#cryptonomicon

Summary: Lawrence has a problem. He's going to need some interesting math to solve it.

Chatting with a friend last night, Neal Stephenson and his 30+ years of influential sci fi novels came up. And we agreed that, as with getting started reading Terry Pratchett, a guide to starting with Stephenson might be helpful.

Here's my "if you like X in your media/fandom, try this book" guide to Stephenson.

All of Stephenson's works are longreads - some are dense and massive. 20th Century Takes On The Genders pop up, usually balanced by Stephenson's foundation respect for women. I've noted a few warnings where these reader challenges come up.

Gritty, action-packed sci-fi

You like The Matrix, Mad Max, that meme about Toledo Killswitch.

Try: Snow Crash

Still a banger! Vivid and sarcastic characters are making their way in a dystopic U.S.A. Delivering pizzas, scrounging skateboard courier jobs, trying to save humanity from toxic data and from fundamentalists abusing the power of language. Today, the role of capitalism-gone-wild in the story seems more prescient than the Metaverse, though both are presented as equally dystopic. I hear there's a TV show in the works.

Sci-fi with fairy-tale/historical tropes

You like: steampunk, Six of Crows, Fables, Sandman.

Yessssssssssss I am WITH YOU. tell me.more...i might have to reread. It was just such a cool book to me, moments through the years, mystery and adventure and Nazi gold and computer hacking and organ playing and just idk a lot rolled into one book.

You'll find the other polls in my 'sf polls' tag / my pinned post.

Black ice may have killed Cliff Burton.

1962-1986. May he rock in peace.

While virtual reality is still struggling to become a thing (looking at you, Metaverse), ICE remains firmly in the realm of science fiction. Short for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics, the term was popularized in the cyberpunk fiction of William Gibson, though not developed deeply, primarily focusing on ICE that can kill the user (“Black ice”) and programs that can defeat ICE (“Icebreakers”).

“Oh, I thought you meant... Okay. I’ll turn the ship around.”

For Shadowrun, the “E” was dropped, as IC is a form of software, not hardware, and the types were expanded from the original “black”, embracing traditional Black and White Dualism along with Shades of Gray.

White IC are passive and cannot damage your persona. Gray IC can damage your persona, and mess with your programs and deck. Black IC just frags you, the decker, up. Just as you, the decker, are running a program (persona) on someone else’s computer system, all IC are independent programs that can be crashed in cybercombat (using the combat utilities Attack and Slow). However, as it is in meatspace, it shall be in cyberspace -- you should try to be sneaky first before busting out the big guns. 

The core book had three types of white IC. :

Access

The most common form, this is just the logon box where you enter your username and password. Can be bypassed either with Deception (fake credentials) or Sleaze (sneak past it).

Barrier

No chance to enter a password, just blocks access.

Must Sleaze.

Scramble

Both this IC, and the decker program to counter it (Decrypt), are meant to represent implementations of cryptography and cryptanalysis, which, having read Cryptonomicon at least a dozen times, makes me an expert.

Scramble can also be defeated using Deception, which means why would you ever need a Decrypt program? Unless you plan to use Sleaze instead of Deception, in which case you could use Decrypt. But since Barrier can only be defeated by Sleaze, deckers always used it. Though, of the book archetypes, the Decker doesn’t have Sleaze, while the Elven Decker does.

Virtual Realities adds one new type of White IC:

Probe

This is Access IC that is specifically resistant to the Sleaze program, because Frag You, players, and your most useful way of sneaking around the Matrix. If Access is like the logon, Probe is like a Captcha. But, you know, Shadowrun style.