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From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Sep 14 2011 - 15:41:02 EDT
#1 New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson releases a thriller
with Eritrean woman as one of the cast of characters in the book.
http://www.facebook.com/TheNealStephenson?sk=app_190322544333196
http://boingboing.net/2011/09/14/stephensons-reamde-p.html
Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller
Posted by Cory Doctorow on Wednesday, Sep 14th at 5:46am
REAMDE Back in 2010, I found myself in Seattle (I was touring with my novel
For the Win -- a young adult science fiction novel about gold-farming), I
stopped by Neal Stephenson's place for breakfast and asked him what he was
working on. He said, "You ever heard of 'gold-farming?'" I couldn't help but
smile.
Stephenson's one of my favorite novelists, a writer who is both very good at
what he does, and who is nevertheless willing to go all the way out to the
edge of his prodigious talents and take brave risks. Even when these don't
fully pay off, they're always exhilarating experiments -- Stephenson's
imperfect results being better than most writers' best days. So while Snow
Crash and Diamond Age drew critical fire for having a lot of seemingly
ornamental plot-discursions that never quite paid off at the end, the
insanely ambitious and enormous System of the World ruthlessly hunted down
every conceivable loose end and executed it before the final page was
turned. As much as I enjoyed the latter, I found that I preferred
Stephenson's loose ends to the sometimes mechanical exercise of tying them
all off. His next book, Anathem, solved this problem somewhat by having a
lot fewer moving parts (a bit of a joke there for those of you who've read
the book!) and thus a simpler, cleaner finish. As good and audacious as
Anathem was, it lacked the intense, fractal plot-complexity of System, and I
missed that a little.
REAMDE, Stephenson's latest novel -- the "have you ever heard of
'gold-farming'" -- novel is a book that represents a new kind of equilibrium
in Stephenson's literary canon: a book that is simultaneously as baroque as
System of the World and as cleanly and crisply finished as Anathem. It is,
in other words, a triumph, all 980 pages of it.
REAMDE starts off as a clever, if somewhat straightforward technothriller.
Richard Forthrast is the black sheep of a rugged, formidable midwestern
family. After a checkered career of minor crime and notoriety, Richard has
founded an enormous and enormously profitable multiplayer online game,
called T'Rain. This has left him uncomfortably wealthy and powerful, and
somewhat constrained by his corporate success. But at least he can help out
his relations, like his favored adopted niece Zula, an Eritrean refugee who
was raised on the family homestead in Iowa and is now putting her advanced
geoscience degree to work as a technician in the T'Rain world, designing the
geosystems that deposit precious metals where gold-farmers (an integral part
of the T'Rain economy) can dig it up.
The story begins in earnest when Zula's foolish hacker boyfriend sells some
stolen credit-card numbers to a front for the Russian mob, and then finds
himself at their mercy as the bagman's entire user directory is encrypted by
a piece of malicious ransomware called REAMDE (a Chinglish mangling of
"Readme") that is targeted at T'Rain players (the malware also encrypts the
backup). Now the mob needs to pay off the ransom -- a trifling $75 worth of
virtual gold -- so that they can decrypt the data. Except that the in-game
region where the gold-drop is to be made is now clogged with powerful
griefers who waylay extortion victims and steal the gold they're bringing to
the crooks.
After a bunch of wrangling and danger, Zula, her hacker boyfriend, and the
Russian gangsters end up in Xianmen, China (the first two aren't there
voluntarily), trying to track down the virus's author, and that's where the
ambition of the REAMDE starts to kick in. You see, at this point, Stephenson
is only a couple hundred pages into his thousand-page epic, and he's only
marshalled a few of the many bands of characters who spend the next 700
pages embroiled in one of the most startling, exciting, white-knuckle
technothrillers I've had the pleasure of losing a week of my life to.
REAMDE goes from being a story about virtual worlds to a much bigger
geopolitical tale about the war on terror, filled with grace-note,
high-detail technical excursions into international shipping, American
survivalism, MI6 spycraft, Philippines sex-tourism, and lots and lots and
lots of guns. This last part is one of the great testimonials I can make
about REAMDE, because books about guncraft generally bore me down to the
marrow. But Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs
(including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical
gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore
gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to
find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself.
Combine that with a cast of characters that, while recognizably
Stephensonian archetypes, are nevertheless novel, likable, and complex, and
you've got a powerful, magnificent book that is worth the sizable forests
that will have to be demolished to commit it to paper, and the sizable lump
that it will represent in your bag or briefcase while you finish it. Here's
a book that, all on its own, makes a hell of a case for buying an ebook
reader, assuming you can find a DRM-free ebook edition.
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