Reamde: A Novel [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

Neal Stephenson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 20, 2011

Neal Stephenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Anathem, returns to the terrain of his groundbreaking novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon to deliver a high-intensity, high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller in which a tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online war game.

In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.

But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe—and Richard is at ground zero.

Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story—an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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

Review

“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, best-known for his genre-hopping novels, tackles tech-terrorism in Reamde.” (OakPark.Patch.com )

“Expertly crafted and often gorgeously written.” (Boston Globe on REAMDE )

“[A] rip-roaring race through computer hacking and guns, China and North America, virtual reality and terrorism. ” (Sunday Times (London) 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 )

“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 )

“REAMDE is...one big, carefully choreographed, jet-set square-dance of mayhem.” (Bloomberg News )

“Stephenson...delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story.” (Publishers Weekly on REAMDE )

“[Stephenson] makes reading so much fun it feels like a deadly sin.” (International Herald Tribune on REAMDE )

“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 )

“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 )

“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 )

“Stephenson somehow makes his crazy setup entirely plausible and tons of fun.” (Knoxville News-Sentinel on REAMDE )

“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 )

“[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 )

“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 )

“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 )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1056 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; First Edition edition (September 20, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061977969
• ISBN-13: 978-0061977961
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (276 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,272 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Neal Town Stephenson (born October 31, 1959) is an American writer, known for his speculative fiction works, which have been variously categorized science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk. Stephenson explores areas such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. He also writes non-fiction articles about technology in publications such as Wired Magazine, and has worked part-time as an advisor for Blue Origin, a company (funded by Jeff Bezos) developing a manned sub-orbital launch system.
Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum) Stephenson came from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs "propeller heads". His father is a professor of electrical engineering whose father was a physics professor; his mother worked in a biochemistry laboratory, while her father was a biochemistry professor. Stephenson's family moved to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois in 1960 and then to Ames, Iowa in 1966 where he graduated from Ames High School in 1977. Stephenson furthered his studies at Boston University. He first specialized in physics, then switched to geography after he found that it would allow him to spend more time on the university mainframe. He graduated in 1981 with a B.A. in Geography and a minor in physics. Since 1984, Stephenson has lived mostly in the Pacific Northwest and currently resides in Seattle with his family.
Neal Stephenson is the author of the three-volume historical epic "The Baroque Cycle" (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World) and the novels Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

200 of 218 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent For What It Is, September 20, 2011

By 

Barney (US) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Reamde: A Novel (Hardcover)

The good news: *REAMDE* is a great page-turner, a bit of a throwback to Stephenson's early, pseudonymous techno-thriller *Interface*. I stayed up all night charging through the first half, and seriously considered skipping work so I could finish it. Having finished it, I have to say that it reads like a streak, which isn't something you can say about any of Stephenson's other novels. However, it's in his digressions and excesses that Stephenson is great, which brings us to...

The bad news: although it wouldn't be accurate to call this a "beach read", it's true that it isn't anywhere near as ambitious as Stephenson's earlier work, and there are no outrageous, indelible set-pieces like the Cap n' Crunch chapter of *Cryptonomicon* or the Newton-Leibniz smack down from *The Baroque Cycle*. And with the exception of the hilarious medievalist Don Squared, the characters aren't very memorable. In particular Zula, the heroine, is a bit bland and unconvincing.

The bottom line: if you're a Stephenson fan, you'll probably be a little disappointed, but if you're new to his writing, this is a perfect introduction to his style and outlook.

103 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Undeniably a Stephenson book, but one of his odder ones...., September 27, 2011

By 

W. Lawton (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Reamde: A Novel (Hardcover)

Just finished this beast of a novel. It's strange to give one of the best thrillers ever written a four-star review, but there it is...because this is, it needs to be said, not a towering accomplishment along the lines of a Baroque Trilogy or a Cryptonomicon or even a Diamond Age.

One could be forgiven for, like me, being a little disappointed about that. Neal Stephenson is an author capable of towering accomplishments. For an author as preoccupied as he is with grand, sweeping ideas of cosmological scale and intricacy, it's jarring to pick up his latest novel and find yourself reading a thriller that's not about ideas as much as it is about fun.

But oh, what a thriller. It's a thousand pages with the dynamic energy of a bullet train or a wild mustang, screaming along with an almost unbearable intensity and narrative zest. I found myself nipping a hundred pages at a time, like trying to gag down a glass of Bacardi 151, because it moves with explosive speed and a madcap intensity that never really lets up. It's not a traditional Stephenson novel, but only a writer of his caliber could have crafted a thriller this long, complex, and energetic. And you get the sense that he just had a ridiculous amount of fun writing it.

It's worth every moment of the read, and it's terrific fun watching the thriller genre get worked over by a writer of a caliber rarely seen in the straight-to-paperback set. But it's still not really as good as some of his earlier stuff...so it's a four, reluctantly. Doesn't mean it's still not one of the best books I'll read this year.

163 of 194 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A pale ghost of the old Stephenson, September 21, 2011

By 

Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya (India) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Reamde: A Novel (Hardcover)

As an avid Stephenson fan, I feel let down after finishing Reamde. It is not as if it is a bad novel. In fact I would rate it as one of the better thrillers I have read in the last couple of years. If you like tales of very strong men and somewhat strong women in which lots of guns go off, then you will like Reamde. In its ambition and the quality of its execution it easily matches up to the works of the masters of this genre such as Clancy or Forsyth.

Yet, the book lacks the special Stephenson touch. First, there is no overarching theme tying the novel together. Cryptonomicon was about the elusive nature of information and wealth, the Baroque Cycle was about the rise of science and capitalism in the West. Having these deeper questions in the background made the surface action in the novels more meaningful. This time it is just a bunch of Good Guys chasing a bunch of Bad Guys.

Second, the characters in Reamde lack both depth and idiosyncrasy. Despite the length of the novel, there is so much going on that we do not get to know the nuances of the characters' personalities. I don't think I am the only Stephenson fan missing the Cap'n Crunch episodes. Though they start off with nominally different backgrounds and interests, as the novel progresses the good guys/girls all converge into a uniform mould of toughness, self-reliance and an aptitude for violence. The bad guys, apart form the chief villain, seem to exist just to be killed. These cookie-cutter "jihadists" seem to have been dropped in from some B-grade action movie script, for Stephenson does not seem to have any wish to examine either the ideology of religious fundamentalists or their social backgrounds. The cliched references to "virgins in heaven" are not what I had expected from an author who had earlier shown such a great awareness of history.

Finally, Stephenson depends too much on coincidences to tie the different plots threads together. This is particularly so in the way in which all the major characters are brought together to the same place for the final climax.

At times Stephenson's discussions of the difficulties in sustaining the game-world of T'rain seem to be ironical self-references to difficulties an author must face in sustaining an imaginary world that spans a thousand odd pages. But self-deprecation can go only so far. I would rather have the old Stephenson back. [Though to be fair, just having written one of the Baroque Cycle books is an achievement worthy of a lifetime.]