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.
