Stephenson! I have such a love-hate relationship with his books (except I get them confused with Gibson - they write sort of similar things and I can never keep track of who wrote which books). I can't talk to you about Cryptonomicon, though, because it's been a while and I remember nothing. Snow Crash I know backwards and forward, though, and will quite cheerfully rave about it with you when you finish that one. :D? :D?

You might also like his Baroque Cycle, which is a series of three books and reminds me a lot of Cryptonomicon except for how it is set in the seventeenth century and is three times bigger in scale. A bunch of the characters are the ancestors of characters in Cryptonomicon, too.