Genre and Subject Matter
In 2000, Cryptonomicon was nominated for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Awards and won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Cryptonomicon later won the Mir Fantastiki award for best foreign sci-fi novel in 2005. The book has been acclaimed as "the ultimate geek novel".
Cryptonomicon 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 Diamond Age. It features fictionalized characterizations of such historical figures as Alan Turing, Albert Einstein, Douglas MacArthur, Winston Churchill, Isoroku Yamamoto, Karl Dönitz, 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.
Read more about this topic: Cryptonomicon
Famous quotes containing the words genre, subject and/or matter:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“But, though light-headed man forget,
Remembering Matter pays her debt:
Still, through her motes and masses, draw
Electric thrills and ties of Law,
Which bind the strengths of Nature wild
To the conscience of the child.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)