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Reamde
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 38 hrs and 29 mins
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Publisher's summary
“Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking, and thrilling.” - Time
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Neal Stephenson is continually rocking the literary world with his brazen and brilliant fictional creations - whether he’s reimagining the past (The Baroque Cycle), inventing the future (Snow Crash), or both (Cryptonomicon). With Reamde, this visionary author whose mind-stretching fiction has been enthusiastically compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace - not to mention William Gibson and Michael Crichton - once again blazes new ground with a high-stakes thriller that will enthrall his loyal audience, science and science fiction, and espionage fiction fans equally. The breathtaking tale of a wealthy tech entrepreneur caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game, Reamde is a new high - and a new world - for the remarkable Neal Stephenson.
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First to Kill
- By: Andrew Peterson
- Narrated by: Dick Hill
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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When you're the best at what you do, it's not always easy to walk away. Nathan McBride was retired. The trained Marine sniper and covert CIA operative had put the violence of his former life behind him. But not anymore. A deep-cover FBI agent has disappeared along with one ton of powerful Semtex explosive, enough to unleash a disaster of international proportions. The U.S. government has no choice but to coax Nathan out of retirement.
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Sniper thriller par excellence
- By Ed on 06-17-09
By: Andrew Peterson
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Ramsey's Gold
- By: Russell Blake
- Narrated by: Ray Porter
- Length: 10 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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When a forgotten journal materializes decades after Drake Ramsey's father vanished in the Amazon jungle, Drake decides to follow in his footsteps and search for the legendary treasure of the Inca empire hidden in the lost Inca city of Paititi.
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Entertaining, but very cliched and derivative
- By Berkley on 12-07-16
By: Russell Blake
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Tarantula
- A John Milton Short Story
- By: Mark Dawson
- Narrated by: David Thorpe
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet John Milton. He considers himself an artisan. A craftsman. His trade is murder. Milton is the man the government sends after you when everything else has failed. Ruthless. Brilliant. Anonymous. Lethal. You wouldn't pick him out of a crowd but you wouldn't want to be on his list. In this second dip into his case files (see 1000 Yards for a further novella), Milton is sent to Italy to investigate the death of a colleague from Group 15.
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John Milton tries to exit British intelligence
- By Wayne on 06-03-16
By: Mark Dawson
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The American
- Ryan Kealey, Book 1
- By: Andrew Britton
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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At 33, Ryan Kealey has achieved more in his military and CIA career than most men can dream of in a lifetime. He's also seen the worst life has to offer and is lucky to have survived it. But being left alone with his demons is no longer an option. The CIA needs him badly, because the enemy they're facing is former U.S. soldier Jason March. Ryan knows all about March - he trained him.
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Decent Characters, Decent Plot, AWFUL Production
- By ShelterMe on 11-08-14
By: Andrew Britton
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Dreamland
- Dale Brown's Dreamland, Book 1
- By: Dale Brown, Jim DeFelice
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Dreamland is the place where the nation's top minds come to develop artillery and aircraft that push beyond the cutting edge. And where the Air Force's top guns come to test them, on the frontlines of a new era in warfare. The fiasco of a spy's infiltration has the Pentagon looking for an excuse to close Dreamland down. To clean up the mess, and save Dreamland from the congressional chopping block, Lt. Colonel Tecumseh "Dog" Bastian is sent in.
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Really boring!
- By Cheryl on 02-22-14
By: Dale Brown, and others
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The Risk Agent
- Risk Agent, Book 1
- By: Ridley Pearson
- Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn
- Length: 11 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Grace Chu is an American-educated Chinese national now working as a forensic accountant after serving in the Chinese army as an intelligence officer. John Knox is an American who parlayed his military service during the first Iraqi war into a lucrative import/export business, which now provides him the official access he needs to work freelance undercover operations throughout the world. Both are highly skilled operatives capable of deft subterfuge or extreme violence, if circumstances require.
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Ridley is back, but he wasn't far away.
- By Dave Staats on 06-27-12
By: Ridley Pearson
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Stormbreaker
- The First Alex Rider Adventure
- By: Anthony Horowitz
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Parker
- Length: 4 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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They said his uncle Ian died in a car accident. Alex Rider knows that's a lie, and the bullet holes in his uncle's car confirm the truth. But nothing can prepare him for the news that the uncle he always thought he knew was really a spy for Britain's top-secret intelligence agency. Enlisted to find his uncle's killers and complete Ian's final mission, Alex suddenly finds himself caught in a deadly game of cat and mouse, with no way out.
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Okay action story held up by an great narrator
- By Mary Fan on 08-13-13
By: Anthony Horowitz
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METAtropolis
- By: Jay Lake, Tobias Buckell, Elizabeth Bear, and others
- Narrated by: Michael Hogan, Scott Brick, Kandyse McClure, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Armed camps of eco-survivalists battle purveyors of technology in this exclusive, original production featuring five sci-fi masters and five all-star narrators.
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Not a wasted credit
- By james on 10-27-08
By: Jay Lake, and others
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Hawke: Three Black Ops
- Alex Hawke Series
- By: Ted Bell
- Narrated by: John Shea
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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This set includes Crash Dive, What Comes Around, and White Death, three Alex Hawke novellas never available before on audio. In Crash Dive, Alex Hawke is on a highly covert mission to enter another nation’s airspace undetected and find a way to avert a global war. In What Comes Around, two CIA officers are found dead. Hawke discovers that the victims are connected through one man: Spider Payne, a rogue intelligence officer. In White Death, M16 suspects a bizarre conspiracy when two bankers are found dead, and vast sums are plundered from the Queen of England’s accounts.
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Scam
- By Anonymous User on 10-10-18
By: Ted Bell
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Two thirds through and quit
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Et tu, Neal?
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Es ist nur ein Spiel. Aber es geht um sehr viel Geld. Und für manche bald um ihr Leben...
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great storry! fantastically narrated!
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We are entering a new technological age in which artificial intelligence and immersive media will transform society at all levels, mediating our lives by altering what we see, hear, and experience. If managed well, this could unleash a new age of abundance. If managed poorly, this technological revolution could easily go astray, compromising our privacy, autonomy, agency, and humanity. Two industry veterans provide a data-driven debate on whether the new world we're creating will be a technological utopia or an AI-powered dystopia and give guidance on how to aim for the best future we can.
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Parce que la montée des eaux menace l'existence même des Pays-Bas, leur reine Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia comprend mieux que quiconque la notion d'urgence climatique. Invitée à une rencontre secrète au Texas par T.R. Schmidt, l'excentrique propriétaire d'une chaîne de fast-food, Saskia découvre non sans inquiétude les plans du milliardaire. En bon Texan, T.R. veut mettre fin, de façon décisive, aux hausses de températures qui accablent le sud des États-Unis. Et si son remède, inspiré par l'explosion du volcan Pinatubo, était pire que le mal?
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The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious". But if you want to know Stephenson was doing 20 years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring 30-year-old junior Casimir Radon.
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Bad first novel by great writer
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Some Remarks
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One of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned for his exceptional novels - works colossal in vision and mind-boggling in complexity. Exploring and blending a diversity of topics, including technology, economics, history, science, pop culture, and philosophy, his books are the products of a keen and adventurous intellect. Stephenson ponders a wealth of subjects, from movies and politics to David Foster Wallace and the Midwestern American College Town; and more.
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Worth a revisit
- By Duncan on 08-09-12
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What listeners say about Reamde
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Alex Levine
- 10-24-11
Good fun...but a little low on substance
Stephenson is a great storyteller, and like most of his books (I'm a committed fan) this one is a great romp. However, what sets him aside from the other prolific storytellers who reliably produce good, long novels is that is books tend to have some real intellectual substance, even when they don't take themselves too seriously. Such substance is missing from Reamde. I know that Anathem, my personal favorite, is not to everyone's taste--but even Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon all played with big ideas in a compelling and stimulating way. Reamde has great characters, fast-paced action, and surprising twists and turns--but the ideas are a bit thin on the ground.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Steph
- 04-18-13
Thank heavens!
I loved this book and Neil Stephenson, however, I do not love all of his books. Recently, I have had frustrations with Anathem and the books he has written with other authors. I much prefer it when he is the sole author. This is not science fiction but it is much more in line with Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon in detail of knowledge and style. Stephenson does a fabulous job in communicating and understanding the gaming world (not that I am an expert but those I know and other reviewers have stated it is).
Malcolm Hilgartner does a wonderful job with the narration. He did well with the accents, and in my opinion did very well doing female voices.
If you like Stephenson and if you enjoy a suspense novel you will enjoy this book. It was a relief to read this book. I was hesitant after Anathem and Mongoloid, as I mentioned above. If you are hestitant, like I was, don't skip Reamde. It really is great.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Grace Ausley
- 06-16-12
Settle Down for a LONG Haul...
Reamde is the massive new tome from Neal Stephenson. Unlike most of his other novels, this is a more traditional modern-day thriller, albeit chock full of his own brand of humor and techie geek references.
Just make sure you're ready to settle down for a long haul. This book is over 1000 pages, over 38 hours on audio.
It's not that so much happens in the book, but rather that Stephenson describes everything, often from the perspectives of multiple characters, jumping back to recap some things from their viewpoint. There IS a large cast of characters too, by the end. The advantage is that you really feel like these characters are old friends after spending so much time with them. On the downside, however, I think the characters still don't feel as deep and fully realized as they should be.
The story stays interesting with Stephenson's dry, often geeky humor. The writing is pretty solid as well, and the story is constantly taking unexpected small turns. Hilarious at times, it involves a double kidnapping of the main character Zula, who is first taken by Russian mobsters, who head out to take revenge on the designer of the computer virus Reamde, only to stumble upon a cell of Al Qaida terrorists, who kidnap Zula again.
This is all outrageous and sometimes humorous, sometimes tense. You can tell Stephenson knows a lot of stuff about what he's writing, from all things tech to subtle cultural references and traits. He must surely have traveled to these locations in order to describe them so fully, places such as Xiamen, China; Manila, Philippines; Prohibition Creek, Idaho.
Someone else said that this book is pieces of action followed by long infodumps, and that about sums it up. This pattern seems to repeat endlessly from beginning to end, until you really expect it. Other things I saw are weaknesses: some strange Deus Ex Machina moments, which shouldn't have been needed in a book of this size; and the fact that the title of Reamde doesn't seem to be THAT central to the book. To the first half, certainly. But later on it's clear the story is about stopping the terrorists rather than the meager threat posed by the computer virus.
I think the audio book added a lot to the experience, as the narrator did a lot of different characters and accents well (not perfectly, but passably), and inflected just the right amount of sarcasm to the humorous sections.
If you're looking for a LONG thriller, are into gaming and/or MMORPGs, you will probably enjoy this book.
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- Mitch
- 11-13-11
Last 5 Hours
Prepare to clear you schedule for when you want to listen to the last five hours of the book. I literally couldn't stop listening to it and only slept two hours before getting up and going to class, but it was well worth it! My first Neal Stephenson book, and will be checking out more soon.
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- Ryan
- 02-01-14
Brainy thrill ride ends with flat tire
To me, there's potential for fun when an author known for behemoth, idea-dense nerd-porn epics decides to slum in a genre beneath his usual level. And, in fact, I found *most* of Reamde, Neal Stephenson's take on a globe-hopping techno-thriller, to be a lot of fun.
The plot here, in usual Stephensonian fashion, is over-the-top, but meticulously constructed from the minutiae of the author's wide-ranging interests, from computer games to economics to guns to organized crime to hackers to midwestern family dynamics to semi-secret national security organizations to the politics of 19th century Canadian mining barons. Thus, we get a story in which a computer virus, created by Chinese gold farmers who play a World of Warcraft-like game called T'Rain, and spread through that game, ends up encrypting the data of a renegade Russian mobster. This turns out to be bad news for Zula, a young developer of T'Rain and niece of Richard Forthrast, its fabulously wealthy CEO and overlord. The Russians "invite" Zula and her sketchy boyfriend to help them solve their problem, paying the hacker's ransom within the game and getting the decryption key. However, unanticipated game world complications make this impossible, and the situation quickly escalates into the real world and across the Pacific...
I don't have space to even begin to explain the elaborate plot that follows, or how a smart, urbane black jihadist named Abdullah Jones, his merry band of terrorists, the British spy agency MI6, or a group of Northern Idaho survivalist nuts enter the picture. Suffice to say, the combinatorial result is about as unlikely as the summary of any airport bookstore thriller, but the parts are smarter, more interesting, and often funnier. Stephenson seems to have put a lot of thought and research into how different areas of expertise might actually come into play in the real world, from running a covert spy operation to utilizing loopholes in flight control protocols to sneak a plane across international borders.
As a former game developer, I particularly enjoyed his conception of T'Rain, its design, its game world dynamics, and its oddball developers, including an Aspergian programmer whose obsession with realistic geology drives the terrain engine, and two hilariously egotistical fantasy writers. Even if the ideas behind the game were about a decade out-of-date, I liked the way T'Rain’s gears meshed into the story, bringing the cantankerous Richard into the plot. It isn't inconceivable that a too-cleverly-designed multimillion dollar virtual economy could come to create unintended waves in the real world -- and vice-versa.
Now, on to the weaknesses. First, if you’re looking for complex characters, a staggering exploration of ideas, or hard-hitting commentary on the state of the world, you probably won’t be impressed. There’s a lot of action and getting from place to place, things NS can do well, if not necessarily the reason one reads him. The main protagonists all seem to derive from the same two basic geek templates, cutely headstrong and resourceful for the girls, and rugged lone wolf for the boys, with a bit much stereotype for the Chinese characters. Somehow, they're all able to make the right decisions under pressure, like players cooly plotting out their next move in a strategy board game -- that is, when the author doesn’t cheat and hand them some spectacularly good luck.
The big weakness, though, is a surprisingly lame ending. If I’d only been permitted to read the first eighty-five percent, I’d have happily given this book four stars, but then, NS just seems to lose interest and wrap things up at the next convenient stopping point. I’m disappointed that all the possibilities that went into the setup were pretty much just dropped by the wayside in an uninspired action movie finale. Jones, who started as an intriguing character, exits the stage as a cardboard villain. What was the point? "Jihadists are bad" -- yeah, thanks.
Alas, because I did really enjoy most of the novel and had high hopes that Stephenson would wrap it up in a more meaningful, complex way than he did. My advice: stop listening when the story gets to Idaho, and consider your appetite whet for one of his other books. Speaking of “listening”, audiobook narrator M. Hillgartner does a good enough job when strictly narrating, but several of his accents are terrible.
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- Jesse
- 10-21-11
One of his best and most accessible - gripping!
Like all his books, this one is heinously long, but I finished it before I even had another credit ready. The book is, in a word, engrossing. I looked for excuses to have my iPod on.
If you're familiar with his other books, this one has a lot of the Stephenson tropes in it, essays on a piece of technology, lots of characters with interweaving paths, and odd bits of humor that make you unexpectedly smile. Unlike Stephenson's other books, though, this one is decidedly a thriller and has the usual stuff in there as a backdrop. This is a sleeker Cryptonomicon that riffs on paperback thrillers - it's more accessible, less obsessed with technology or history, and the REAMDE virus itself is a terrifying piece of imagination that doesn't go where you'd expect it to.
Also, a nice bonus, it seems he's finally figured out how to write an ending. ;)
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- Rebecca
- 10-20-20
Too many stories trying to be one
While the writing and narration were really good, the plot was too convoluted. I felt like this chould have been either a series or separate books.
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- GyAzJRD
- 12-05-13
The Author's BEST Work with outstandig naration..
Maybe, my most enjoyable listen of a novel. -- I've re-listen every-other year since purchasing.
An abundance of interesting, care-about characters and locales, woven into a suberb, move-like story with few opportunities to pause my listen. The outstanding naration-enhances writing was woven into movie-like story telling.
Seems to be miscategorized as SiFi/Fantasy -- more likely, an Action/Thriller.
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- Christopher Johnson
- 08-27-18
Possibly my favorite Stephenson
I’ve read Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon. All great books. There’s something special about this one - it’s the most believable of his that I’ve read. Like any good Stephenson you can’t tell where the hell its going until the last third. The characters are deep and the action is intense the whole way through. Oh yeah, and there’s actually an epilogue for one. 30 hours of my life well spent.
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- Jim In Texas!
- 10-16-12
What a ride!
What about Malcolm Hillgartner’s performance did you like?
I felt Malcom Hillgartner did an excellent job narrating this book. He's only a little behind the great Patrick Tull in being able to carry an international ensemble cast of characters. His non-US accents varied a bit, but were overall quite good, as good as any American reader I've heard. Hillgartner must have spent time with gamers, computer geeks, and military veterans, he captures each group's subtle dialects perfectly. I particulary enjoyed Hillgartner's voicing of the head Bad Guy. Very Darth Vader-ish (with the breathing). James Earl Jones could not have done better.I have to complement Brilliant Audio for doing an outstanding job of producing a very high quality audio protection. The performance was clear and consistent for the whole 38 hours, no variation in audio level, no clumsy edits, no noticeable breathing, no speeding up or slowing down. This book's production quality is equal to that of Recorded Books LLC, the uncontested best in the business.Nothing is worse than a good book that has distracts caused by poor production values (I'm looking at you, Blackstone). Other producers should strive to reach this level of production quality.
Any additional comments?
I really enjoyed Remde. A lot of what the bad reviews say is true. The actual plot contains ridiculous coincidences, and the author sometimes does silly things to avoid the obvious need the good guys have to call 911.The author takes some time to introduce us to the characters and their social milieu, before the roller coaster starts. It's a 38 hour book! There is time to get to know these people. And the people are interesting. I really cared about the characters, idiots that some of them may be.One really thing coming from a SciFi author: It's set in present day, but everyone uses flip phones, smart phones don't exist in this world. Cell coverage isn't very good either.It doesn't matter. Go with it! This book has something for everyone, gun nuts, gamers, IT nerds, spys, international travelers, military veterans, and farmers. It's a fascinating story, and it accelerates like a huge rocket ship. There is a count down and then the plot begins to move. At first it seems like its barely clearing the tower, then the pace starts to pick up and just continues to accelerate up until the hectic Final Battle. Highly recommended.
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