Amazon Best Books of the Month, September 2011: Neal Stephenson is quite rightly known as a writer of ideas, but don't put it past him to pen a straightforward thriller. True, the plot of said thriller hinges on a massively multiplayer online game that's a step beyond what's actually available on the Internet circa 2011, but that's as far as the sci-fi goes. Enter "REAMDE," an online virus that brings together a super-rich CEO, a Chinese hacker, a rogue Russian mafioso, an assimilated East African beauty, an itinerant Hungarian software programmer, two insanely prolific fantasy writers, and guns, guns, guns. (The book features so much firepower that Stephenson enlisted what he calls a "ballistics copy editor.") It takes a veritable master of pacing to make a thousand pages feel like barely a third of that, but Stephenson is that master; his breakneck narrative starts fast and never, ever lets up. As such,
Reamde is as likely to turn off fans of his more cerebral fiction as it is to gain him scads of new devotees. Regardless, it marks an inimitable highlight of this year's thriller roster. --
Jason Kirk
“Stephenson’s REAMDE: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller...a triumph, all 980 pages of it.” (Cory Doctorow, boingboing.com )
“Noir futurist Stephenson returns to cyberia with this fast-moving though sprawling techno-thriller...Who’ll prevail? We don’t know till the very end, thanks to Stephenson’s knife-sharp skills as a storyteller. An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of statisfying mayhem.” (Kirkus Reviews (starred review) on REAMDE )
“Stephenson...delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story.” (Publishers Weekly on REAMDE )
“In less masterful hands, this pile-up of implausible coincidences, madcap romance, technological mayhem and nail-biting suspense might have been a train wreck, but Stephenson pulls it off. REAMDE has one of the most satisfyingly over-the-top endings of anything I’ve read in years. ” (Washington Post Book World )
“Nobody else writes like Stephenson” (Press Association (England) on REAMDE )
“Neal Stephenson has guts, a killer story, and—for the first time since
Cryptonomicon—a thriller I can thoroughly recommend to any reader....With REAMDE we have a very smart page-turner—a global chess game expertly played.” (Mental_Floss on REAMDE )
“REAMDE is...one big, carefully choreographed, jet-set square-dance of mayhem.” (Bloomberg News )
“Sometimes when you’re reading Neal Stephenson, he doesn’t just seem like one of the best novelists writing in English right now; he seems like the <
only one.” (Lev Grossman, Time magazine )
“There’s an intellectual pill buried deep in Mr. Stephenson’s narrative candy, one powerful enough that he deserves to be classified as a major national and international resource.” (Wall Street Journal on REAMDE )
“[Stephenson] makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin.” (International Herald Tribune on REAMDE )
“
Reamde is an entertainment, an enormous, giddily complex one. There’s no telling what Stephenson might be planning for his next novel, but now’s the time to dive into a first-rate intellectual thriller without fear of being overwhelmed by its virtuosity.” (San Francisco Chronicle on REAMDE )
“Expertly crafted and often gorgeously written.” (Boston Globe on REAMDE )
“Even at a thousand pages,
Reamde is sprightly enough to jump between 9 or 10 plot threads without getting tangled up in itself.…[A]n addicitve reading experience. You don’t so much read the book as tear whole hundred-page chunk out of it with your eyes.” (Stranger magazine on REAMDE )
“It’s hard to sum up a 1,000 page tome in a short review, so if you don’t feel like reading this rather long one, I’ll boil it down to three words: I loved it.” (Tor.com on REAMDE )
“After a decade of novels set in 18th century Europe and in alternate universes, Neal Stephenson triumphantly returns as a bestselling author to contemporary America.” (www.fantasyliterature.com )
“Stephenson, best-known for his genre-hopping novels, tackles tech-terrorism in Reamde.” (OakPark.Patch.com )
“A story that, despite its gargantuan heft, speeds along like a bullet train....The depth of the story, the attention to detail, the interlocking narratives and fine characterizations mark REAMDE as an immersive literary experience.” (Pittsburgh Tribune on REAMDE )
“REAMDE combines meticulous observation of the stranger socioeconomic effects wrought by technology with rousing fusillades of adventure.” (The Guardian on REAMDE )
“Stephenson somehow makes his crazy setup entirely plausible and tons of fun.” (Knoxville News-Sentinel on REAMDE )
“[REAMDE] is, without a doubt, one of the smartest, fastest-moving, and most consistently enjoyable novels of the year, a book with the rare distinction of being one this reviewer wishes he had written.” (Irish Examiner on REAMDE )
“[A] rip-roaring race through computer hacking and guns, China and North America, virtual reality and terrorism. ” (Sunday Times (London) on REAMDE )
