Enjoyable Near Future Action

Any novel by Neal is a big thing for me ever since Snow Crash and Diamond Age. REAMDE was no exception. It takes place in the near future and it is your basic action story about a billionaire MMO inventor, his spunky niece, a Hungarian hacker, a Chinese gold farmer, a former Soviet special forces operative, an unlikely British undercover terrorist hunter and a big-footed mountain girl. All great characters which are something you have learned to expect from Neal Stephenson.

The science fiction parts are more short extensions of our current world with the possible exception of T’Rain, the game that made Richard a billionaire. But it is the fantastic well-developed everyday world and the characters that makes the book. This near future world really comes alive in Neal’s writing.

A large part of it is the characters, including the villain of the story. My personal favorite is Zula, Richard niece that takes being kidnapped by the Russian mob and Terrorists with the inner strength you want to see in a heroine. Sokolov the Russian security consultant is another. All the characters are really well-developed and easy to like with the exception of the villain, he just makes sense.

The story takes us all across the world from rural America and Canada to a milling city in Southeastern China and back again. Much like in his other books the many plotlines and characters split up and catch up again and again until they reunite in the last climactic shoot out.

Neal builds on current affairs like terrorism, the success of World of Warcraft, gold farmers, cyber viruses and crime to weave this long tail (it is 1042 pages) and he does it really well. I really enjoyed REAMDE and I warmly recommend it. It is more human interest and action than science fiction though like most of Neal Stephenson’s latest books.

Book Information

Reamde by Neal Stephenson (William Morrow 2011) – Amazon US | UK

Across the globe, millions of computer screens flicker with the artfully coded world of T’Rain – an addictive internet role-playing game of fantasy and adventure. But backstreet hackers in China have just unleashed a contagious virus called Reamde, and as it rampages through the gaming world spreading from player to player – holding hard drives hostage in the process – the computer of one powerful and dangerous man is infected, causing the carefully mediated violence of the on-line world to spill over into reality. A fast-talking, internet-addicted mafia accountant is brutally silenced by his Russian employers, and Zula – a talented young T’Rain computer programmer – is abducted and bundled on to a private jet. As she is flown across the skies in the company of the terrified boyfriend she broke up with hours before, and a brilliant Hungarian hacker who may be her only hope, she finds herself sucked into a whirl of Chinese Secret Service agents and gun-toting American Survivalists; the Russian criminal underground and an al-Qaeda cell led by a charismatic Welshman; each a strand of a connected world that devastatingly converges in T’Rain. An inimitable and compelling thriller that careers from British Columbia to South-West China via Russia and the fantasy world of T’Rain, Reamde is an irresistible epic from the unique imagination of one of today’s most individual writers.

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Edit3:After reading A State of Disobedience by Tom Kratman I got a bit annoyed at the views presented there and to a minor degree in the Carrera series. That Democracy can stand back for a great leader, UN, EU and other international organisations are fundamentally evil. Of course I might be wrong about this, an author don’t necessary stand for the views his protagonists have. As Tom says himself. There will be democracy eventually in the series, of sorts. One of the reason I read is to understand better what motivates people. Reading the Carrera stories has given me a lot of insight into the culture in the Middle East and some what ifs.

This is a book about the war on terrorfought on the colony New Earth 500 years or so in the future. All of todays powers are there under different names though maybe a little different. Earth has a run down Peace Keeping Fleet around the planet with a hidden agenda: to plunge the planet into war and barbarism by playing Muslim fanatics against the more developed countries. United Earth is suffering from a hash stratified social system where the proles are less than slaves. Earths level of technology is declining and they can’t build new starships any more. That’s why they struggle to keep the New Earthers from developing their own technology. They might find out Earth has lost most of it’s and might come calling.

After his Family are killed in a 911 attack Fredrick Henessay starts his own war against those responsible. He raises an army and fight in an Iraq-like war.

You can tell Tom Kratman served himself. The story contains lots of realistic details and he really knows something about how to organise an army. I can tell. I used to be an officer myself.

This is the first book I read by Tom himself. I Read 2 books before that he wrote with John Ringo. Sometimes the story strikes me more as a way for Tom to process the war he himself where in rather than go science fiction. A bit like many with progressive social ideas went for Fantasy there a while in the 80s and 90s. All in all it kept me up a couple of nights. Maybe not for everyone but if you like military science fiction or just want to view a war from the inside of someone who fought in one this is a book for you.

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