The Barnes & Noble Review Neal Stephenson's latest novel, Cryptonomicon, is an immense and extraordinary tale that unwinds with all the stylistic grandeur his fans have come to expect. With Cryptonomicon, the reader is quickly plunged into a bizarre, breakneck-paced story that interweaves World War II code making and code breaking with computerized global corporate takeovers, one that melds elements of Catch-22, A Man Called Intrepid, and a hefty dose of cyberpunk reality. Stephenson leaves behind the science fiction worlds of his previous novels — Snow Crash and The Diamond Age — to depict the madness involved in many of World War II's top-secret missions and to offer a view of how 1940s cryptography eventually led to technological developments in the world of computers. Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse, a brilliant mathematician at Princeton, is eventually lured away from luminous fellow students Alan Turing and Rudy von Hacklheber and enters the U.S. Navy. There he is considered so dim that he's only given the task of playing the glockenspiel in the Navy band. After the disaster of Pearl Harbor, however, Waterhouse's skills as a cryptoanalyst are finally noticed, and he's immediately sent to Bletchley Park, England, the base of the Allied code-busting operations. The "unbreakable" German code, Enigma, has been cracked, and the Allies want to use their newfound information without alerting the Germans and Japanese to the fact that their plans are no longer secret. It's Waterhouse's job, as a member of the ultra-secret Detachment 2702, to make all oftheAllied actions from this point on look "randomized," so that the Axis powers won't realize Enigma has been broken. Paired up again with Turing, who is on his way to developing the first computer, Waterhouse learns that their old friend Rudy is now the chief German cryptographer.