[Today’s run: 6 miles]<\/p>\n
Reamde<\/span><\/span><\/strong><\/span> is the latest fiction work by Neal Stephenson.<\/p>\n I have read a few of Stephenson’s prior fiction works: Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, Anathem.\u00a0 Reamde is a similar work.<\/p>\n Like those works it has a large cast of characters.\u00a0 It is set in the current time (not past, future or mixed).<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 She attracts a following of friends who try to rescue her.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n I don’t think this is Stephenson’s best work.\u00a0 Not very far into the book our protagonist is confronted by omnipotent Russian mafiosi.\u00a0 I just about quit reading it at that point.\u00a0 Later I picked it up again.\u00a0 The Russians are thwarted by some rather hapless\u00a0 hackers who use the computer-game world to extort real money.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In China other characters are brought into the picture, some of whom fall in love with our heroine (as do some of the Russians).\u00a0 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. \u00a0 (Again I set it aside for awhile.)\u00a0 Many of the Russians and terrorists are killed.\u00a0 But the main terrorist escapes and kidnaps our heroine (yet again!) and hauls her to Canada.\u00a0 The remaining Russians, hackers, spies and\u00a0 accessories\u00a0 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.\u00a0 All of the bad people die, most of the good people live.<\/p>\n Besides a plot I considered bizarre, I thought the characters were kind of flat.\u00a0 Stephenson is an American computer guy.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Even the terrorists.\u00a0 Shouldn’t hackers in China be a bit different from Russian mobsters and those a bit different from Islamic terrorists?\u00a0 And what is it about this woman that causes everyone to put a rose between their teeth and face death to save her?\u00a0 She’s more popular than Helen of Troy.\u00a0 Well, sure, she’s spunky.\u00a0 But everyone in the whole book is spunky.\u00a0 It reeks of spunk and competence and McGyver-like ingenuity.<\/p>\n I did enjoy the parts about the computer game world and it’s various entwinings with reality.\u00a0 That part was thought provoking.\u00a0 I did not think that part went far enough,\u00a0 ending with\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Ok.\u00a0 Bottom line:\u00a0 the book was entertaining, readable, fast paced.\u00a0 But if you are just starting out with Stephensen I don’t think this is the place to be.\u00a0 Start with something else.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [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.\u00a0 Reamde is a similar work. Like those works it has a large cast of characters.\u00a0 It is set in the current time (not past, future or mixed). A central […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-thoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2768"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2774,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2768\/revisions\/2774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2768"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2768"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2768"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}