recover gold stolen by Those Wacky Nazis and create an Internet data haven.
• Pink Mist: The fate of the unfortunate Lieutenant Ethridge.
  "You weren't hit," the flyboy says confidently. "If you'd been hit, you'd look like Lieutenant Ethridge."
  For the first time, Shaftoe hazards movement. He props himself up on one elbow, and finds that the floor of the plane is slick and wet with red fluid.
  He had noticed a pink mist in the cabin, and supposed that it was produced by a hydraulic fluid leak. But the hydraulic system now seems hunky-dory, and the stuff on the floor of the plane is not a petroleum product....
  Shaftoe looks at what is left of Ethridge, which bears a striking resemblance to what was lying around that butcher shop earlier today....
  "Holy cow," he finally says, "that Kraut twenty-millimeter is something else."
• Properly Paranoid: Both Avi and Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe come across like this. Of course, it all turn out to be justified when the when it turns out that a ruthless corporate executive and his Filipino mob partners are gunning for the collective heads of Epiphyte(2) corp.
  "I [Randy] keep bothering him [Douglas] to get Ordo and encrypt his email, but he won't."
  "That is really unprofessional," Avi grumbles. "He needs to be more paranoid."
  "He's so paranoid he doesn't even trust Ordo."
  Avi's scowl eases. "Oh. That's alright then."
• Punch-Clock Villain: Goto Dengo is appalled at the brutality of his fellow soldiers, particularly after the New Guinea affair, but can't protest it lest he be shot for being a traitor or insulting somebody's honor. He saves a handful of workers when the Japanese Army is sealing Golgotha—permanently—and killing everyone who worked on it, converts to Christianity after he meets Douglas MacArthur, and helps rebuild Japan after they surrender.
• Running Gag: Despite its harrowing origin, Bobby Shaftoe's obsession with giant, Nip-eating lizards turns into one of these, culminating with a moment where he sees a Chinese dragon on Douglas MacArthur's bathrobe and freaks out.
• Sequel Hook: Subtle enough that it initially seems like bad writing. Stephenson has said that no one batting an eye at Enoch Root appearing at Shaftoe's funeral after having dramatically died in Sweden the previous winter is a hint that Cryptonomicon might be sci-fi after all. It's a hook for his next book, The Baroque Cycle, which also features Enoch Root—and takes place at the turn of the 18th century.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: The Waterhouses are especially prone to this.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: The academic conference that ultimately ruins Randy and Charlene's relationship, as well as Charlene's lengthy article on beards. Similarly, the Japanese Army, when it has to come up with terms to save face: "retrograde maneuver" (i.e., "retreat") comes up repeatedly.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: Tom Howard's rambling story about discovering his own and his wife's sexual fetishes rambles on for most of a chapter. Its only relevance to the story is to illustrate what Van Eck phreaking is and how it works, which are critical to the plot later. The story's actual content is never referenced again.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: Discussed and zigzagged. Randy is awed by Action Girl Amy Shaftoe's changed appearance at a ballroom dance, but he admits that, unlike in the movies, she's not as well-dressed or as good a dancer as the ballroom regulars. When he later sees her in a nicer dress at the airport, he feels like he's been hit with a poleaxe.
• Shout-Out:
  • Randy compares everyone to characters and races from The Lord of the Rings. He's a dwarf, Enoch is Gandalf, Loeb is Gollum, etc.
  • Gunter Enoch Bobby Kivistik.
• Shown Their Work: If there's a commercial literature work that does features real cryptography, down to and including a working Perl script for a cipher commissioned from a real cryptography guru, as well as including entire lectures on information theory, it's definitely Cryptonomicon. Also detailed is computer science, politics, diving technique, etc. If you stop to think about all the research Stephenson has done, it'll be a long time before you finish the book.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Doug Shaftoe.
• Strong Girl, Smart Guy: Amy Shaftoe is an Action Girl from a long line of adventurers. Randy Waterhouse is a bookish tech genius. They get into a relationship.
• Staying Alive: Enoch Root.
• Straight Gay: Alan Turing.
• Super-Detailed Fight Narration
• Tangled Family Tree:
  • The Shaftoes. Lampshaded when Amy states that, while she could try to explain her actual relation to her "cousin" M.A.^note Marcus Aurelius. Yes, after the Roman Emperor, Randy would "start shifting around and heaving great big sighs before [she] got more than half way through".
  • The Altamiras even more so. Of course, they're eventually connected through Bobby, Glory, and Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe... which only makes everything even more complicated.
    The family Altamira is vast enough to constitute an ethnic group unto itself, and all of them live in the same building—practically in the same room. Once or twice, Glory has begun to explain to Bobby Shaftoe how they are all related. Now, there are many Shaftoes—mostly in Tennessee—but the Shaftoe family tree still fits on a cross-stitch sampler. The family Shaftoe is to the Altamira clan as a single, alienated sapling is to a jungle. Filipino families, in addition to being gigantic and Catholic, are massively crosslinked by godparent/godchild relationships, like lianas stretched from branch to branch and tree to tree. If asked, Glory is happy, even eager, to talk for six hours nonstop about how the Altamiras are related to one another, and that is just to give a general overview. Shaftoe's brain always shuts off after the first thirty seconds.
• Taking You with Me: Bobby Shaftoe blows himself up with a large and ship-like bunker of Japanese soldiers. More accurately, he decides to blow them up, and, already fatally wounded, joins them.
  • Averted in that whenever Japanese soldiers try this, they die.
    "Don't you guys know banzai charges never work?!"
    "Everyone who learned that died in banzai charges."
• Title Drop: The eponymous Cryptonomicon, which is a centuries-old, ever-growing compendium of cryptology, gets mentioned several times.
• Translation: "Yes": Several of the Qwghlmian-English parts. Bonus points for bringing in information theory: the Qwghlmian language's information density is so high, it's difficult to transmit clearly over a radio channel.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: One set during WWII, the other during the final years of the twentieth century.
• Unexplained Recovery: Enoch Root is unceremoniously shot to death in Sweden mid-book and given a rather dramatic funeral, but suddenly reappears talking to Goto Dengo in Manila towards the climax and eventually shows up in the jail cell next to Randy... sixty years later.
• Unusual Euphemism: In the lead to the final scene, security in the jungle is provided by Doug Shaftoe's "interesting and well-travelled friends". The inference is that these are former special forces operators and scarily professional individuals.
• The Vietnam Vet: Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe.
• Walking Armory: In Egypt, Bobby Shaftoe has half a dozen weapons hidden on his person; knives, pistols, derringers, etc, in addition to the much more obvious Tommy Gun. At one point, he's on a transport and trying to get comfortable so he can get some sleep. To do so, he has to deal with: "the teeny revolver in his waistband", "the Marine Raider stiletto holstered invisibly between his shoulder blades", "a standard-issue Colt semiautomatic" on one side, "his own six-shooter from home" on the other, "the various ammo clips, speed loaders, and maintenance supplies that go with them", "the V-44 'Gung Ho'...knife, strapped to the outside of his lower leg", and "the derringer that he keeps on the other leg for balance". The only things he doesn't move "are the grenades in his front pockets". This happens a line after Shaftoe has rolled his eyes at how unstable and paranoid a pair of SAS pilots must be for carrying sub-machine guns inside the cockpit.
• War Is Hell: Stephenson's depiction of the Second World War, particularly the Pacific theater, is incredibly brutal. Gets really depressing once you realize it's a case of Shown Their Work; the Japanese, in their Imperial phase, were really not nice people.
• Warrior Poet: Bobby Shaftoe and Goto Dengo. Bonding over poetry is how they first meet.
• Wicked Cultured: At one point we meet Herman Goring, who is a terrible person... but has great taste in art.
• World of Badass: The narration posits that any organism living on Earth after billions of years of evolution is a "nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machine". (Even nerds like Lawrence.)
  Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey [Lawrence's father] was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo—which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.
• You Are Number 6: Loeb insists on being referred to as RIST 9E03. No one outside of his immediate circle of followers calls him this.

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