This is the first edition, first printing of this book that consisted of 50,000 copies. Stephenson's signature, signed on a plate that is collaged to a page near the front cover, was distributed by the publisher in 250 signed and numbered copies; the Sackner copy is unnumbered. This novel consists of at least three interwoven stories. One is set during World War II from the American perspective, another from World War II from the Japanese perspective, and the third from an American perspective of Internet communications. All stories involve encryption and codes. The author writes a fictionalized account of Alan Turing's role in computers and codes.Therese Littleton wrote the following review for Amazon.com. Cryptonomicon zooms all over the world, careening conspiratorially back and forth between two time periods--World War II and the present. Our 1940s heroes are the brilliant mathematician Lawrence Waterhouse, cryptanalyst extraordinaire, and gung ho, morphine-addicted marine Bobby Shaftoe. They're part of Detachment 2702, an Allied group trying to break Axis communication codes while simultaneously preventing the enemy from figuring out that their codes have been broken. Their job boils down to layer upon layer of deception. Dr. Alan Turing is also a member of 2702, and he explains the unit's strange workings to Waterhouse. "When we want to sink a convoy, we send out an observation plane first.... Of course, to observe is not its real duty--we already know exactly where the convoy is. Its real duty is to be observed.... Then, when we come round and sink them, the Germans will not find it suspicious."All of this secrecy resonates in the present-day story line, in which the grandchildren of the WWII heroes--inimitable programming geek Randy Waterhouse and the lovely and powerful Amy Shaftoe--team up to help create an offshore data haven in Southeast Asia and maybe uncover some gold once destined for Nazi coffers. To top off the paranoiac tone of the book, the mysterious Enoch Root, key member of Detachment 2702 and the Societas Eruditorum, pops up with an unbreakable encryption scheme left over from WWII to befuddle the 1990s protagonists with conspiratorial ties. Cryptonomicon is vintage Stephenson from start to finish: short on plot, but long on detail so precise it's exhausting. Every page has a math problem, a quotable in-joke, an amazing idea, or a bit of sharp prose. Cryptonomicon is also packed with truly weird characters, funky tech, and crypto--all the crypto you'll ever need, in fact, not to mention all the computer jargon of the moment. A word to the wise: if you read this book in one sitting, you may die of information overload (and starvation). Amazon.com also conducted the following interview.Amazon.com: Is the Cryptonomicon of the title a real book?Neal Stephenson: No. This novel, Cryptonomicon, is eventually going to be part of a series of novels about crypto that cover a long span of historical time. As a way of tying them all together, I came up with a fictitious book of the same name that, according to the story, was written in the 1600s by an English scholar. It's a kind of Talmudic compendium of crypto lore that's been added on to in the centuries since then. It shows up only very briefly in the novel. It's just kind of mentioned once or twice in the World War II part--the guys are using it as one of their training manuals. By the time the modern-day storyline rolls around, it's been scanned.I've done a lot of searching to make sure I wasn't stepping on any real titles, and I haven't found any references to an actual book by that name. I was trying to come up with a name for this fictitious 17th-century book that would sound like one of those old titles--they used to give quasi-Latin names to books.Amazon.com: How many books will be in the series?Stephenson: Well, I'm trying to avoid specifying a specific number. We're trying to avoid the "T" word--trilogy. Not that there's anything wrong with trilogies, but we're trying to use words like "cycle" or "series" instead. Partly because I really don't know, and partly because the term "trilogy" implies a closer linkage between books. I'm trying to write these in such a way that you could read any one in the series and not have any idea that the others existed.Amazon.com: What made you decide to write a non-science fiction book?Stephenson: That's not how I thought of it. There's a kind of science fiction take on things that I find interesting. Occasionally, it's been the habit of SF writers to apply that take to things that aren't typically what you think of as science fiction--historical novels, for instance. One of the most prominent examples of that was the steampunk novel by Sterling and Gibson, The Difference Engine. That's kind of what I'm doing here, it's just that the historical period I'm looking at is fairly recent--it's World War II.It might seem strange, but [settling on a genre] doesn't even enter my mind until moments like this. Selling and distributing books isn't my job, and assigning particular categories to books is something that's necessary and desirable when you come to that part of the business, but when you're in the writing part of it, it just never comes up.It's all one thing to me. My early novel Zodiac, for example, is set in the modern day. To me it's all one thing that I do, and I'm not really that conscious of whether I'm currently writing science fiction or something else.Amazon.com: How did you research all the cool stuff in the book?Stephenson: A lot of it is pretty straight--reading World War II history and crypto history. The undersea cable article that I wrote for Wired gave me a chance to visit some interesting parts of the world and meet some interesting people who know about those kinds of topics. I wish I could tell you something entertaining or exciting about research, but in the end, it's research.Amazon.com: How about the submarine scenes?Stephenson: I went to Chicago, where they have a U-boat in the courtyard of a museum. They captured it from the Germans during the war and towed it up the seaway and into Lake Michigan, put it on a railway car, and dragged it into the courtyard of this museum. They've got a lot of it blocked off, but there's a little route you can take through it led by a tour guide. So that, plus watching Das Boot, and just reading the accounts. A lot of the people who went through that experience were not shy about explaining what it was like in print. So that was enough to get me started.Amazon.com: In the book, the business plan for the start-up tech company is startlingly accurate--and funny. How did were you inspired to write that?Stephenson: Oh, that. I actually tried to write a couple of business plans. I have this need to do stuff, to tinker with stuff. And for a while the only way I could justify putting time and money into screwing around was to claim that I was trying to start a high-tech business or something. Which in retrospect was ludicrous. But in any event, during the 1980s I actually did attempt to get one or two high-tech businesses going, so that involved writing business plans. It just gives me the cold sweats even thinking about it.Amazon.com: Who is your favorite character in Cryptonomicon?Stephenson: I have to say my personal favorite is Bobby Shaftoe. My wife's uncle was a Marine at Guadalcanal, and I did a lot of reading about Marines; they really had a particular style about them that I found interesting. I was reading an anecdote about this guy who was on the Yangtze River patrol in the 1930s. Their gunboat went up the river, way deep into China. When they dropped anchor at a bend in the river, they saw a British Imperial Navy gunboat on the same patrol a short distance away. So they got together, and the British Marine takes the American Marine guy over and opens up this locker, and it's full of polo mallets, and saddles, and stuff. And he said, "You provide the ponies, we'll provide everything else." So these American Marines went ashore and somehow arranged to buy or rent a string of Mongolian ponies, and they set up a polo field, or chukker, or pitch, whatever you call it, and set it up and played polo.By modern standards, they were kind of rough-edged characters, but they did have a certain kind of style about them.Amazon.com: Was there a real person who was your inspiration for Lawrence Waterhouse?Stephenson: The classic line we trot out for questions like this is that the characters are composites, which is not a very satisfactory way of explaining how it works. It kind of implies that every feature a character has or anything he does can be traced back to something real, which isn't the case. At a certain point when you're going to write novels, you start to realize that your characters are taking off and doing stuff that you don't necessarily expect or want them to do. After a certain point you kind of have to go with that. So you try and come up with characters who have plausible backgrounds and could have existed in the real world, and then you kind of let them go and see what happens. That's true of Waterhouse and most of these other people.Waterhouse's particular combo of biographical data is unique, but nothing about him is particularly outlandish, except that he's unusually gifted in math. But I think his overall story is fairly typical up to the point where he gets messed up in Detachment 2702.Amazon.com: Is this is a book about changing the world, or is it a good action adventure?Stephenson: I think that if you write a novel or create any work of art in the pursuit of a specific end, a specific goal--reaching a particular audience or having a particular impact on the world--the art tends to suffer. And so I kind of avoid doing that. I try to start with some impression or some scenario that I can't get out of my head, and to kind of build on that. At a certain point, you have this kind of blind hope that you'll reach some audience. It remains to be seen whether that's going to happen. To me, there's something about crypto during the second half of the 20th century that is really kind of haunting and interesting. I find it's a theme that can be taken to some pretty interesting places. It was very important, obviously, in World War II, and it's very important now.Amazon.com: You've loved crypto since you were a kid--do you encrypt your e-mail and files?Stephenson: I've got PGP and all that on my computers at home, but I find that I don't use it very much. I don't really have that many personal secrets. If I was running a business or if I had proprietary data to worry about, I would probably use it a lot. I'm more interested in how encryption can be used to verify identities and sign documents. It seems like, all evidence to the contrary, the level of paranoia in society is not high enough right now that everyone feels like they have to encrypt and digitally sign their e-mail. The only time they do is when there are credit card numbers at stake or something. That might change. You can sort of make an analogy to gun ownership. A lot of people feel that, even though society in general is peaceful compared to Kosovo, it's a good idea to retain the ability to defend yourself against an oppressive government. Without taking a position on that, I think that a lot of crypto people have an analogous attitude about crypto technology. Even though they don't use it every day for all their e-mail, they feel that it's safer for ordinary people to have access to that technology just in case everything goes bad.If things like the Melissa virus start happening more often, people may use this more. At the moment there's kind of a remarkable situation, which I would not have predicted--abuses are pretty few and people pretty much trust what they see on the Net.Amazon.com: If we were to feed Cryptonomicon into a super-sophisticated crypto analysis program, what would we find?Stephenson: Are there any hidden messages? No. I kept playing with the idea of putting that stuff in there, but it just didn't come together, I just didn't have the energy. Novels are hard enough to interpret sanely, especially a novel like this, without putting an encrypted message in there. They are kind of an encrypted message to begin with -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.