jethrien

Title: Reamde
Author: Neal Stephenson
Genre: Not-so-techno thriller
Thingummies: 4

Synopsis: What starts with hackers spreading a virus through a World of Warcraft clone turns, via the Russian mob, into a globe-hopping fight against jihadists.

Thoughts: This is a very good book, although I'm not sure that it's the one that Stephenson originally set out to write.

With books like Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash under his belt, Stephenson is known for pushing the boundaries of tech with sprawling, deep thinking analyses of tech, both past and future. And when this book begins, it looks as if it will continue in that direction. There is the elaborately described MMORPG, with an intricately thought-out history (both in-game and developmental), a detailed geological basis, and a convoluted economic underpinning. There is the equally complicated virus/money-making scheme based off of it. There is a memetic war brewing in the fantasy setting that is subtly playing out the antagonisms between two of the original sources of the game mythology. And then there is the unrelated credit card scam that gets accidentally entangled, setting the plot in motion and pulling the characters across the planet.

But about a third of the way through the book (where a less ambitious/prolific author might have simply wrapped things up), a single really unfortunate (for the characters at least) coincidence suddenly takes the entire book off at a right angle from where the plot was originally leading. From there, things proceed perfectly logically. Checkov's guns are strewn across the landscape and characters scattered to the four winds, all to be reunited in a slightly implausible but internally consistent and deeply satisfying ending that consists of about 200 pages of well-done suspense.

The only problem is that most of the original plot involving the game is dropped completely. Including the carefully developed conflict between the two authors and their thousands and thousands of fannish cohorts. Now, I understand that if you're a game designer and you suddenly find yourself dealing with global terrorists, you might become less interested in the work-related problems that you'd been obsessing over the day before. But surely some kind of wrap-up of such a major subplot could be arranged. The only conclusion I can come up with is that Stephenson originally wanted to write a book about the real world intersecting with MMORPGs, kind of accidentally added in some terrorists, and then became far more interested in that story than the one he'd started writing.

So you end up with what's really a very good thriller. High stakes, great tension, engaging characters. Very enjoyable, probably worth a 5 in the thriller category. With this odd, slowly dying subplot about the game.

Writing-wise, it's a lot of fun to read. There are some great one-liners, especially from Sokolov the Russian muscle and occasionally Olivia the MI6 agent. There are the usual chunks of exposition and multi-page backstories of people who would rate three lines in other books. But they're interesting and well-written diversions, so I couldn't complain much.

One thing I really appreciated is the number of interesting, strong, well-drawn female characters. There's Olivia, the aforementioned MI6 agent. Xuxia, a Chinese tea merchant, gets accidentally caught up in the disaster but manages to hold her own admirably. Zula turns out to be the real protagonist. She gets kidnapped relatively early and spends most of the novel being plunged from one increasingly ridiculous situation to another, but she's no damsel in distress. She manages to repeatedly foil or significantly alter her captors' plans, she gets plenty of agency, makes several escape attempts and finally rescues herself, and leaves more than enough clues for the people trying to find her to be able to come help her stop the terrorists in time.

And they're all people, as much as the male characters. They have different strengths and weaknesses from each other, they hold it together and fall apart in appropriate and non-stereotypical ways, they beat the men at some things (and some of those things involve guns, computers, and generalized sneakiness). They make a lot of good decisions and a couple horrible mistakes, just like the men. And they're not the only ones who cry over the course of the novel. Basically, he writes his women just like he writes his men, with plenty of things that make them individually awesome and also plenty of unique flaws. It's refreshing.

Minor spoilers:

The women do all end up paired off at the end. But then, by definition, nearly all the surviving men do, too, since no one starts dating some random minor character. It's perhaps a little unrealistic, but it's satisfying nonetheless. And since everyone seems to fall in love because they're so impressed by their partner's competence and all-around awesomeness (not because anyone had to be rescued or is so amazingly gorgeous or whatever), I'm not going to complain about this, either.

So overall, I really enjoyed this story. I'm still kind of curious about the one he meant to write. It's a pity he didn't just write two different books. But the story that survived is still good enough to be worth reading, even if you never get to find out whether the Forces of Brightness beat the Earthtone Coalition.