correction: Pynchon mentioned in NY Times article on Cryptonomicon...

[Doug Millison]

...and other WWII code-breaking books, at
http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/news/arts/code-breaking.html

"The water currents in a stream, the turning of a bicycle chain, the
pattern of street curbs in London, the churning of a bingo bin -- there are
patterns to decode in everything; everything is connected. This creates a
sense of Pynchonesque paranoia, in which characters' concerns about secrecy
regularly reach wartime proportions.

"But it also inspires a kind of techno-mysticism that has become familiar
among the digerati: if everything is connected, a hacker who could read the
currents properly and reproduce them in digital form might come to know the
world's deepest encoded secrets."