Reamde: a fractally complex novel

Reamde is the latest novel by Neal Stephenson. I should begin this review admitting I haven’t read any book by Stephenson I haven’t liked, although I think I’m not entirely blind to their shortcomings. Like some few modern science fiction authors, amongst which I would name Charles Stross, Peter Watts and perhaps Richard Morgan, Stephenson is a master of plot: his books are full of complex ideas and digressions that somehow fit together and come packaged in sentences that can go from the bluntest concision to balanced and multi-clause arrangements that defy linguistic gravity. Many people find Stephenson unbearably verbose, or affected, but I am glad of an author who’s not afraid of his medium.

Reamde could be said to be about many things, although trying to reduce it that way would do much violence to what it actually is. One could say it’s about coincidence, or family, or gold farming, or mafia, or narrative, or online communities… and it concerns itself with all these themes. However, like certain realities, Reamde doesn’t easily lend itself to abridgement into a closed form. Describing Reamde, if one is not to lose much of its essence, cannot easily be done in less space than Reamde takes itself.

There have been criticisms that Neal Stephenson’s fiction is ethnocentric: written about and for white nerds. One can dispute such a reading, but it is perhaps somewhat true of some of his work, and clearly a novel like Diamond Age is, to a certain extent, an apologia for “Western” values. Thus, on the article I just linked, we read:

Neal Stephenson sure has a thing for gold, doesn’t he? Cryptonomicon was (partially) about a white guy from the midwest with a tech-startup trying to get gold out of Japan.  The Baroque Cycle was (partially) about a white guy whose family would eventually be from the midwest with a ship named after the godess [sic] of technology trying to get gold to England.

It would appear that REAMDE is about a white guy from the midwest with a tech-startup built on money laundered through virtual gold transactions with Chinese gold farmers.

Inasmuch as this may have been true of some of his work, it is the least true about Reamde. It’s a multicultural novel, where we get to see the world from varied viewpoints: the obligatory white mid-western guy, though this time not a nerd; a mix-raced intelligence operative from England; assorted Eastern Europeans… even the Islamic terrorists are sometimes interesting and funny.

Of everything that goes on in the book, perhaps one misses a more ddetailed treatment of some of the hypotheses around T’Rain, an online game that reminds us a little of the Metaverse. Maybe that is why it doesn’t get quite as much time: Stephenson has done virtual reality before, in Snowcrash. The function of narrative, though, and the arising of emergent, unforeseen group attractors in the game, is left a little unexplored. Perhaps the book was already a little large at 4.4 megabytes to add a more detailed excursus on such matters.

I read this book in a day, and it was the only thing I did. I can’t imagine how a writer can keep that much state while writing a novel, and I suspect that when–not if–I read it again, I will find new things that passed me by on first reading. Trying to explain the novel to someone else, though, is difficult: so many things go together in parallel, it feels like working on a function with dozens of local variables and exit points. It works in the novel, somehow, and that’s a further tribute to the capabilities of its author. Driving all those little separate stories in such a way they interact just enough to attain the results sought, without losing touch nor colliding into chaos, is a performance worth enjoying.

As to its mode, it is perhaps closest to Cryptonomicon. It’s set in a future of our world, but so near to our own time that one is a bit cautious about calling it science fiction. Arguably, though, science fiction isn’t characterised primarily by being set in the future, but, stylistically, by an unusual focus in concepts and their interactions, and materially, by people being vehicles of expression of such concepts. In that regard, Reamde could easily be said to be science fiction.

If you can deal with sentences written for adults, and information-dense narrative that presupposes an alert reader with some curiosity, I think you will enjoy Reamde. I can’t make a better job of describing it, so go ahead and read it already, and let me know what you think. I’ll probably do so myself again sooner rather than later.

Back to the struggle

I haven’t been blogging in here for a long time. Part of the reason is I’ve been doing so on a Spanish language weblog I won’t link to in order to better protect my anonimity. The cause, however, was mostly laziness and apathy. Eventually one gets tired of making noises at the void…

The situation reminds me of a great work by Dostoyevsky, perhaps his greatest. I refer to Notes from Underground, a complex and difficult to categorize work. I remind myself of its narrator, expostulating on dealing with the impossible:

I will continue calmly concerning persons with strong nerves who do not understand a certain refinement of enjoyment. Though in certain circumstances these gentlemen bellow their loudest like bulls, though this, let us suppose, does them the greatest credit, yet, as I have said already, confronted with the impossible they subside at once. The impossible means the stone wall! What stone wall? Why, of course, the laws of nature, the deductions of natural science, mathematics. As soon as they prove to you, for instance, that you are descended from a monkey, then it is no use scowling, accept it for a fact. When they prove to you that in reality one drop of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your fellow-creatures, and that this conclusion is the final solution of all so-called virtues and duties and all such prejudices and fancies, then you have just to accept it, there is no help for it, for twice two is a law of mathematics. Just try refuting it.

“Upon my word, they will shout at you, it is no use protesting: it is a case of twice two makes four! Nature does not ask your permission, she has nothing to do with your wishes, and whether you like her laws or dislike them, you are bound to accept her as she is, and consequently all her conclusions. A wall, you see, is a wall … and so on, and so on.”

Merciful Heavens! but what do I care for the laws of nature and arithmetic, when, for some reason I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes four? Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength.

And really, doesn’t it seem a bit quixotic to insist on drafting and editing and “publishing” my essays–what a grand yet false sense of moment, the verb to publish–for them to end, like so many other futile endeavours, lost in the æther, to profit or harm no-one? This must be the eventual obsession of all frustrated writers, and most writers are frustrated: all nice sentiment to the contrary, a single mind changed does not necessarily justify an infinite amount of effort. There comes the time when one must make one’s bow to fate–not so?–and admit that there are better things to do with one’s time.

Yet, there really aren’t better things to do with mine. Time passes, as I chat and read and think, and, when I can compell my stubborn self, study, and little suggests any of that is worth the effort, either. At least, my writing does yield a product of sorts, even if it’s abstract and no-one can grip it in the hand. Reading and chatting obtain far less, and as for studying… the least said on this, the better.

So time has come to once again assail the stone wall. This time, without the naïve pretention of storming heaven, but, rather, modestly attempting to leave some dents on fate, and on boredom. Let it be so!