[Today’s run: 6 miles]
Reamde is the latest fiction work by Neal Stephenson.
I have read a few of Stephenson’s prior fiction works: Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, Anathem. Reamde is a similar work.
Like those works it has a large cast of characters. It is set in the current time (not past, future or mixed).
A central fixture of the book is an on-line multi-player computer game and the interactions between the game world and the real world. The plot evolves around a woman who is kidnapped, first by Russian mafia then by Islamic terrorists. She attracts a following of friends who try to rescue her. Along with her adopted family, she and her friends are able to defeat the Islamic terrorists and give her freedom, also blunting an implied terrorist attack.
I don’t think this is Stephenson’s best work. Not very far into the book our protagonist is confronted by omnipotent Russian mafiosi. I just about quit reading it at that point. Later I picked it up again. The Russians are thwarted by some rather hapless hackers who use the computer-game world to extort real money. This makes the Russians angry and they mount an expedition to China to confront them, kidnapping our heroine so she can assist in their quest. In China other characters are brought into the picture, some of whom fall in love with our heroine (as do some of the Russians). The evil designs of the Russians are thwarted yet again when she misdirects them from the hacker hideout to an alternate place, where happens to be a bomb-making parlor under the direction of an international terrorist and under the watchful eye of a 007-ish British spy-woman. (Again I set it aside for awhile.) Many of the Russians and terrorists are killed. But the main terrorist escapes and kidnaps our heroine (yet again!) and hauls her to Canada. The remaining Russians, hackers, spies and accessories are eventually able to merge at the site where the terrorist and his new team attempt to enter the USA and there is a big shoot-out. All of the bad people die, most of the good people live.
Besides a plot I considered bizarre, I thought the characters were kind of flat. Stephenson is an American computer guy. Everyone in this book is a capable, self fulfilled person who looks life in the eye and attacks it with mindset of an American engineer. Even the terrorists. Shouldn’t hackers in China be a bit different from Russian mobsters and those a bit different from Islamic terrorists? And what is it about this woman that causes everyone to put a rose between their teeth and face death to save her? She’s more popular than Helen of Troy. Well, sure, she’s spunky. But everyone in the whole book is spunky. It reeks of spunk and competence and McGyver-like ingenuity.
I did enjoy the parts about the computer game world and it’s various entwinings with reality. That part was thought provoking. I did not think that part went far enough, ending with some hand-waving about people sitting at computers for abnormally long periods of time and unleashing super-user cheat-codes in order to fill a minor plot point.
Ok. Bottom line: the book was entertaining, readable, fast paced. But if you are just starting out with Stephensen I don’t think this is the place to be. Start with something else.