> But that's a miss, it's like one of those Neal Stephenson moments where the creator is using the right language (so it's not like reading William Gibson who clearly has no idea and knows it - he's going for the emotional feel not the technology) but they don't understand what's actually going on.

That feels a bit harsh when reading a book written in 1992. Shor's algorithm was only invented in 1994. There was no indication about our quantum future at the time that novel was written

A Fire upon the deep is set in the far future. Its easy to imagine all non information-theoretic secure cryptosystems failing thousands of years from now. I think that prediction is more reasonable than most far-future scifi predictions.

If i remember right, i think that is the novel that predicts we'd still be using usenet when talking between planets (i read a long time ago), so i think the crypto prediction aged a lot better than that.