Kinakuta

Kinakuta (or Quennah-Kootah) is a fictional country featured in the novels "Cryptonomicon" and the multi-volume "Baroque Cycle" by Neal Stephenson. It is a tiny island sultanate located in the Sulu Sea between the Philippines and Borneo (centered between Palawan and North Borneo, explains "Cryptonomicon"). Its precise location is shown on the map included in the second volume of "The Baroque Cycle", The Confusion. It has the (equally fictional) top-level domain ".kk".

Stephenson's most detailed depictions of Kinakuta are found in "Cryptonomicon's" present-day storyline, where a group of West Coast-based technologists and entrepreneurs are attempting to use modern cryptologic, telecom and computer technology to build the Crypt, a data haven, inside a Kinakutan mountain, to facilitate anonymous internet banking with electronic money and (later) digital gold currency and (eventually) distribution of Holocaust Education and Avoidance Pod (HEAP) media for instructing genocide-target populations on defensive warfare.

History

Kinakuta has always been a "meeting-place of cultures." ["Cryptonomicon", p. 316] Its original inhabitants were Malays. In the 17th and 18th centuries, under the name "Queenah-Kootah," it was home to a dynasty of white sultans, beginning with one Mr. Foote, an "ex-privateer." It was at this time that the capital, Kinakuta City, was constructed.

The original spelling is a contraction of "Queen Kottakkal" in honor of the matrilinial sovereign of the Malabar pirates who is the primary "Investrix" in the trading ship "Minerva," built by a multinational "Cabal" of former galley-slaves-turned-merchants, including Mr. Foote. (Electress Sophia of Hanover was the secondary investrix, despite being the co-sovereign of a land-locked German principality.)

Following the white sultanate, Kinakuta became a German colony for a while. (Borneo at that time was part of the Dutch East Indies, and Palawan part of the Spanish empire.) The Germans ceded it to the Japanese following World War I as part of the South Pacific Mandate; but both imperial powers maintained the sultan as a figurehead ruler. ["Cryptonomicon", p. 236]

During World War II (as depicted in "Cryptonomicon"), the island was home to a Japanese Naval Air Force garrison. The Japanese put the islanders to work building an airstrip, a command center, and other such amenities. The entire garrison was massacred by vengeful islanders on August 23, 1945, following the garrison's surrender to American forces. ["Cryptonomicon", pp. 251, 273]

Kinakuta today

At the time of the present-day storyline of "Cryptonomicon" (approximately the late 1990s), "the population is Muslim or ethnic Chinese around the edges [and] animist in the center". ["Cryptonomicon", p. 248] This is due to the island's topography: While the coast is generally flat, the interior is mountainous and hilly. The present-day sultan is no longer a figurehead but is actively head of the government, and claims to be an absolute ruler, although in the novel he appears to be a benevolent one who furthermore relies heavily on informed input from government officials.

In recent years (as of the time depicted in "Cryptonomicon"), the sultan has expanded and modernized Kinakuta City, dynamiting the nearby Eliza Peak both to create new flat land where the mountain once stood, and in order that the resulting rubble might be used to create new, valuable oceanfront real estate (see Land reclamation) — most of which was immediately claimed for the new airport.

Most of the country's wealth comes from its sizable oil reserves; the current sultan of Kinakuta (who is incidentally the Sultan of Brunei's second cousin ["Cryptonomicon", p. 236] ) made a small fortune in oil following the 1973 oil crisis.

Possible inspirations

The fictional nation of Kinakuta may be based partly on the historical sultanate of Sarawak, in northwest Borneo, which was ruled by "White Rajahs" from 1841 to 1946.

Another possible inspiration is the offshore banking island of Labuan, which is located between Brunei, Sabah, and the Philippines, near the putative location of Kinakuta. Labuan is a federal territory of Malaysia.

Stephenson himself has remarked [http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Stephenson:Neal:The_Confusion:Queena-Kootah] Dead link|date=April 2008 that he "figured it was more akin to ... Sri Lanka or Serendip.... Others contend it was a fictionalized Tuvalu with a dash of Tonga."

ee also

*Qwghlm, another fictional location from Stephenson's work
*Eliza (Stephenson character), after whom Eliza Peak was named

Notes

External links

* [http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml?title=Kinakuta Kinakuta] page at The Metaweb