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Thursday, June 5, 2008

I am a self-confessed lover of technology, loving it as an externalisation and extension of the brilliance that is the human mind. I came across Neal Stephenson's name in an information science related discussion list. The book was Snowcrash, referring to the way computer screens would white out as they crashed. My beloved library didn't have Snowcrash but it did have the tome-like and hard to pronounce Cryptonomicon.
Cryptonomicon is an Indiana Jones epic for technology and cryptography junkies. Two threads, one set during WWII highlighting codes and their breaking, looted Nazi and Japanese gold, and one set in present day around the development of an uncrackable data haven free from government or commercial interference (A Swiss banking system for data if you will). The two central characters in the present are the grandchildren of two significant characters in the WWII time. And of course, the stories and lives converge to a suitable and satisfying climax.
Like all my favourite authors, Stephenson blurs fact and fiction, and historical characters are deliberately painted larger than life. Blending Alan Turing (one of the fathers of modern computing) with a genius US Navy code breaker and Douglas Macarthur, General of the US Army, hated by US Marines, but fearless in the face of combat with a Marine hero responsible for a "black ops" group whose role was to ensure the Germans and Japanese did not suspect their transmission codes had been cracked. And that is just one of the threads.
As much a vision into an intelligent, lucid and creative American mind, Cryptonomicon is an expose of the world of codes, their makers and breakers, the consequences of broken and unbroken codes during times of war and the possibility that in today's World Wide Web world security of data will be of greater value than gold.
I did need to renew the book two times (isn't online renewal great) to cover the 900+ pages. And my eyes did glaze at some of the explanation of some of the codes and statistical methods for code hiding and breaking.
But the writing style was crisp and wry, the storyline intriguing. Language and concepts make the book more suitable for open minded adults, rather than children or people locked in patriotic or unexamined views of reality.
Andy Carnahan
The Rose of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon. Weidenfeld & Nicolson , 2007

The Rose of Sebastopol by Katherine McMahon is an engrossing historical novel which juxtaposes London’s comfortable middle class world of the 1850s and the horror and suffering of the Russian battlefields of the Crimean War.

Mariella Lingwood is an accomplished young middle class woman who wants nothing more than to marry her fiancé Henry, who is a respected London surgeon and public health expert, and to spend her married life in pursuits acceptable to her social circle.
Mariella’s conventional and comfortable world is turned upside down when in the winter of 1854 Henry leaves for the bloody battlefields of Balaclava and Sebastopol to tend the injured, sick and dying of the Crimean war.
Henry is followed soon after by Mariella’s headstrong and unconventional cousin, Rosa who, unlike Mariella, wants more from life than Victorian convention allows women. Rosa travels to the Crimea determined, despite the appalling conditions, to nurse and save as many sick and injured as possible.

As she waits patiently at home, the war for Mariella is contained within the pages of her scrapbook, in her London sewing circle, and in the letters she receives from Henry. This all changes when the news that Henry is gravely ill with typhoid fever reaches her.
Accompanied by her maid, she hurries to Henry’s sickbed in Italy and there she discovers Henry is no longer the man she thought she knew and that Rosa has gone missing.
Mariella is driven to find Rosa so sets off to the carnage which were the battlefields of the Crimean war to search for her. Rosa’s possible whereabouts are surrounded by mystery and hearsay and in her quest Mariella ends up discovering more than she ever thought she would.
This novel is compelling and recommended reading for those who love romance and historical fiction with an edge. The description of battle and disease is not for the squeamish but for anyone interested in the world and society of England in the 1850’s it conveys that world in telling detail.
Roxanne