Reamde

By: Neal Stephenson

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 38 hrs and 29 mins

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.

©2011 by Neal Stephenson. (P)2011 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Critic reviews

“Stephenson...delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story.” ( Publishers Weekly)

“Noir futurist Stephenson returns to cyberia with this fast-moving though sprawling techno-thriller...Who’ll prevail? We don’t know till the very end, thanks to Stephenson’s knife-sharp skills as a storyteller. An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem.” ( Kirkus Reviews, starred review)

“Sometimes when you’re reading Neal Stephenson, he doesn’t just seem like one of the best novelists writing in English right now; he seems like the only one.” (Lev Grossman, Time)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. ;)

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.

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.

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.

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.