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Reamde

Neal Stephenson (Goodreads Author),

Malcolm Hillgartner (Narrator)

3.97 · Rating details · 47,533 ratings · 4,796 reviews

Four decades ago, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa family, fled to a wild and lonely mountainous corner of British Columbia to avoid the draft. Smuggling backpack loads of high-grade marijuana across the border into Northern Idaho, he quickly amassed an enormous and illegal fortune. With plenty of time and money to burn, he became addicted to an online fantasy ...more

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Audiobook, 39 pages

Published September 26th 2011 by Brilliance Audio (first published September 20th 2011)

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Sep 01, 2011 Jenne rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Me: la la la I'm sure this will be edifying and weird.

Book: Yes this will be a book about math and philosophy and like, historical dudes J/K actually I am like 14 Die Hards all squished together!

Me: SHut up, I have to stop reading this and actually make a living!

Book: no YOU shut up!!

Me: Seriously, they say people need to sleep occasionally.

Book: Bitch, I am NOT DONE. I will TELL YOU when you can sleep.

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Aug 11, 2011 Kemper rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: terrorism, 2015-reread, thriller, spy-vs-spy, cyber, over-there, 2011, crime-mystery

Damn, but this book exhausted me. It wasn’t just having to hold up it’s 127 lbs. of bulk while trying to read that wore me out either.

Stephenson hasn’t made it easy on his fans since Cryptonomicon in 1999 with it and every book since being about 27,000 pages long while spanning the late 1600s in Europe to World War II to another world complete with it’s own languages and customs, and each book was also crammed with detailed information about topics like finance and code breaking. When I saw that Damn, but this book exhausted me. It wasn’t just having to hold up it’s 127 lbs. of bulk while trying to read that wore me out either.

Stephenson hasn’t made it easy on his fans since Cryptonomicon in 1999 with it and every book since being about 27,000 pages long while spanning the late 1600s in Europe to World War II to another world complete with it’s own languages and customs, and each book was also crammed with detailed information about topics like finance and code breaking. When I saw that this was going to be a modern day thriller that had something to do with a MMORPG, I thought Neal was finally taking pity on us poor readers of only average intelligence and attention span and giving us an easier book.

Wrong.

At over 1000 pages with a plot that races around the world and includes multiple characters in wildly different circumstances, Reamde is not a thriller you just breeze through, but like most things Stephenson, I found that the effort I put into it was rewarded with a wild and unique story and top notch writing.

Richard Forthrast fled the US for Canada to avoid the draft during Vietnam and once the war was over he made a small fortune as a marijuana smuggler. Years later, Richard put his pot money into the development of a MMORPG called T’Rain and is now enormously wealthy and successful as the game is one of the most popular of its type around the world.

Richard’s relationship with his family in Iowa is strained, but he loves his niece, Zula. An African refugee, Zula was adopted by Richard’s brother and grew up as an Iowa farm girl and recently graduated college with a computer degree. Richard offers her a job and is thrilled that he’ll get to spend more time with her. However, hackers have put a virus called Reamde in the T’Rain game and this inadvertently begins a chain of events with deadly consequences.

The story roams from the US to the Isle of Man to Canada and China as well as various other locales and a huge cast of characters is involved. Russian gangsters, fantasy novelists, British spies, on-line gamers, a Hungarian money launderer, Chinese hackers, American survivalist nut jobs and Islamic terrorists all get mixed up in the plot, and the book culminates in an epic way with 100+ tense pages that stressed me out and left me needing a nap afterwards.

While Stephenson still never met an info dump he didn’t like, he keeps the focus here mainly on the characters without taking long detours to explore concepts like he has in some of his other books although he does spend a fair amount of time explaining the nature of the T‘Rain game while working in some pretty funny observations about the fantasy genre and gaming. Fans of his earlier work who grumble about the length and pace of his later stuff will still find plenty to bitch about here, and there are some dead sub-plots that could be trimmed with no damage done to the overall story.

But to me, that’s what makes a Neal Stephenson book special. Yes, he probably could have written a 300 to 400 page book that got most of the same plot into it, but without the backstories and the time spent in the mind of each character as they think through their respective situations, it’d be just another book with a bunch of people running around with guns and laptops. Part of the charm for me is Stephenson’s quirky way of telling a story, and he’s delivered another great book here. ...more

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Aug 29, 2011 Ryan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It's important for writers to recognize their strengths. With Reamde, it's clear that Neal Stephenson has embraced his: the infodump. There are infodumps about the setting of wind shield wipers on cars in Seattle, bears roaming the Rockies, and Walmart.

These may not be thrilling subjects, but Reamde is a infodump fueled thriller. After just 300/ 1000 pages, Stephenson grows tired of American Walmarts. Before we know it, his hero's niece, Zula, is kidnapped and flown to China, where we are given ...more

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Sep 03, 2011 Dan rated it liked it · review of another edition

The fact that this book came out 2 days before I take a 12 hour flight to china is proof that god loves me and wants me to be happy.

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May 08, 2011 Will Byrnes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, brain-candy

“Birth and death,” Chet said. “The poles of human existence. We’re like meridians, all beginning and all ending in the same place. We spread out from the beginning and go our separate ways, over seas and mountains and islands and deserts, each telling our own story, as different as they could possibly be. But in the end we all converge and our ends are as much the same as our beginnings

Neal Stephenson has taken the notion of a multi-player, on-line video game as the basis for an action novel ...more

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Sep 15, 2011 Jenny (Reading Envy) rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read2011, sword-and-laser, sci-fi-fantasy

I know, I know. When Stephenson writes really smart, I get annoyed while I force myself to finish the book (Quicksilver). When he writes a (sometimes) action-packed crime novel full of terrorists and international espionage and virtual worlds (Reamde), I get stuck near page 100 or 200 and allow myself to be talked into pushing onward, and start regretting it around page 700, and feel annoyed when I finally finish.

Here's the thing. I like a fun crime novel. I read all the Stieg Larsson books. I ...more

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Aug 19, 2012 Julio Genao rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Remind me never to read reviews written by my most ardent "fans."

This book is great, but it appears #TeamStephenson was expecting the opening of the Ark of the fucking Covenant.

If you want a smart, contemporary, geeky, international action thriller written by someone who just spent 10 years writing an epic about the connections between the tech of the 17th century and the tech of the 21st—in longhand, on, like, parchment, with a fountain pen, the showboating bastard—then read this.

It's fun. And ...more

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Nov 09, 2011 Graham Crawford rated it liked it · review of another edition

I love Neil Stephenson (most of the time), and I loved this book - most of the time. When He's good he's brilliant, but when he's bad he's mind numbingly dull. This is probably his most commercial/mainstream book yet - It screams please make me into to a Hollywood action movie, or big budget miniseries. For my taste it screams this too loudly.

The best parts of the novel are about the Chinese hacking and Gold Farming scene, the REAMDE virus- all classic slick Stephenson. Once we are back in ...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Nick rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I thought, when I started reading this book, that Stephenson had turned in a classic Great American Novel. By that I mean that the introduction to the main character (although actually this is a seriously ensemble piece, so it’s probably better to think of him as the spine character – the events in the book could not take place without him, even when – as much of the time – he’s out of the room and has no knowledge of what’s going on) is a perfect, serious statement of a particular moment of I thought, when I started reading this book, that Stephenson had turned in a classic Great American Novel. By that I mean that the introduction to the main character (although actually this is a seriously ensemble piece, so it’s probably better to think of him as the spine character – the events in the book could not take place without him, even when – as much of the time – he’s out of the room and has no knowledge of what’s going on) is a perfect, serious statement of a particular moment of American history – the present one. The prose has a ringing certainty, and a compelling portrait emerges of a man in later years, slightly aloof from his extended family, whose life has followed the major threads of his time. This is Stephenson pulling together the strands of his writing. You get powerful depictions of the heartland of America, dynastic storytelling, and a sense of the US as a fractious, complex, fascinating entity; woven into this, though, is a new world of online gold farming and the economics of MMORPGs as they become more populous than many nations.
So I was all set to read a kind of cross between John Steinbeck and William Gibson, and wondering whether this was going to be Stephenson’s “Great Book”.
And then the action started.
And did not stop.
For nearly one thousand pages.
This is not a measured, dynastic thriller stepped in draft-dodging, marijuana, and Warcraft. It is an epic, exhausting, non-stop action flick in book form. It makes Heat and Kill Bill look short, tame, and dull. It has, yes, an ongoing allegiance to history and culture. It does not suddenly abandon the slightly melancholic sense of ageing, or the awareness that what happens now depends in great part on then. But it surely isn’t the book I expected on page 20. Instead, it’s a superbly exciting, cross-cultural adventure with a cast of thousands (well, no, all right, but certainly about ten main characters who are in different parts of the world and rushing towards a final confrontation).
I loved it.
There are niggles, of course. Stepehenson’s Brits are real people when you get to know them, but they have a kind of veneer of showcase tweediness. Although maybe that’s just how the rest of the world experiences Brits. But then there’s a gang of jihadists caught between extremism and sexual violence all the time, and while there’s a vague nod to the notion that the majority of American muslims would consider them insane and nightmarish, it has to be acknowledged that we never meet a muslim character in the course of the action who isn’t a total bastard. That was a bit disappointing, because it’s something I’d really like to see Stephenson do: the journey of an immigrant into the US tapestry is a thing he understands. On the other hand, maybe there was a storyline like that and it had to be cut. There certainly wasn’t room for another two hundred pages in this book – as it is, the thing’s printed on Bible stock.
So: this is a blinding book. Expect a movie. But it’s not the showstopper I imagined it might be when I began – it’s a completely different showstopper. It won’t be the one which is bound in leather and kept on the shelf alongside your original print of Magnificent Ambersons. But you will not be bored, and you will laugh, and you will stay up late to find out what happens next. ...more

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Dec 31, 2011 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I took the week off between Christmas and New Years and decided the perfect book to end the year with was the new woolly MAMMOTH sized Neal Stephenson book. Because we were traveling down to the in-laws house, a 12 hour trip to the ship channel in Texas, I checked out a library copy. With this size of book it is easy to break the spine while reading it and this is a book that actually forces the reader to abuse it to actually read the book. In retrospect, though I was glad I didn't have to I took the week off between Christmas and New Years and decided the perfect book to end the year with was the new woolly MAMMOTH sized Neal Stephenson book. Because we were traveling down to the in-laws house, a 12 hour trip to the ship channel in Texas, I checked out a library copy. With this size of book it is easy to break the spine while reading it and this is a book that actually forces the reader to abuse it to actually read the book. In retrospect, though I was glad I didn't have to torture my own copy of the book, it would be a wise investment to purchase this book on your kindle, iPad, nook etc. This is a book made to be read digitally.

My mother-in-law who was diligently marking my progress in the book would come in at different times of the day to find me slouched in a chair with this book perched in various positions to relieve my hands, arms and back.(I still have a stubborn knot in the muscle under my scapula.) She would say, "You really aren't making much progress in that book." I would blearily pull myself away from China, Canada or the latest wonderfully tense moment in the plot and bluster, "Of course I'm making progress it is a 1,000 page book."

She was right though. I'd get to the end of a day of power reading and find my bookmark still on the South side of the center of the book. It did not seem I was really making any progress and what made it all the more interesting was I didn't care. I was willing to spend as much time as Stephenson would give me with Richard Forthrast the founder of the online game T'Rain and self proclaimed black sheep of the Forthrast clan; Zula Forthrast, the niece of Richard and the main catalyst for the plot of the novel; Sokolov, the Russian Spetsnaz trained mercenary; Csonger, the Hungarian computer hacker; Marlon, the Chinese hacker that hatched a brilliant plan to steal millions of dollars from T'Rain; Olivia, the British MI6 agent; Yuxia, the Chinese facilitator that gets caught up in much more than she expected when she offered to help; Seamus, the American CIA operative; and our ultimate bad guy, Abdallah Jones, international terrorist.

Except for Richard and Zula none of these characters knew each other before the beginning of this international endeavor to find a terrorist. In the course of the book Stephenson weaves the plot around these people and draws them all into the same goal of stopping Abdallah Jones. I was right there with them, totally taken up with the plot, feeling my body tense with each burst of gunfire, sometimes despairing that the band of international gypsies could ever catch up with Jones in time. I was glad that I had the time to read 200 pages at a go. I think reading this book 20 pages a day might have driven me crazy.

This is a brilliantly composed thriller, smart, compelling, overwhelming, and ultimately satisfying. Time well spent. Highly recommended!!! ...more

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May 03, 2018 Andrew Smith rated it really liked it

At over 1000 pages, this book has the scale of epic tomes such as The Stand and 1Q84, though the the story itself seems to bear a much closer relationship to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. It has vast geographic spread, featuring action in settings as widely spaced as Idaho USA, the Philippines, China and (very briefly) the UK. But outside of these real life locations there is a good deal going on within the confines of a multiplayer online role-playing game that has much in common with World At over 1000 pages, this book has the scale of epic tomes such as The Stand and 1Q84, though the the story itself seems to bear a much closer relationship to Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. It has vast geographic spread, featuring action in settings as widely spaced as Idaho USA, the Philippines, China and (very briefly) the UK. But outside of these real life locations there is a good deal going on within the confines of a multiplayer online role-playing game that has much in common with World of Warcraft. T’Rain features fantasy figures who spend much of the time travelling through its huge landscape whilst fighting monsters, collecting items and completing various tasks with a view to improving and enriching their own character(s). It’s a huge thing and everyone seems to be playing it.

At the start, we view a reunion of the Forthrast family, where we get to meet a number of people who are to play a significant role in this story. Foremost here is Richard Forthrast who has made his fortune by benefit of a dodgy past involving drug smuggling and, latterly, through inventing and marketing T’Rain. His neice Zula is also introduced and it’s through these two that much of the story is tracked.

The real action commences when a ransomware virus called REAMDE (a typo of README) begins to affect players by encrypting their computer files. It seems that the aim is to extort in-game gold (which can be exchanged for real money) in exchange for a key to decrypt their files. One gamer who has his files so impacted happens to be in the process of selling stolen credit card details to the Russian mob and they’re none to pleased to have been given an unreadable file in exchange for the money they handed over. Things then start to get crazy – very quickly.

I won’t go into further detail regarding the plot but I will say that there are a lot of guns (both within the game and outside of it) a large cast of interesting characters and plenty of action. The downside is that the whole thing (were you to think too deeply about the logistics involved) is dependent on a number of huge coincidences and some technology that I’m not sure exists in the real world. That said, I’m sure that many readers wont care a hoot about this and will just lap up the adventure.

It is great fun and even as a non-gamer I really enjoyed the juxtaposition of the ongoing action within T’Rain versus the wild antics kicking off in the outside world. My only real grumbles are that the whole thing just goes on way too long (particularly the final reckoning) and the fact that it’s all rather too neatly sewn up at the end. Oh, and the fate of (at least) one of the key characters seems to have been omitted – unless I missed it, which is possible as I was getting very tired of the protracted dénouement by this stage. It’s a book that readers will probably either love or hate and, on balance, I’m certainly closer to the former. ...more

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Aug 15, 2011 Mark rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

[Note: longer review now in place. Spoilers may be present.]

So: your starter for 10. Is it Reamde? Remade? Reamed? Read Me?

Just working out the title can be a complication in itself. But then that’s what you should expect with Neal Stephenson’s books. It’s a well known adage in the genre that if you read Neal Stephenson’s books, you’re there for a long journey.

And so it goes with this one: over 1000 pages of small text, over 2 inches/6cm thick. (I measured it!)

For what is typical of Neal’s ...more

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Sep 24, 2018 Heidi The Reader rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fantasy-and-sci-fi, fiction

A former drug smuggler turned (mostly) straight-laced business man owns a multi-million dollar computer game, a refugee from Eritrea, a Hungarian computer hacker, a computer engineer, a further cast of international characters and the Russia mob all feature largely in Reamde. It is a science fiction novel by Neal Stephenson, but more than that.

This book will teach you about how flight paths are planned, how to properly check the safety on a firearm, and how the best laid plans of mice and men ...more

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Dec 24, 2011 Davis rated it it was ok · review of another edition

By the time I was about three-fourths of the way through, I found myself wondering why Stephenson had bothered to write this book. Aside from The Big U I've read all of his other works, and in each of those he used his skills —his knowledge of math and computers, his understanding of how computer engineers and programmers handle information —to build a compelling world and tell a meaningful story (often with social commentary) from a unique perspective. In Reamde Stephenson clearly stepped far By the time I was about three-fourths of the way through, I found myself wondering why Stephenson had bothered to write this book. Aside from The Big U I've read all of his other works, and in each of those he used his skills — his knowledge of math and computers, his understanding of how computer engineers and programmers handle information — to build a compelling world and tell a meaningful story (often with social commentary) from a unique perspective. In Reamde Stephenson clearly stepped far outside his expertise to tell us a story about... muslim terrorists. And a predictable story at that — the only thing I was surprised by was the clumsiness of the author's reliance on overly convenient coincidences and a deus ex machina or two. And while we're discussing the climax, I cannot help but note that this part of the novel would have benefited from editing out about 100 pages of detailed information regarding the trajectory of each of the many bullets that flew through this scene. The intense level of (unnecessary and uninteresting) detail that characterized the long-overdue gun battle suggested not so much rich storytelling as choreography for a generic action film.

This isn't to say that the story was a complete failure. Stephenson spent the first half of the novel setting a compelling scene: the world of T'Rain seemed lovingly crafted, and he spent time developing characters who promised to be compelling (even some of the villains). But somewhere around the midpoint of the novel, the stage-setting seemed to give way to narrative chaos: It became clear that T'Rain was not going to play the central role it could have (it was the most interesting "character" in the book) — rather, it was just a well-drawn plot device to connect the characters. The protagonists quickly lost all sense of individual character once the action really started rolling, until their thought patterns and skill sets were nearly indistinguishable by the end (did everyone know how to handle a gun? really?). The main antagonist developed from a seemingly complex character into a cardboard cutout villain. Detail is thin and unconvincing on some topics (such as spycraft), and detailed to the point of tedium on others. And all this in service of a generic story about guns and terrorists. By the end, I found myself finishing this book more out of a sense of duty than out of any curiosity as to how the story was going to wrap up — as if there was even any question on that front.

As a long-time fan, I turn to Stephenson's works because his background allows him to tell stories that few other authors would possess the understanding to craft convincingly — who else could have written The Baroque Cycle, Cryptonomicon, Anathem? But with Reamde, he's given us a story that any of a dozen thriller authors probably could have written — and written better. ...more

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Nov 05, 2011 Skott Klebe rated it did not like it · review of another edition

REAMDE reads as though he started to write an interesting novel about massively multiplayer online gaming business and frauds, and inadvertently stumbled into writing an irritatingly conventional thriller novel about Islamic terrorists when the MMPORG novel turned out not to have enough action in it. I wonder, actually, if this is his 9/11 book, delayed somehow by nonliterary circumstance. Cardboard villains seen up close to be mere dark-skinned cartoons of inexplicable evil, heroic northwestern REAMDE reads as though he started to write an interesting novel about massively multiplayer online gaming business and frauds, and inadvertently stumbled into writing an irritatingly conventional thriller novel about Islamic terrorists when the MMPORG novel turned out not to have enough action in it. I wonder, actually, if this is his 9/11 book, delayed somehow by nonliterary circumstance. Cardboard villains seen up close to be mere dark-skinned cartoons of inexplicable evil, heroic northwestern recluses enforcing their own law in heavily armed compounds-- at its worst, REAMDE reads like a cross between Farnham's Freehold and a rightwing warblogger's 2003 fever dream.
At its best, though, it is more than that. The principal characters are fascinating and well-drawn, and the MMPORG context and its driving scam are convincing. Its passages about the business around gaming read like the Neal Stephenson I expected. Those moments are too far apart, though, and don't last long enough.
With Snow Crash, Stephenson inspired legions of developers to try to create the virtual worlds that in some cases became the games REAMDE discusses; in Diamond Age he so thoroughly exploited the fictional possibilities of nanotech that hardly anyone has dared write about it since. Cryptonomicon deftly interwove dead-on satire of Silicon Valley's intersection with global commerce and the heartfelt desperate survival struggles that color our memories of World War II. The Baroque Cycle is one of the most ambitious attempts to understand the modern world through the lens of the past that I've ever read, yet the travails and triumphs of its characters consistently drive me to tears. Anathem, a mature, deep story and one of the finest extraterrestrial-culture novels ever, was robbed of the Hugo the year it came out.
This book isn't worthy of the rest of Stephenson's career.

A footnote:
It also makes me sad that Stephenson assumes it to be plausible that there might be innumerable Arab jihadist living in the United States and Canada waiting to be summoned into action at a moment's notice. Innumerable, as in, so many that he doesn't bother to count them, let along name them or give most of them distinguishing characteristics.

...more

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Oct 15, 2011 Bill rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, fiction, lit-fiction

i have absolutely no interest whatsoever in video games. i have never played a video game on my tv,on my computer, or on my phone. the last time i played a video game was when pac-man was the cutting edge.

so karen sends me a signed copy of this book (she's so awesome), and i was really looking forward to getting it, having read stephenson before,so even though it's a very big book, i started reading it the day it arrived at my place.

so i start reading it, and initially, much to my ...more

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Aug 03, 2013 Monica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle_fiction, puppy-squishers, pub_2010s

Great book!! Not my usual fair at all. This was a thriller with online gaming undertones. I actually learned quite a bit about the role playing games. Interesting tangents. Characterization was very good. You understood what was in the minds of everyone (except the jihadists. How could the author or anyone sane possibly know what goes on in the minds of jihadist.../sarcasm). This novel had everything I like. Strong characters both male and female, humor and lots of it (particularly around Great book!! Not my usual fair at all. This was a thriller with online gaming undertones. I actually learned quite a bit about the role playing games. Interesting tangents. Characterization was very good. You understood what was in the minds of everyone (except the jihadists. How could the author or anyone sane possibly know what goes on in the minds of jihadist.../sarcasm). This novel had everything I like. Strong characters both male and female, humor and lots of it (particularly around T'Rain), irony; even the ending was somewhat tongue in cheek. The other reviews are very true, Stephenson embraces the info dump...about everything. An around the world tour featuring Russian mobsters, Canadian mines, Chinese hackers, British spies, an African orphan, al Quaeda-esque terrorists, the entire realm of T'Rain, and a pesky computer virus. This was actually an upbeat novel with almost all of the good guys surviving and the bad guys getting their comeuppance. A little too tidy in the end (which is what I attribute to cheekiness or could Stephenson be a hopeless optimist at heart?). I only had two issues with this book. One is that the female characterization in particular is a little weak. Specifically, all three of the main female characters are basically the same person. All are plucky, smart, brave and capable. The only real distinguishing characteristic is their varying levels of sexual permissiveness. But if you are only going to have one type of female character, this is a good one. The other issue is the book is long...very long. It kept my interest and every time I put it down, I wanted to get back to it, but good grief, it took me months to get through. No regrets. All in all, time well spent.

4 stars

Edited to add: The more I think on this, the more I believe there is much satire between the covers. Stephenson is taking some shots at a lot of genres, even the one he is most famous for, cyberpunk. In this case it's through online gaming. Great book, but definitely an investment of time and energy. ...more

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Jan 17, 2018 Thomas Frank rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Absolutely loved everything about the virus, T'Rain, and the hackers. Really wish the book would have focused more on that than (view spoiler). With that, my attention was definitely held - but mostly because I wanted to see the conclusion of the story.

One thing that did impress me, though, was the care that was put into ensuring the characters (good and bad ones) made logical decisions. None of Stephenson's characters here are stupid, and it was satisfying ...more

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Mar 15, 2012 RandomAnthony rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Neal Stephenson's Reamde is over a thousand pages long. ONE THOUSAND PAGES. In the same way that I avoid movies over 130 minutes (especially if they're historical costume drama, egads) my self-diagnosed ADD usually keeps me away from books over, say, 500 pages. Exceptions exist, of course, and this novel caught my eye because 1) I had read and liked/loved Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Cryptomicon, and 2) I was experiencing one of those uncomfortable “I don't know what to read” ...more

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Jul 22, 2011 Kim rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011, ebooks, general-fiction

I was so excited about this book, but it slowly slipped from a 5 at the beginning to a 3 by the end. This book was over the top...it read like Ian Fleming was alive and forced to write an action movie with Tom Clancy. A 6 hour long action movie. That over the top. Just as with any over-the-top action movie, you have to suspend disbelief to enjoy it, and it was certainly fun. Unfortunately, there was just too much schmaltz for the action alone to carry it. To be fair, I also had high expectations ...more

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Jan 08, 2012 David rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Pot smugglers, gold farmers, Russian mafia, jihadists, Christian isolationist gun nuts

Shelves: guns, china, terrorism, contemporary, audiobook, doorstopper, thriller, technology, american-literature

I used to really, really like Neal Stephenson. I read all of his earlier books (even Zodiac and The Big U). But somewhere along about the Baroque Cycle, I fell out of love with him -- not that he stopped being a good storyteller, but man those books were long and took forever to get anywhere.

Anyway, I picked up Reamde hoping to get some of the old Stephenson cyber-thriller love again. And Reamde is a very good tale, action-packed and filled with a ton of interesting characters in a plot that ...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Michael rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, thriller, idaho, china, british-columbia, washington, terrorism, philippines

This thriller represents a nice reprise of a the fun, excitement, and imagination of Stephenson’s sci fi thriller Snow Crash and techno thriller Cryptonomicon,. Though some criminal indiscretions of her boyfriend, a young woman gets sucked up in a very few steps as a tool and a hostage by some very powerful bad guys, initially by the minions of a rogue Russian gangster and later by a group of jihadists led by a particularly ambitious terrorist spawned in Wales. I don’t want to spoil the This thriller represents a nice reprise of a the fun, excitement, and imagination of Stephenson’s sci fi thriller Snow Crash and techno thriller Cryptonomicon,. Though some criminal indiscretions of her boyfriend, a young woman gets sucked up in a very few steps as a tool and a hostage by some very powerful bad guys, initially by the minions of a rogue Russian gangster and later by a group of jihadists led by a particularly ambitious terrorist spawned in Wales. I don’t want to spoil the ingenious plot, but it’s fair to say that a motley set of individuals of diverse nationality get drawn into the action of her side (including family members, spies, and hackers) and that a lot of the focus has to do with a massive role playing computer game called T’Rain, which was developed by her uncle.

In many ways, the action unfolds like a computer video game. Survival depends on one’s skills and available weapons and on the formation of shifting alliances with other players with complementary skills and weapons. Also, there is competition in a quest for a particular target and sideline activities to increase one’s capacity and resources to achieve the main target. Above all, there are many surprising threats that call for problem solving comprised in many painful steps with proper timing of patience balanced with interludes of desperate combat.

All of the characters, even the bad guys, are imbued with slightly mythic and stereotyped characteristics, and the good guys are lovable, but tough, heroes you root for because of their challenging backgrounds and strong moral fiber. The three major women heroes actually best the men in rising to the challenges, often actually enjoying the prospect of revenge and garnering romantic loyalty from various men in the process. Despite the comic book aspect such factors would suggest, Stephenson gripped me with a great sense of realism and plausibility in the multiverse of scenarios that skip between various sites in the Pacific Northwest and the Far East and then slowly come together in a big showdown at the border of remote British Columbia and northern Idaho.

There is purple patch in the writing, but it’s usually wry and tongue-in-cheek and never really over-the-top absurdist. For example, here is sample in Stephenson’s description of the CIA operative character, Seamus Costello:
He looked like a slightly over-the-hill backpacker, the kind of guy you’d strike up a conversation with on a rattletrap bus in Bhutan or Terra del Fuego, borrow a joint from, ask for advice on where and where not to stay the night. He was lean, like a strip of bacon that had spent too long in the pan, and a bit north of six feet tall. He had green eyes that seemed just a little too wide open—though, she had to admit, any nonblack eyes looked that way after you’d been living in China for awhile—and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover.

This illustrates Stephenson’s penchant for digression. But this is actually less of a problem here that many of his other works. Much of the narrative in this massive tome is harnessed to the drama, which just happens to involve a lot of characters and appropriate eddies in the flood. The consequence is that I felt fully sated as if I had played an engaging video game around the clock or binged on reading the equivalent of three exciting thrillers in a row.
...more

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Aug 16, 2014 Megan Baxter rated it liked it · review of another edition

In my head, this book is very much lumped together with the recent Greg Bear book, Vitals, that I read. Both are by authors that I have previously enjoyed. (Well, my reading relationship with Stephenson started out a little rocky, but it's gotten better of late.) They are both authors whose previous works have thrown off ideas like candy, been provocative and engaging. And they both turned in books in this round of reading that are mere technothrillers. Well-written technothrillers, but I want ...more

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Nov 08, 2013 Rick Riordan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I understand from Stephenson aficionados that it is somewhat different than his other work, but I found it a great point of entry to this author's world. It's a long book, over a thousand pages, and it did take some commitment to get into. Stephenson's research is incredibly detailed, and his interests are myriad. The amount of information he presents could easily bog down the plot if his writing wasn't so compelling and well-crafted. The plot zigzags breathlessly all over the world -- from ...more

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Oct 10, 2011 Moira rated it really liked it · review of another edition

OK, look. I routinely go into small bookshops and badger clerks to recommend a giant, sprawling, poly-thematic novel, ideally one that takes place in multiple far-flung locales and features kick-ass women. Which is to say, I have read all of Neal Stephenson's novels, most of them two and three times over. I am a big fan, and just like any partisan, I am somewhat unsuited to anything aside from gushing or howling.

But honestly, I can't do either. REAMDE a good, long, and involving read. It fails ...more

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Apr 24, 2019 Jessica rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, own

NEAAAAAAAL. NEAL! My man! I know we're all supposed to love Snow Crash the best, but my favorite thing about Snow Crash is that I feel like it freed him up to just do whatever the hell he wants.

And he does.

This book is over a thousand pages long. Could it have been shorter? Yeah. Did we need to know the elaborate backstory of every character? Eh. Some of them. But does he spin this incredibly long and detailed yarn for hundreds of pages and then bring them all together absolutely perfectly at ...more

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Jan 24, 2012 Justin Hampton rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Let's face it: Neal straight up jumped the shark with The Diamond Age. Immediately after people began hailing him as a visionary (and rightfully so) for a pretty impressive run with DA and Snow Crash, Neal started developing some bad, self-indulgent habits with Cryptonomicon, and it doesn't seem like anybody around him has enough pull or inclination to speak truth to power. Still, the argument could be made that Stephenson's digressions, while superfluous, were still quite entertaining and ...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Hank Mishkoff rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Very clever and engaging premise, but very broad and sloppy execution. I'm a huge Stephenson fan, he's on my short list of best writers on the planet, so Reamde was huge disappointment to me.

The premise (and I don't think this is a spoiler) is the intrusion of a MMORPG (a massively multiplayer online role-playing game) on real life in unexpected (and potentially disastrous) ways -- not in a Tron-like player-gets-absorbed-into-the-game sense, but in a way that strikes me as so realistic (although ...more

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Nov 16, 2011 Althea Ann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Oh, I sure do love Neal Stephenson.
Here's my new and revised list of his books, in order of how much I like them:

Snow Crash (1992)
The Diamond Age (1995)
Anathem (2008)
Cryptonomicon (1999)
Reamde (2011)
Zodiac (1988)
Interface (1994) & The Cobweb (1996)
The Big U (1984)
The Baroque Cycle (2003-2004)

I considered bumping Reamde up past Crytonomicon, but then decided, no, I really can't, because although Reamde is non-stop fun, Cryptonomicon was more interesting and in-depth, as far as its subject ...more

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Mar 28, 2018 Ray rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

A fast paced thriller which careens around the world leaving death and destruction in its wake. It features the Russian mafia, CIA, FIB, MI6 and various police forces. It sets jihadis off against an unlikely coaltion which includes American backwoodmen and computer geeks. As ever with this writer there is a heady mix of cutting edge tech - for me at least - and action.

Stephenson does massive sprawling books but I have to say that this needed to be 1000 pages and more to fit it all in. I enjoyed ...more

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About Neal Stephenson

Neal Stephenson

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Neal Stephenson is the author of Reamde, Anathem, and the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World), as well as Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.

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Quotes from Reamde

“The GPS unit became almost equally obstreperous, though, over Richard’s unauthorized route change, until they finally passed over some invisible cybernetic watershed between two possible ways of getting to their destination, and it changed its fickle little mind and began calmly telling him which way to proceed as if this had been its idea all along.” — 22 likes

“Humans needed water or they would die, but dirty water killed as surely as thirst. You had to boil it before you drank it. This culture around tea was a way of tiptoeing along the knife edge between those two ways of dying.” — 16 likes

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