Neal Stephenson: Reamde (2011, HarperCollins Publishers)
English language
Published Oct. 8, 2011 by HarperCollins Publishers.
actually i give this 3,5 stars. liked most of it, but the infodumps were a bit much sometimes.
I don’t normally read books that are over 1000 pages and after reading Reamde, I’m a little reluctant to read something this big again. Not that there was anything wrong with this book; but sitting at over 1100 pages, it was a big task chipping away through this book. Neal Stephenson provides a story full of nerdism, thrills and a lot of action, dipping into aspects of organised crime and terrorism. My first thought of this book was the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) game that this book is based around; every aspect of this game is covered in this book. It takes all the aspects he liked about World of Warcraft and gave it a face lift, threw out all the parts he didn’t like, even going to the extent of making the world geographically accurate for people interested in mining. But the underlining reason for T’Rain, is …
I don’t normally read books that are over 1000 pages and after reading Reamde, I’m a little reluctant to read something this big again. Not that there was anything wrong with this book; but sitting at over 1100 pages, it was a big task chipping away through this book. Neal Stephenson provides a story full of nerdism, thrills and a lot of action, dipping into aspects of organised crime and terrorism. My first thought of this book was the MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) game that this book is based around; every aspect of this game is covered in this book. It takes all the aspects he liked about World of Warcraft and gave it a face lift, threw out all the parts he didn’t like, even going to the extent of making the world geographically accurate for people interested in mining. But the underlining reason for T’Rain, is the gold farming market; while Blizzard tries to crack down on farming, this game is based around a potential money laundry scheme. While T’Rain was created for sinister reasons, the creation of the game and the employee of popular fantasy writers turned the game into a huge success. Just reading about this game made me want to play it. This game serves as a background for the main plot in Reamde.
While there is a lot happening in Reamde, the main plot is centred around a virus, which encrypts files and hold them for ransom for T’Rain gold. This virus affects a computer containing sensitive documents of the Russian Mob, who do not wish to pay the ransom but set out to hunt down the people behind the virus and make an example of them. Along the way many people become involved including the T’Rain founder, a T’Rain employee, some Chinese gold farmers/hackers, a Russian mercenary, a Hungarian hacker, the CIA, MI6 and some international terrorists.
While I enjoyed the ride that Reamde took me on, I can’t help thinking that there is a lot of fat that needs to be trimmed. I’m not sure if being a bestselling author Neal Stephenson had the freedom to fatten this book up, or the editors didn’t do a good job, or they intentionally left the book this long; but I think that this book could haveeasily been turned into a 700-800 page novel without losing any of the plot. While this book was really enjoyable for a nerd like me, I still can’t help but wonder; does it need to be this big?
