Stuart's Reviews > Reamde

Reamde: MMORG techno-thriller for geeks who love quirky infodumps
What else would you expect from Neal Stephenson when he does a techno-thriller. It's not some airport newsstand throwaway, this is a mega-novel with a universe of diverse and three-dimensional characters such as Chinese hackers, game developers, Russian mobsters, British spies, Al-Quaida jihadists, crooked businessmen, right-wing survivalist nut-jobs, etc, all bound up in an ultra-complex techno-thriller plot that ranges across the planet and the virtual territory of T'Rain, a MMORG that is central to the characters and plot and that is deeply engrossing in its own right.

There are two kinds of Neal Stephenson book in my opinion: sprawling info dumps packed with fascinating characters, intricate plots, and laced with quirky humor and erudite discussions of unexpected topics -wait, that's just one type! The difference is some are really entertaining, and others are unbearably annoying and unreadable. The good ones for me are Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, and Diamond Age; the unbearable ones are Anathem and Seveneves (pretty sure the Baroque Cycle would fall into this group too if I weren't already forewarned to avoid it). I'd say Reamde belongs in the good group as well, though it doesn't have quite to philosophical depth of the others, but is certainly as entertaining.