The novel's Cryptonomicon, described as a 'cryptographer's bible', is a fictional book summarizing America's knowledge of cryptography and cryptanalysis. I haven't actually read the Lovecraft books, but clearly it's formed by analogy to that. I've heard the word Necronomicon bounced around.

And that's how I came up with Cryptonomicon. I wanted to give it a title a 17th-century book by a scholar would be likely to have. It features fictionalized characterizations of such historical figures as Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, Isoroku Yamamoto, Karl Dönitz, Hermann Göring, and Ronald Reagan, as well as some highly technical and detailed descriptions of modern cryptography and information security, with discussions of prime numbers, modular arithmetic, and Van Eck phreaking.Īccording to Stephenson, the title is a play on Necronomicon, the title of a book mentioned in the stories of horror writer H. Their goal is to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money and (later) digital gold currency, with a long-term objective to distribute Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare.Ĭryptonomicon is closer to the genres of historical fiction and contemporary techno-thriller than to the science fiction of Stephenson's two previous novels, Snow Crash and The Diamond Age. The second narrative is set in the late 1990s, with characters that are (in part) descendants of those of the earlier time period, who employ cryptologic, telecom, and computer technology to build an underground data haven in the fictional Sultanate of Kinakuta. One group of characters are World War II-era Allied codebreakers and tactical-deception operatives affiliated with the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park (UK), and disillusioned Axis military and intelligence figures. Cryptonomicon is a 1999 novel by American author Neal Stephenson, set in two different time periods.

Audible cryptonomicon