REAMDE - don't take it seriously. The author basically just took a vacation and wrote a mindlessly fun action book. If you read it as such, it's pretty good. It's definitely written from a Western perspective, but it does have some pretty astute insights about East European mentalities and culture (I say this as someone straddling the fence between West and East culturally). DODO is not pure Stephenson. The personality of the other writer (Nicole Galland) quite clearly changes the atmosphere. It's the first NS book where characters' emotions are actually given some attention, and the first…
My opinion on Stephenson: Cryptonomicon is fun, Baroque Cycle is great, Anathem is his best work (from a literary perspective), and Seveneves is 2/3rds awesome 1/3rd bad scifi pulp. Snow Crash is how most people first encounter him. It's a warmed over cyberpunk book that repeats a lot of what Gibson did, but is also good. The Diamond Age is one of the best pieces of speculative fiction written in the last 20 years except that it fails badly to have a coherent story with an ending that makes sense. Which is a shame considering the ideas in the book are so good. REamde is shit and should…
Central to the plot in the book Reamde but these guys don't offer a 'pay in WoW gold' choice. Given the cost of computers these days, at least in business a separate 'browsing' machine and 'business' machine seems to be the best solution. I wonder if you could provide wireless for employees to bring their own laptops which had no 'office' connectivity (but internet connectivity) and machines that were hard wired and MAC filtered to the 'business' network.
Reamde does still have rape as character development which is... it's one of those tropes that once you notice an author keeps doing it you wince when it comes up again. This is of course in The Big U, and in Snow Crash, and in Diamond Age, and here it is again in Reamde. I really like Diamond Age, it's probably one of my favourite books, and if that was his only novel which did it I'd say well, fair enough it sort of makes sense in context - but it happens over and over, so that's not great. It's in the same category as Fridging in comics. Twice is coincidence, three times is lazy writing.
Yeah, Stephenson seems to have developed something of a moral blindspot regarding billionaires, which has been growing over time. It was somewhat obvious in Seveneves, but the "Dodge" sequence (REAMDE and Fall) becomes blatant to the point that much of the latter is full of people you just can't identify with, because they're all stupendously wealthy tech people.
Man I am almost done Reamde and would not recommend that to anyone. I have a massive vocabulary and I was still looking up words every few pages. Every time I suspected it was a synonym for a simpler word, and every time I was right. Writing aside I've found the plot pretty slow with not much interesting happening for most of the Zula portions (ie. middle half of the book). Maybe Stephenson's level of detail just isn't for me but it really wants for editing.
After reading the review I was afraid that it was going to be primarily about in-game action - but was relieved when I read it that the online game was mostly a backdrop and only a few scenes actually occur there. I absolutely recommend this book to anyone who has played a MMORPG for more than a few hours and enjoyed the concept of it - even if you were never addicted. It is not a masterpiece like Cryptonomicon or Anathem but a very enjoyable read.
This is absolutely par for the course for Stephenson. He's written at least 4 books like this, as far as I can tell. Seveneves in particular is 700 pages of incredible, next-level worldbuilding, then the potential for 3 more 300+ page volumes compressed into 180 pages. It's like at the 700 page mark the "wrap it up" light comes on, and he hastily bookends it.
Excellent work. Reminded me of the description in Neal Stephenson's REAMDE about the world generation code that forms the basis of the game: ``` And so, basically as a protest action —almost like an act of civil disobedience against the entire video-game industry — Pluto had put up a website showing off the results of some algorithms that he had coded up for generating imaginary landforms that were up to his standards of realism. Which meant that every nuance of the terrain encoded a 4.5-billion-year simulated history of plate tectonics, atmospheric chemistry, biogenic effects, and…
Reamde would have been my first recomendation to introduce someone to Stevenson. Constant action, an unusually direct storyline for him, and not too too much time spent off in the weeds. Of course some might argue those are the best things about his books, but while Chryptonomicon is perhaps my favorite sci-fi novel I've read, I think it takes a certaim type of person to enjoy a book where the plot gets interupted for 5 page descriptions on how to eat Captain Crunch or a who fucked who of the Greek pantheon.