Richard Forthrast, a multi-millionaire marijuana smuggler, has parlayed his wealth into an empire by developing T'Rain, a billion-dollar online role-playing game with legions of fans around the world.
But T'Rain's success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold, unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player's electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game's virtual universe - and Richard is caught in the crossfire. Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho, Reamde traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which computer hackers and mobsters, entrepreneurs and religious fundamentalists face off in a battle for survival, Reamde is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century.
Stephenson fills his thousand-plus-page tomes easily, because he's prone to meandering tangents regarding various minutiae (some brief, some pages long). These were the same tangents that made me toss away Tolkein in disgust, so it goes to show what a difference it makes when the subject matter happens to be endlessly fascinating (which I'm sure Middle Earth is for its fans, too). Suspenseful, exciting, and brilliantly realized.
This is an action/adventure story with little of the complexity of any of Stevenson's previous books. There are some interesting MMORPG elements but its largely an international man-hunt james-bond-style story.
I can't say that I enjoyed this book as much as The Confusion, but it's certainly Stephenson's most accessible book. It's essentially a 1000-page action movie, complete with a globe-trotting cast of Chinese hackers, Islamic terrorists, secret agents, laconic Russians, and portly Hungarians. The ending gets a little random at times (I honestly wonder if Stephenson has played Red Dead Redemption; the role of random cougar attacks certainly reminded me of the game) but it doesn't detract from the quality of the novel as a whole.
You have to love a book with an Apostropocalypse AND a shout out to Charlotte Bronte. Or, I have to love it. This was a great ride from start to finish.
A much more readable book than either the Baroque Cycle or Anathem; it moves far faster than either and gets going right away. But it is kind of uneven.
The part describing the game T'Rain and that take place in the game were fascinating, and reminded me a lot of the Cryptonomicon. Stephenson's best skill is that he just obviously gets geek talk, viscerally, and the tech is totally accurate and reads true to life. But his tendency to explore minute details and to wander off in sometimes unrelated digressions -- something I don't really mind in his other books -- to me doesn't serve him well in this book, which is supposed to be a fast-paced thriller. The level of detail and the lingering descriptions get in the way. Even the action scenes occasionally seem overwritten.
Much better characterization in this book, especially with Richard Forthrast, who was very …
A much more readable book than either the Baroque Cycle or Anathem; it moves far faster than either and gets going right away. But it is kind of uneven.
The part describing the game T'Rain and that take place in the game were fascinating, and reminded me a lot of the Cryptonomicon. Stephenson's best skill is that he just obviously gets geek talk, viscerally, and the tech is totally accurate and reads true to life. But his tendency to explore minute details and to wander off in sometimes unrelated digressions -- something I don't really mind in his other books -- to me doesn't serve him well in this book, which is supposed to be a fast-paced thriller. The level of detail and the lingering descriptions get in the way. Even the action scenes occasionally seem overwritten.
Much better characterization in this book, especially with Richard Forthrast, who was very well drawn and one of the most believable characters I've read from NS. Better female characters than any NS book up to this point, although all of them fit neatly into a sort of a Smart Plucky Tomboy rubber stamp, and none of them read as especially feminine. (you can't have everything.)
I also had trouble with some of the pacing. The book moves right along at a very brisk pace until the big jihadist apartment explosion in China, and then it seems things grind to a halt for a couple hundred pages. They pick up again at the end but that middle was kind of a slog. On the other hand, it is a really solid ending, which I am very pleased that Stephenson has finally figured out how to do. On the third hand, there are a bunch of plot points left dangling, including the entire T'Rain plot, which is too bad.
It was OK. I skimmed a lot of it.
Note: I initially gave this 4 stars, and I don't know why I did that. Lowered to 3.
Note #2: No, changing my mind again. 4 stars it is.
Not science fiction in any sense of the words, but this was still surprisingly good. It caters to the tech/geek crowd just enough to suck you in, and then basically turns into an espionage novel. Still, it kept me reading, and I finished its 1000+ pages in about a week, so that's saying something indeed.
I really wanted to like this book more. I've read everything Neal Stephenson has written and I work in the video game industry, so I thought this sounded like the best book ever, and was thrilled to be able to borrow an advance copy. But unfortunately it was nowhere near the standard of 'Snow Crash'. It wasn't even very much about the online game described in the book blurb; it was really a quasi-techno thriller about spies, terrorists, long-drawn out shoot-outs, and international intrigue that just happened to involve a couple people who worked at or played a multiplayer online game. That said, there were still some interesting ideas in there. His discussion of the APPIS interface to map real world work to in-game rewards was interesting, as was his description of the economic basis of the game world, for example. Most of this was sidetracks though, not really relevant …
I really wanted to like this book more. I've read everything Neal Stephenson has written and I work in the video game industry, so I thought this sounded like the best book ever, and was thrilled to be able to borrow an advance copy. But unfortunately it was nowhere near the standard of 'Snow Crash'. It wasn't even very much about the online game described in the book blurb; it was really a quasi-techno thriller about spies, terrorists, long-drawn out shoot-outs, and international intrigue that just happened to involve a couple people who worked at or played a multiplayer online game. That said, there were still some interesting ideas in there. His discussion of the APPIS interface to map real world work to in-game rewards was interesting, as was his description of the economic basis of the game world, for example. Most of this was sidetracks though, not really relevant to the plot.
The book was lengthy at almost 1000 pages, and could easily have been cut in half without losing substance. It left me suspecting that Stephenson has reached a point in his reputation at which editors are now afraid to tell him to be more concise for god's sake, so he just rambles on and on when he really shouldn't.
As far as the story and plot go, they were okay (though drawn out with rambling explanatory details and irrelevant sidetracks). However, as someone who works for the same type of game company that Stephenson is supposedly describing, I was occasionally brought to a jarring stop at some description he used that was just very much NOT the way this type of game, or a game company, works. Even if we postulate this is set slightly in the future, there are some things he described that just don't make sense, and it bothered me. It bothered me because in' Snow Crash' and 'The Diamond Age', Stephenson was clearly way ahead of the pack and describing amazing technological possibilities that we're still far from achieving; in 'Reamde', he seems to have given this up entirely. Instead, he talks about existing technologies like Twitter and Facebook by name, rather than speculating on what the next progression will be. He talks about online game mechanics and game companies in ways that show he not only doesn't know a thing about them, but also couldn't be bothered to ask someone who does to fact check him. And although this might not bother readers who are less familiar with the internal workings of the game industry, it made me very sad, and also significantly lowered my expectations of ever seeing another 'Snow Crash' out of him in the future. :(
