Neal Stephenson’s REAMDE: Excellently written, ambitiously epic technothriller.
I first read Neal Stephenson at least ten years ago. Published in 1991, Snow Crash was set in the early 21st century. Jacking into a computer virtual reality was a common way of escaping the realities of the massive corporate owned enclaves that used to be the United States. It was Stephenson’s vision of how a virtual reality-based Internet might evolve in the near future.
Snow Crash’s virtual reality is said to be a strong influence in the development of Second Life, a wildly popular online virtual world launched in 2003.
Stephenson was amazingly close with his Snow Crash predictions, and he takes us beyond current massive on-line gaming state-of-the-art with his latest techno-thriller REAMDE.
REAMDE is an epic novel that is built around a massive online multi-player virtual reality game called T’Rain. Richard Forthrast, who founded the profitable game, is very wealthy, but uncomfortable with the lifestyle that comes with corporate success. He justifies his success by quietly financially helping out his family. His favored niece, adopted into the conservative mid-western family, is now utilizing her 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. Although there is some violence, it’s not gory-in-your-face-gratuitous violence but a necessary part of the story.
Highly recommended! Five Stars!
Tags: book, book review, REAMDE