Review by New York Times Review
LET us say that novelists are like unannounced visitors. While Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow pound manfully on the door, Jonathan Franzen and Zadie Smith knock politely, little preparing you for the emotional ferociousness with which they plan on making themselves at home. Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he'd left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk. It is tempting to call Stephenson a "cult writer," but cult writers are typically under- or selectively read. All of Stephenson's novels published since the late 1990s have been best sellers, and some of his original editions go for precious-metal asking prices online. His still-fresh, still-astounding cyberpunk parody "Snow Crash" (1992) standardized use of the Sanskrit word "avatar" to denote virtual human identities and came impressively close to predicting how the Internet would come to be understood, which is to say as a "metaverse" paradoxically larger than the world that enfolds it. For these and other reasons, Stephenson is the rare writer whose 20-year-old magazine essays have their own Wikipedia pages. That leaves us with his dense, funny and erudite novels, which are packed with so many different kinds of information, they sometimes scarcely feel like novels at all. What do they feel like? Eldritch downloads, maybe, from some mind-flaying computer brain. This critic - a Stephenson fan and admirer of long standing - has read most of Stephenson's novels. His "Baroque Cycle," a three-volume megatome about 17th- and 18th-century Europe and New England published over 2003 and 2004, put the author's many gifts on full display. But halfway through the second volume I set the "Cycle" aside. Mainly it was the prose, which made it feel as if one were being winked at for a thousand pages by a Laurence Sterne impersonator. Stephenson followed up with "Anathem" (2008), a work of philosophically inclined science fiction that seemed determined to scare away anyone who regards "A Canticle for Leibowitz" as anything less than the premier achievement of human imagination. If you are a Stephenson fan who believes "Snow Crash" and "Cryptonomicon" (1999) are his greatest novels, "Reamde" will come as very good news, for in many ways it can be read as a thematic revisitation of those excellent precursors. Once again Stephenson is asking us to think about virtual worlds and information storage; once again, by God, he makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin. Just about any novel's plot can be made to sound ridiculous in summary, but the plot of "Reamde" is ridiculous no matter how sympathetically one summarizes. Here goes: Richard Forthrast, an erst-while drug smuggler who funneled his earnings into founding a Fortune 500 video game company, takes under his wing a young woman named Zula, who was born to hardship in East Africa and later adopted by Richard's Iowan sister. Richard's company is the publisher of a massively multiplayer online game called T'Rain, which has eclipsed World of Warcraft as the world's most popular such entertainment. Zula's boyfriend, Peter, borrows a thumbstick from Richard, which he uses to save stolen credit card information and gives to an associate of the Russian mafia. Richard's thumbstick, unfortunately, is tainted with a T'Rain virus called REAMDE ("an accidental or deliberate/ironical misspelling of README"), created by a Chinese T'Rain player. The virus incapacitates the Russians' computers, after which they come violently calling for assistance. With Peter and Zula in tow, the Russians fly illegally into Xiamen, China, to find and kill the Chinese hacker responsible for the virus. This brings them into accidental contact with a jihadist cell led by one Abdallah Jones, a wanted terrorist, who despite being black and British somehow regards China as an appropriate place to hide. Jones kidnaps Zula and flies her into the wilds of British Columbia. The novel ends with a 150-page-long running firefight along the Canadian-American border. So it turns out you can make this stuff up. Stephenson's novels have always been a little nuts, but thoughtfully nuts. That he is even able to keep this big, careening, recreational-vehicular novel on the road during its hairpin narrative turns says a lot about him as a plot juggler and information wrangler. But "Reamde," at a certain point, becomes less a novel than a book-shaped IV bag from which plot flows. Just about all the plucky good guys wind up killing someone, an act of moral extremity that leaves them remarkably unclouded. (An epilogue mentions that two characters are "seeing the same doctor for treatment of post-traumatic stress," but that is too small a concession for a book with such a high body count.) Make this clear: "Reamde" is always hugely entertaining, and Stephenson is always an amazing writer in the sense that he can go anywhere and describe anything. Yet he can be an oddly vulgar writer. ("The look on his face said: Can this really be happening!?") Gunfights described in slow motion also occur too frequently and often end with sentences like this: "Then he pulled the trigger and blew Jabari's head off." The "Welsh terrorist" Abdallah Jones is simply not a very convincing villain. ("Welsh terrorist." A funny phrase, like "Mongolian pastry chef" or "Spanish engineer.") When Jones is not saying things like "If you work with me and come along nicely, I shall permit you to keep your teeth," he is bludgeoning one of our heroes to death with an artificial limb. There are times when you wonder if "Reamde" is the smartest dumb novel you have ever read or the dumbest smart novel. The best parts of "Reamde" concern Richard, his company and T'Rain. Two things have assured T'Rain's commercial success: actual geological laws have been programmed to govern its terrain (it is this feature from which the game's name derives); and the game uses a currency system based on real money - treasure mined from the strata of T'Rain's crust can be transformed into earthly coin. Which is where the Reamde virus comes in. It locks down users' computer files and tells them the only way to unlock their files is to proceed into a certain part of T'Rain. When the unfortunate players enter territory held by Chinese hackers, they are virtually killed and less virtually robbed. The passages in which Stephenson gives us a double game of cat and mouse, where those stalking prey across T'Rain are simultaneously being stalked in real life, are some of the book's strongest. At one point Richard referees an argument between the two writers who created T'Rain's mythology, one an English fantasy writer of Tolkienish linguistic pretension and the other a "freakishly prolific" American from whom ill-conceived lore tumbles by the second. The two hilariously spar over the proper use of apostrophes in invented languages and names. Later, the American writer asks Richard, "How can I write a story about Good and Evil in a world where those concepts have no real meaning - no consequences?" By the end of "Reamde," you wonder if Stephenson ever thought to put this question to himself. In this novel, the heroes stalk their prey in a virtual online world, while they in turn are being stalked in real life. Tom Bissell is the author, most recently, of "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 11, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Not many writers can make a thousand-page book feel like it's over before you know it, but Stephenson, author of Cryptonomicon (928 pages), Anathem (981), and the three-volume Baroque Cycle (about 900 each), is a master of character, story, and pacing. Here, an unknown miscreant has created a computer virus, Reamde a possibly deliberate misspelling o. read me. a common file name and is using it to extort money from users of a multiplayer online game. Meanwhile, a plan to sell stolen credit-card numbers to a Russian mobster goes horribly awry, catapulting a hacker and her cohorts into a race for their lives. The book feels like a video game characters bouncing from one action set piece to another; new villains introduced out of left field; a sprawling, compelling, completely seductive story that keeps the reader flipping pages at near light-speed. As always, Stephenson has created a cast of three-dimensional characters with their own voices, motivations, and behavior patterns. If a well-drawn character can step off the page, then these guys positively lunge off it, leaping into our heads and making us feel as though we're watching some elaborate game being played out on the screens of our minds. Another wild adventure from a true literary genius. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Stephenson's continues to turn out door-stop-size genre-benders that, against the odds, become commercial successes. His latest has his track record behind him as well as as a digital promotional campaign that will leave no byte unbitten.--Pitt, Davi. Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stephenson (Anathem), the master of meandering, inconclusive plots, delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story, regardless of the many digressions and a host of characters. Zula Forthrast's unfortunate taste in boyfriends catapults her into a breakneck adventure spanning two continents and several increasingly dangerous criminal gangs. What looks like a chance to make a quick buck turns sour when the Russian mafia discover that Zula's conniving boyfriend, Peter, inadvertently handed their representative a virus-infected thumb drive that holds all of the mafia's encrypted data. Peter and Zula find themselves prisoners of the menacing and desperate Ivanov and dragged to Xiamen, China, in a last-ditch effort to confront the hackers responsible before Ivanov's bosses learn what has happened. Complications ensue when the gangsters raid an apartment belonging not to the rather hapless hackers but instead to the notorious terrorist Abdallah Jones and his well-armed compatriots, into whose hands Zula falls. The plot snowballs from there, toward a violent conclusion near the U.S.-Canadian border. Author tour. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
After the best-selling Anathem, Stephenson's latest blockbuster introduces Dodge Forthrast, a legendary gamer, famous for his illegal past and for T'Rain, the hugely successful real-time strategy game he created. When teenage hackers in China unleash a computer virus named Reamde in T'Rain, the virus interrupts the daily business of the criminal underworld, who use the virtual world of T'Rain to launder real-world dollars. The plot intensifies both inside the game and around the globe, as gamers, fantasy writers, and hackers try to outplay a wide range of bad guys including the Russian mob, Islamic terrorists, and MI6. VERDICT Stephenson continues to deliver cyberthrillers packed equally with detailed backstory and action adventure. It is a great crossover recommendation for sf readers interested in thrillers and for fans of spy novels who appreciate intricate plotlines and technical detail. [See Prepub Alert, 3/14/11.]-Catherine Lantz, Morton Coll. Lib., Cicero, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Anathem, 2008, etc.) returns to cyberia with this fast-moving though sprawling techno-thriller.Richard Forthrast is a middle-aged videogame tycoon with a problem on his hands: Bad guys have figured out a way to hack his new shooter splatfest with a virus that "took advantage of a buffer overflow bug in Outlook to inject malicious code into the host operating system and establish root-level control of the computer."Richard has other problems, some big enough to pose a threat to the world currency market. Eek! Fortunately, nepotism be damned, he's hired his adopted niece to do a little consulting, and she turns out to have the wherewithal to give Geena Davis and Uma Thurman a run for the money in the hot-chicks-with-mad-ninja-skills department. Young Zula has solid possibilities. For one thing, she's babelicious, "black/Arab with an unmistakable hint of Italian." For another, she's got dual degrees in geology and computer science, which come in very handy when she has to scale impenetrable mountains on the hunt for renegade computer jocks. A bonus: She's quick to learn her way around a shotgun, and her boyfriend isn't too shabby, either, even though they have a habit of getting into bad predicaments: "As minutes went by and the novelty of being on a private jet wore off, Zula began to understand the same thing that Peter did, which was that they were not meant to get out of this alive." There are bad guys aplenty, and they're more diverse than an IHOP menu: There are Russians and Chinese, mutually distrustful, and a small army of very bad jihadists, the kind who give good Muslims a bad name. There are hackers and counterhackers, spies versus spies. And then there are Richard's kinfolk, the Brothers Karamazov with heavy weapons.Who'll prevail? We don't know till the very end, thanks to Stephenson's knife-sharp skills as a storyteller. An intriguing yarnmost geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
