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 subject matter, genre, subject and/or matter:
“In the middle years of childhood, it is more important to keep alive and glowing the interest in finding out and to support this interest with skills and techniques related to the process of finding out than to specify any particular piece of subject matter as inviolate.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“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)
“It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse—
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.”
—Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972)
“When you gonna get married, Marty? You should be ashamed of yourself. All your brothers and sisters, younger than you, they get married and got the children. I meet your mother in the produce store. She say to me “Eh, you know a nice girl for my boy Marty?” What’s the matter with you? That’s no way!”
—Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981)