I bought and read The Baroque
Cycle this winter, and loved it. I avoided it for the longest time
thinking it would be an overkill because I read Stephenson's books
primarily for his SF work. When I finished it I just had to read Cryptonomicon
again.
While reading it I couldn't stop thinking about the technology in the
book. Cryptonomicon was written in 1999, before we had blogs and
Windows 98 was all the rage. Even the Internet as we know it
today was a lot different. But somehow Stephenson pulled it off,
Cryptonomicon 10 years later is not obsolete. You have Finux
and crypto, optics and data havens... Parts of it almost seem like SF,
even today.
Story follows three narrations. Two of them during WW2, and
how allies broke the axis crypto. There people like Turing are side
characters and besides cryptography Stephenson tells us a story of
IT and electronic computers. Narration set in modern
days follows a hacker named Randy - grandson of a
mathematician that worked on breaking the axis code - and his company
Epiphyte while they are trying to build a data haven. In the
process they get involved in a hunt for Japanese war gold, so you also
get your share of adventure... I often saw people calling it a
cypherpunk/cyberpunk bible, and not without good reason, I agree.