Ever since I read Snow Crash, I knew I wanted to read more of Neal Stephenson’s work. Deciding which book to read next was the hard part, because quite frankly, the size of his books scare me. Stephenson is known to write tomes and his fanbase relishes in this. I myself am a slow reader so I try to stay away from them. So what made me chose to read all 1044 pages of REAMDE?
What made me decide on REAMDE was the feedback I was seeing on the book. Many people love it, but there are also loyal Stephenson fans that felt that it was far removed from Stephenson’s other works because it was more thriller and less philosophy. Based on these evaluations, I decided I would read REAMDE because if it was less philosophical then it would be easier to follow and that would surely cause me to struggle less with it’s length.
Well, I still struggled with the length of the book. It took me a month and a half to finish this bad boy. But I can say honestly that I was never tired of the story once. I was locked in enough to care about the outcome, and that gave me the willpower to consume all the info-dumps sprinkled throughout the book. So my struggles stemmed only from me being a slow reader.
REAMDE is a techno-thriller with a huge cast of unique characters, and it’s these characters that carry this book, much more than the plot—which is slightly wacky when you try to summarise it.
Richard Forthrast is a former drug smuggler who later founded a video games company that created a popular MMO called T’Rain. Zula is Richard’s niece by adoption. Zula is an Eritrean refugee born into hardship who was adopted by Richard’s sister. When Zula visits Richard, she brings along her boyfriend Peter who has kept his life as a hacker secret from her. Peter borrows a USB drive from Richard to handover a file full of credit card details to a third-party buyer. But unbeknownst to Richard and Peter, the drive is infected with a virus called REAMDE (a mispelling of README). The virus holds the file on the USB drive for ransom until a sum of money is paid to the virus’ creator inside the game world of T’Rain.
This creates an issue for the third-party buyer, because he’s buying the credit card numbers on behalf of the Russian mafia. When the Russians find out there is a problem obtaining the cards, they hold Peter, and Zula hostage to find a way to obtain the file. Eventually, their solution becomes to fly their private jet to China and hunt down the virus’ creator and deal with him face-to-face. In doing so, they run into a black terrorist who runs a team of Jihadists. Things take a huge turn for the worst at this point.
As you can tell by this summary, this book has elements of litRPG, hacking, Russian mafias and terrorism. Later on, we also get MI6 spies and FBI agents added to the mix; creating an insanely varied cast of characters that all get caught up in this wild plot. And it’s a plot that could have easily fallen apart if it wasn’t written by Neal Stephenson.
Although there are many things that Stephenson gets right with this novel, there are also things that I felt were missing. This is largely to do with the way the book comes to its conclusion. Stephenson made us exert so much energy on the intense build up, only to conclude at an ending that feels rushed.
REAMDE is billed as a techno-thriller, but an argument can be made that calling this a thriller was simply a way to cop out from giving us a more substantial ending. This is because throughout this book we’re treated to Stephenson’s signature info-dumps that explain the world of T’Rain and what’s possible in the game world. Only for it all to be completely meaningless at the end of the book. With this being Stephenson, he could have easily tied the game world to the outcome of the plot in a more meaningful way, but instead it felt as though he realized he was nearing the 1000 page mark and wanted to wrap things up with a long shoot-out because he realised there wasn’t enough space left for anything more meaningful.
REAMDE is full of insanely long—and sometimes over the top—action scenes. One of these action scenes is about a third of the books length alone —or at least it felt that way. It’s literally the longest chapter I’ve ever read. I feel that Stephenson could have given us a more satisfying ending had he been willing to comb through some of the earlier chapters and shaved off some of the filler. But this is up for debate, as there are fans of Stephenson that would argue that his filler is always imaginative—even if irrelevant to the books outcome—and I would be inclined to agree. I feel that the info-dumps in this book are fascinating, it’s just the fact that we may have been robbed of a satisfying outcome because of them. Instead we get a generic thriller ending, and a happy epilogue that answers none of the questions left in our heads.
But even with all my gripes about REAMDE, I cannot deny that I feel accomplished at having finished it. Stephenson did a fantastic job at keeping me entertained throughout this beast of a book, and even if I was unhappy about its ending, I must give him his credit nonetheless.
If you’ve been intimidated by the look of some of Stephenson’s more notable works, then REAMDE might be the perfect entryway into his catalogue—outside of Snow Crash—because the content is definitely easier to digest than—let’s say—Cryptonomicon. Now that REAMDE is behind me, I feel like I’m ready to tackle some of Stephenson’s denser works.
