A myth has taken over America: geek culture is now mainstream. It seems to be true and to a certain extent, it is true. But to a more certain and truer extent, it is incomplete. The geek culture that has gone mainstream is a highly sexualized and very dumbed-down version that most “nerds” laugh at as impossibly simplistic. If you really want to get a peek at the down and dirty of geek culture, try reading Neal Stephenson’s massively nerdy novel Cryptonomicon.
The advisory “try reading” is not issued lightly. In 2015, Charlie Jane Anders produced a list rather cheekily titled "10 Books You Pretend to Have Read (And Why You Should Really Read Them)." Among the ten books which comprise this list are such notoriously difficult novels as Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest along with some really long and involved stories like Dune and Asimov’s Foundation series. The most unexpected title is 1984 which, thanks to school assignments, hardly seems to belong alongside such a relatively unknown quantity as The Long Tomorrow. But topping the list as the one book that most people pretend to have read when they really have not is none other than Cryptonomicon.
The reasons for this could be many. The full text is available online at the Internet Archive and clocks in at 1174 pages, reason enough for the pretense of having read it. More likely, however, is that Stephenson’s novel is highly dependent upon the creation of a cryptosystem called Pontifex, written as a Perl script which “has various asymmetries and special cases that make it difficult to express in clean, elegant lines of math.” If that sentence makes little sense to you—and it likely does for the overwhelming majority of people—then take a second to imagine diving headfirst into a novel in which that sentence is far from the most geek-heavy example of nerd culture abstruseness. And if that that sentence makes no sense to you, then expect the 1174 pages of Cryptonomicon to be a long, slow slog.
Does this mean it is not worth reading? Anders answers that question in the headline to that list. It probably is worth trying to make that slog for a great many readers because while deeply steeped in geek culture, the story is entertaining, and the narration makes up for the math-y stuff. Make no mistake, however: this is entertainment written for and being sold precisely to the geek culture of America. The Big Bang Theory it isn’t nor is it supposed to be. And therein lies the difference between the market for real purveyors of geek culture and the dumbed-down, sexed-up version that has been co-opted for the mainstream.
