Reamde

This cowboy-in-cyber-boots action thriller is 1040 pages long. I had to prepare by: reading up on virtual gaming and “gold mining”; making a glossary of gaming terms; making a character spreadsheet; making a glossary of words in Russian and Chinese; and having a computer by me at all times to

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look up other miscellaneous concepts, historical figures, and geographical information. It took me a long time to read this way and certainly isn’t necessary to enjoy the book. Nevertheless, I had a rip-roaring good time and am very glad I took the journey!

How might an author make readers want to hang out with characters for 1040 pages? Stephenson’s strategy was to make the characters interesting and fun, and to get them involved in a comic-book-like succession of dangers and exploits that keep you turning the pages, even when there is so much page turning a person could get carpal tunnel syndrome.

I should clarify that the title is not a typo. Reamde is the name of a virus disguised as a file meant to be mistaken for a Readme file and therefore opened and released by the end-user. In the book, the virus is released inside of a complicated multiplayer virtual game, so that many gamers are eager to open it in case the file contains new background info or rules about which they should be aware. Once the virus is in, it encrypts the host computer’s (non-game) document files and holds them for ransom which must be paid to the virus perpetrators in virtual gold pieces. The virtual gold can be exchanged for real money as part of a [real-life] gaming convention known as “gold mining.” This clever gambit, called ransomware, can make millions for the hackers.

In an effort to stop the virus, a hugely comical global chase scene ensues involving the game company execs, the Russian mafia, Islamic terrorists, the FBI, the CIA, and all sorts of other players who get caught up in the mayhem. The thread that ties everyone together is Zula, the niece of the creator of the virtual game. A wild string of near misses, coincidences, mishaps, serendipitous convergences and a sprinking of romance come together in a pitched battle during the last 150 or so pages that not only is mirrored in the game universe, but will have you on the edge of your seat for the unfolding of both the plot and the metaplot. It’s just too much fun!

Evaluation: In a meta meta sense, reading this book about playing a virtual reality game that parallels a real plot line that sounds like a virtual reality game is like playing a virtual reality game: at the end of a totally absorbing investment of many hours, all of which you thoroughly enjoyed, what do you actually have to show for yourself? Well, you have the memory of having spent many enjoyable hours not really accomplishing anything useful in the real world. And you learned a lot of stuff you may never use again (especially about lots of characters and rules particular to the fictional virtual game T’Rain). You’ve spent time with some really fun people you wish you knew in real life. And you have gotten yet more respect for an author who could keep you interested for all that time and indeed, at the edge of your chair for a good bit of it as well.

Some of the book is a bit over the top and some of the villains are a bit caricatured (in a very humorous way) but given the author’s skills otherwise, I felt that this was a stylistic choice that made for some wonderfully madcap/slapstick Groucho Marx kind of encounters. I thought of it as a pastiche: of information, of themes, of philosophies, of styles. I also thought that reading this hugely long book with a big learning curve for me was a sort of personal Everest. It felt really good when I reached the end-goal, but very sad too. I will miss Zula (the heroine, who is a "mixed-race computational fluid dynamics geek") and Richard (creator of T'Rain), Richard's T'Rain alter ego Egdod, and Csongor and Seamus and Olivia and all the rest of the motley crew with whom I spent a solid week.

Favorite quote (spoken by the Hungarian hacker Csongor):

"'There is an English expression: 'high-maintenance girlfriend,' Csongor remarked. 'Now, of course, Zula is not my girlfriend. Probably never would be, even if all this shit were not happening. And I think that if she were my girlfriend? She would not be high maintenance at all! She is just not that type of girl. However. Because of circumstances, today she is the most high-maintenance girlfriend since Cleopatra.'"

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a) This is not Science Fiction/Cyberpunk/Speculative Fiction/Other Names for same thing. If anything, it should be classified as a "thriller" of some sort. It's much like Cryptonomicon in that regard.
b) As such, it's not so much about big allegories (as Anathem was) and huge societal themes (which

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threatened to overwhelm Diamond Age) and all that.
c) It's not as funny as Snow Crash. If Snow Crash is ambitious mid-20s intellectual humor, this is more tempered, late 30s humor. (I don't know how old Stephenson is. Not the point.)
d) If you're looking for all those things, you may be slightly let down by this book. But I'd think it's the sort of let-down you'd get from... I don't know. Maybe showing up to the party a little after the pizza does. It's not quite as hot as it was when it showed up, but, hey, pizza! No such thing as bad pizza.

My only real complaint while reading this was that, towards the end, I felt as though I was physically unable to read fast enough to keep up with what was going on.

I think that for Neal Stephenson, the plot of a book is just a stalking horse, but it's a really cool robotic stalking horse that looks and sounds like the real thing. (Possibly stretching that metaphor too far.) "It's about gold farming". Well, sure. And it involves an MMO. But this is a trick. It's a framework in which he gets to hang his fantastic wordplay. His writing makes me enjoy language. If he wrote a manual for a bread machine, I would read it cover to cover, because it would be fun to read.

But for all that, it's a hell of a story. By about 200 pages in (which is not even a quarter of the book), it had already covered everything I thought might be coming, and I realized that I had no idea what was going to happen next. And there were still 700 pages to go.

It's fun. It's not quite the mind-blowing hit of future shock that Snow Crash was. It doesn't have the elaborate set pieces that Cryptonomicon did. (The story of Randy's trip into the jungle was practically a standalone novella.) It's not... whatever the Baroque Cycle was, it's not that. But it's a lot of fun.

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I read Reamde over a two-day stretch where I did nothing else. This isn't a surprise because this is how I tend to read all Neal Stephenson books, so I waited to start it until there was an opportune moment.

This is a classic Neal Stephenson tale, resonating on themes from Cryptonomicon, The Baroque

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Cycle, and even The Diamond Age. Themes include: family; currency; games; how games intersect with reality; insane globe-spanning adventures; guns; deliciously long-winded explanations of things that will be better upon a reread because you won't be so urgently wondering what happens NEXT; tactics and survival, or, if you like, displaying adaptibility; people you wish you were; multiple viewpoints that are somewhat frustrating because you keep wanting to continue the thread you were on even while wanting to know what happens to everyone else; events somehow ending up with everyone ready for the climax.

New themes: geography (real and virtual); Russian organized crime; global terrorism, which adds quite an interesting wrinkle to everything.

I find this book hard to review because if you've read any Neal Stephenson book, you will already know if you will like this or not. Anathem was a huge and lovely departure from Stephenson's former work and this swings back to his former style. I do think Zula, Olivia, and Yuxia are all a step up from Amy Shaftoe, though, so good work there.

I also laughed out loud quite a few times while reading this, and read a few lines aloud to my partner. The humor came through loud and clear to me.

I have no problem with where the book ended but I would love an appendix or something to satisfy my curiosity on a few measures (clearly spoilers after this): what happened with the Wor, and especially the two authors? How were Yuxia and Marlon's visa problems solved? What were the in-game consequences of Egdod roaming around like that? What type of business exactly is Marlon doing now? For that matter, what business are Yuxia and Olivia doing now? Etc.

This book left me to think about a belief that I think is quite common, or at least I hope is quite common: that if we do the right thing, things will work out for us in the end. I don't mean the notion of karma because it seems to be more direct than that. (Spoilers are here, I suppose.) Zula ponders this, if indirectly, when wondering why people she only just met are trying to help her. She tried to save Marlon and the other hackers and now he tries to help her. She tried to escape to warn Yuxia and Yuxia tries to help her. Sokolov is presented as, for lack of a better word, a "gentleman" - only killing his enemies, but helping the innocent. Seamus doesn't abandon Yuxia and Marlon in the Phillipines. And while there are injuries, and some of our main characters end up worse for wear, I am pretty sure only four mid-level characters aligned with good die - the pilots, then one in a self-sacrificing way, and one in a way that really made me sad, I admit. (I realize four people would be a lot in another book, but in this one?)
And I'm 100% ok with that - I didn't *want* any of these characters I'd grown to love to die - but how realistic is it? Is there any basis to believe that doing the right thing makes outcomes better for a person in the long run? Or is it merely enough to do the right thing because it's the right thing, even though in the real world you won't get any benefit from it, and might even have negative material consequences if, of course, being able to live with yourself?
In this way the book actually seems incredibly optimistic to me.

I will say, the one part where my disbelief really was suspended was when I was supposed to believe a Hungarian character was unfamiliar with ferry terminals. The country might be landlocked, but Budapest is two cities separated by the Danube, which flows through the country. I was in the country for four days and took at least one ferry. Come on!

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This is an action thriller more akin to the James Bond or Mission Impossible movie genre than to other Neal Stephenson books. It is a lot of fun - as long as you suspend your critical faculties (don't ask how the Chinese characters are able to communicate so effectively in English, for example).

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The book lacks some of the depth and learning of Stephenson's earlier works, but is still imaginative and creative. A great romp. Read Sept 2012.

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Richard Forthrast is the creator of the T'Rain, the most popular MMORPG in the world. It has recently become infected with a virus called Reamde which encrypts a user's data and holds it for ransom for a large sum in game money. The boyfriend of Richard's niece Zula becomes involved in a credit

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card scam with Russian mobsters whose computers become infected with the virus. The mobsters kidnap Zula and take her to China to try and locate the creator of the virus. Once there, they stumble onto an international terrorist cell, which eventually leads to a showdown involving secrets from Richard's past.

Reamde has a basic thriller plot, but done in Neal Stephenson's style with lots of digressions and infodumps. In the early parts of the book these get to be a little much. There is a lot of information about the development and history of T'Rain, that while somewhat interesting, is almost totally irrelevant to the actual story. The plot does come together well in the last few hundred pages though, as it mainly concentrates on the action and on bringing the novel to an actual conclusion. This is spoiled a little by a deus ex machina cougar attack, but Reamde is still an exciting, worthwhile read.

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I'm beginning to tire of pigeonholing books. What kind of book is this? It's a book you should read if you like the idea of densely plotted, fast-paced novels about the world we live in. It's not like Stephenson's SF novels, except it kind of is - it's like all his novels in its tumult and urgency,

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but it lives firmly in the real world to a surprising degree.

Why surprising? Consider this - all of the characters in REAMDE are real people in ways that characters in action thrillers (but it's not an action thriller) generally aren't - they get cold and scared, they need to use the bathroom at inopportune moments, the women have periods, some of them try to be heroes and end up dead, and all of them have failings which make them real.

The least real thing in the story is the game of T'Rain. Not that things like it don't exist - they do - but the way Stephenson has it pervade the world is a little over-enthusiastic; even Farmville wasn't that all-conquering. However, that serves its narrative purpose very well, as do just about all the other elements of the story - for a 1,000-page book, there is very little wasted prose - personally, I found the diversions about the background to the game fascinating but hardly essential given the constant peril the other characters are in.

If I equate this to the Baroque Cycle, it might seem to put undue emphasis on world-spanning role-playing games and the all-pervasive role of the internet in the modern world, but Daniel Waterhouse and his companions didn't know which of their enthusiasms would turn out to change the world, and at this point, neither do we - Stephenson makes a good case for games like T'Rain becoming part of everyday life in ways which might not appear intuitive - a seeming diversion on using the game to improve airport security might seem outlandish, but I'm certain it's based on something concrete in the real world.

However, it's not a nerdy treatise on internet gaming.

It is - oh, look, there's no way to do it justice. It's a bit of everything - characters caught up in wild coincidences find themselves dealing with a world full of Russian Mafia (except it's not actually... oh, you get the idea) and wild-eyed jihadists led by a charismatic Welshman. With added glamorous English spies, assorted hitmen and more than one key character introduced after page 500.

Yup, I said charismatic Welshman.

It will confound your expectations at every turn - you'll never see 'Love Actually' in quite the same light again, for example; it will teach you more than you could ever imagine you needed to know about modern weapons; it will cause you to understand just how big British Columbia is (slightly smaller than Stephenson thinks, but only slightly - it might take him 11 hours to drive here from Vancouver, but he's never had to do it in time to be back at work in the morning); it will make you look things up on Wikipedia because they can't possibly be true (yet almost all of them are - it's an extremely impressively researched book) and above all it will grip and entertain you in a deeply satisfying way.

And then, being a Neal Stephenson novel, it will stop really suddenly.


Although with a tiny coda to let you know that most of the things you thought might happen actually did.

Recommended for - everyone, really; I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't get something from this, even if it's only wrist strain.

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Reamde
Neal Stephenson
William Morrow
September 20, 2011
Hardcover
1056 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0061977961

Some books are sprints, quick easy reads that take the breath away. Others are long distant runs; more complicated, with timing, spacing and strategy integral to crossing the finish line with a

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specific goal in mind. Reamde by Neal Stephenson is a true long-distance marathon. It is a performance, obviously backed by long practice and training. It is gut wrenching, breath-taking, and ultimately exhilarating. While it is not Science-Fiction in the traditional sense, Reamde is more of a thriller, it tackles elements of near-future business, social media, and Internet gaming aspects and manages to add elements of an international thriller that spans the globe and includes kidnapping, hackers, Islamic extremists, Russian Mafia, massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMO), murder, spies, action, adventure, and intrigue. While not his normal bill-of-fare Reamde is still a very accessible read and should be enjoyed by present fans as well as action-adventure, tech thriller, and murder mystery enthusiasts. With Reamde Stephenson should gather in an entirely new and pleased audience. I wish him well.

Many established fans may not enjoy this work as well as some of Stephenson’s others but Reamde is a high-quality novel. Strong characters, a good plot, interesting locations, and pages of tense action make this a very enjoyable read.

4 stars out of 5

The Alternative
Southeast Wisconsin

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This was one fantastic book. Taking place in two worlds at once (the real world and a virtual world) with two sets of characters (again, real and virtual) means twice the action with overlapping plots.

Richard Forthrast is the developer and owner of T'Rain, an MMORPG with millions of players around

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the world. When a virus starts hitting members, someone has to stop them REAMDE is a virus that attacks the files in members computers, completely encoding them until a ransom is paid in the T'Rain world. Richard's niece, Zula, an Eritrean girl adopted into his family believes that she can talk the attackers into stopping and heads of to China to track down the hackers. This is the start of a battle and chase story that moves around the globe. Mirroring the way characters meet and form alliances and battle foes, strange alliances form in the real world and connect the hackers with Zula and her gang against the accidentally created foes, a gang of Islamic terrorists. Another gang which includes a female MI6 agent and a member of a Russian mob is also in the mix as is a family of hardy survivalists in the wilds of Idaho and British Columbia.

This story completely captured me and whisked me through the hundreds of pages. The characters were rich and their interactions were, at times, surprising and deep. The action took abrupt turns from one locale to another, frequently back-tracking to catch the reader up to events in a different arena until they cross into another arena.

The reader becomes quite informed as to computer hacking, virtual worlds, trans-oceanic navigation, weapons, weapons, and more weapons.

The only ding I could give this book is for the interminable final battle up and down mountains, in and out of trees, back and forth from one group to another.

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One must be impressed by Stephenson's range in the books he has written. Most unusual to handle so many genres and do it so magnificently.

This is by no means a book without flaws, but it is one with many strengths.

I thought the characters were well-drawn, consistent and enjoyable except for one;

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see below. I loved the globe-spanning locales here, especially the scenes in Xiamen. I had never heard of the place before, and it led me to do extensive research which was illuminating about all kinds of things: Fujian Province; the Fujian language and its relation to Taiwanese; Cross-Straight relations, and the history of Taiwanese administration Quemoy, Kinmen, and other islands near the PRC coast; the layout and architecture of Xiamen, etc.

I was irked for the next 600 pages by the --I will not give it away in a review -- but let us say a dubious coincidence of apartment proximity.

Who was Jones, the villian, and how do we make sense of him? Not clear from the book.

T'Rain, the mmorpg which while interesting, especially the focus on gold farming, plays less of a role than one would expect from the first.

Oh -- it was understandably long, but I do believe some editing could have knocked off 200 pages without much sacrifice.

Nonetheless, a pleasing read. Not Anathem. But satisfying! And I am sad to leave these characters behind.

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The REAMDE virus is designed to extort a little money from players of T'Rain, but it soon touches off a global chase with Chinese hackers, Russian mobsters, and Islamist terrorists.

Why I picked it up: Robin gave me this ARC, knowing I like Stephenson.

Why I finished it: Not as mind-expanding as

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"Diamond Age" or "Anathem," this energetic adventure thriller is more like "Cryptonomicon." I was fascinated about the game history, and the way in world activity touched off and powered events in the real world. As in "Cryptonomicon," the characters are engaging, even if they're up to some pretty bad stuff. And Stephenson is good with words.

I'd give it to: Jacket copy called this Stephenson's most accessible novel to date, which is an odd thing to stake a campaign on. But it's true. This novel would appeal to fans of Cussler, Crichton, Thor, Follett, etc.

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At about 950 pages (on my Sony Reader) this is a beast of a book, at least physically. "Reamde" has all of the hallmarks of a Neal Stephenson novel -- it's full of geek themes and discursive writing -- but it avoids some of his worst tendencies as a writer. What do you expect from a book whose plot

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revolves around money laundering in a World-of-Warcraft-like MMORPG? Those of you scarred my "Cryptonomicon" can rest easy -- there aren't any equations in "Reamde". I fo...moreAt about 950 pages (on my Sony Reader) this is a beast of a book, at least physically. "Reamde" has all of the hallmarks of a Neal Stephenson novel -- it's full of geek themes and discursive writing -- but it avoids some of his worst tendencies as a writer. What do you expect from a book whose plot revolves around money laundering in a World-of-Warcraft-like MMORPG? Those of you scarred my "Cryptonomicon" can rest easy -- there aren't any equations in "Reamde". I found that it took the book about 150 pages to get rolling, not unusual for Stephenson novels, but once it did get started it moved along at a pretty good pace. His editor deserves our thanks for making sure that there were no sex scenes in the book, something Neal doesn't do well. (Those of you who read The Baroque Cycle know what I'm talking about. )

I found one plot point to be a kind of lazy deus ex machina: Richard Forthrast is fabulously wealthy, which makes some things that would be very hard of impossible for most people easy, but it's not something that really disrupts the plot. Without spoiling anything, I do like that the good guys don't make it through the final at unscathed, even if he does get a little sappy in the epilogue.(less)

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It's basically a mega airport novel - an enjoyable romp if you're into modern thrillers. Good holiday reading. We've got hackers, terrorists, spies, Russian mafia, computer games, guns, bombs, the works! Bonus points for several excellent female characters.

A huge page-turner, my attention was held.

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But it was nowhere near as inventive or intellectual as I've come to expect from Neal Stephenson. I'm mildly disappointed.

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Had I known more about this book, I wouldn’t have chosen it as my first foray into Neal Stephenson’s work. I was expecting science fiction, and there is nothing science-fictional about it. It is purely a thriller. Some have compared it to Tom Clancey—I wouldn’t know. The closest thing to

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that genre that I’ve read is Ken Follett, to which it compares favorably. Like Follett, this was a compelling page turner, quite the potboiler. I wouldn’t even call it a technothriller, in that the titular virus, which exploits a WoW-like MMORPG, gets the plot ball rolling, and informs some of the action, particularly early on in the book, but is not really even the central difficulty that needs resolution. In fact, one of my complaints is that, after getting us interested in the game, the politics of its players, the techs and “creatives” who develop it, once it’s served its purpose, we don’t hear much about it again, and we don’t hear about how the rather cataclysmic events in the game world are resolved. The last few chapters are pure gun and ordnance battles that I waded through only to find out how it all came out in the end. The characters are all interesting and likeable, even though they are all, each and every one, walking tropes. Still, it was mostly an entertaining read, and it hasn’t made me cross Cryptonomicon off my reading list.

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If you dig any of Neal Stephenson's output, I can't see why you would want to read this.

Whether you liked the fun of Snow Crash, or the brilliant but lengthy Baroque Cycle, or the intrigue of Anathem, you will find little of interest in this spy chase book. The book is masquerading as something it

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is not. It has nothing to say about virtual worlds, nothing to say about terrorism and proceeds to it's conclusion without much wit or purpose.

While the set up is intelligent, nothing remarkable comes of it, and I expect remarkable from Stephenson. This is second rate. There are plenty of authors who can do spy thrillers with more elan - and i didn't want a spy thriller anyway.

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"A typical Stephenson novel: a romping good thriller in which we learned more than we ever really wanted to know about some technology or other. In this case, it's T'Rain, a massive multiplayer online role-playing game, clearly modeled World of Warcraft. Add some jihadists, the Russian mob, a few

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special forces types, and a hot MI6 spy of Chinese heritage, and you get a pretty interesting plot. Highly recommended."

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So much fun!

1044 pages that grab on from the very beginning and simply will not let go. If you are familiar with Stephenson's other work, particularly the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon, there are some familiar themes, however (money, adventure, family, and romantic relationships that blossom at

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an awkward place and time), there are amazing new ones as well.

The Russian Mob meets a Chinese teens computer virus designed to attack via the app installed on the Microsoft software the users a massively multiplayer online role playing game use to schedule game time with friends, results in a kidnapping (or two or three) and other mayhem.

Enter MI6, the CIA, Islamic extremists, Pacific Northwest survivalists, chartered planes and helicopters, highjacked fishing boats and one character whose golden eyes just might save the day .... the list of players and adrenaline rushing episodes goes on and on and the story is woven in an fairly believable way - other than the extra ordinary luck of a certain extremist to grab the right person at the right place and the right time and to do so completely blind!

The last 200 pages could be an action adventure movie in their own right and as I read to the final showdown I marveled at it all (and laughed out loud as I pieced together most of how it might all end). Cryptonomicon meets Snow Crash with a dash of Zodiac, and through the online play of T'Rain, a pinch of the other worldliness of Anathem.

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For the most part, this is not a Big Ideas book: despite its forbidding size, its a mostly fast-paced thriller. The writing is weak in some places and another pass from a good copy editor could have improved it, but all-in-all REAMDE is an enjoyable romp that any Stephenson fan should enjoy.

A popular MMORPG game that has severe impacts in the real world, some Chinese gamers, a band of Russian mobsters, an Eritrean-American girl, islamistic terrorists – a thriller with those ingredients will certainly be a terrific read, one would think. Well, not necessarily. The book started off

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quite well, and the first 200 pages or so were very entertaining. But then, the pace slowed down because there were far too many details, and far too exhaustive. Everything is described at great length: how one person manages to get from A to B without his enemies noticing it; how the terrorists make sure that their hostage doesn’t escape; what a third person considers when adopting a certain strategy; the exact construction plan of a shed in which a group stayed for just one day. It almost felt obsessive at times. At maybe 400-500 pages it could have been a good thriller. But this way (the book has 1000 pages), it became just too tedious for me, and I abandoned the book after about 600 pages.

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Hard to imagine that a book of more than a thousand pages could be a page-turner, but this one keeps the reader hurrying to the conclusion at the same time not wanting the experience to end. At times the several threads got a bit confusing, a map would have helped, and the conclusion was drawn out

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more than necessary. However, ultimately this novel was an extremely satisfying, thought-provoking, and memorable experience.

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