Reamde - Neal Stephenson
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By now, I suppose you've figured out the format for The Great Fantasy (---)logy. It used to always be "Trilogy" in homage to LOTR, but I think some authors are now up to more than twenty volumes per "story." Anyway, the standard set of tropes is a battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil, some sort of "fellowship" that invariably splinters, an arduous journey (usually across mountains) and a talisman that must be rescued/destroyed/captured so that Evil can be held at bay – at least until the next series begins. Oh, and there's one more convention: medieval weaponry. It wouldn't do to have this particular saga's version of Frodo picked off by a sniper who's hiding behind a boulder high on the slopes of this particular saga's version of the Mountains of Mordor. Yeah: that's fantasy. |
Well, maybe it isn't for Neal Stephenson. Nope, because Stephenson likes to stand the world of fantasy trilogies on its head; and he does it again his latest release, Reamde (no, not a typo). Sure, there's a fellowship of sorts and you could say there's a talisman and the battle is between an Evil force and... a force that's not necessarily "Good," but isn't all that Evil. However; there's definitely a sniper (or two) and not a single sword, mace, or battle-axe in sight: Glocks and Makarovs in great abundance, but no swords. When you come right down to it, Stephenson's crafted what you could term an anti-fantasy; "anti" enough that the author packed all 1042 pages into a single hefty hardback instead of spinning it into three (or more) volumes. All this reader, who long ago grew tired of the proliferation of multi-volume not-very-epic sagas chock-full of medieval weaponry, can say is, "Thanks, Neal!" As for Reamde...
It began with a virus, but quite unlike the Captain Trips virus in Stephen King's The Stand, this specimen (named REAMDE) was confined to the digital world – specifically to the world of the MMORPG "T'Rain." The sneaky little bit of ransomware encrypted all the files on Wallace's hard drive (as well as his backup), its maker demanding that 1000 pieces of gold (about $72) be delivered to a remote corner of T'Rain. Wallace caught the virus from Peter, who caught it from Richard Forthrast – inventor of T'Rain and the adoptive uncle of Peter's African-American girlfriend Zula.
Problem 1: It should've been easy to pay the ransom and get the decryption key, but the virus had... well, okay, it had gone viral; and myriad motley crews of brigands and bandits were standing around the drop point waiting to intercept tens of thousands of ransom deliveries. Problem 2: Wallace turned out to be the money-minder for Ivanov, a very nervous (and demonstrably insane) Russian mobster who'd dipped into the organization's till one time too many. Problem 3: Ivanov wanted Wallace's files decrypted so badly that he was willing to track down the troll who'd written REAMDE - in China. To make this happen, he loaded Peter and Zula onto a bizjet in Seattle (quite against their will, of course) and plunked them down in the city of Xiamen a day or so later.
In Xiamen they met two more members of their loosely-defined fellowship, Hungarian sysadmin/hacker Csongor and their local Chinese guide, Yuxia. It was also in Xiamen that they first encountered Evil. Evil arrived in the guise of a black Welshman named Abdallah Jones, militant Islamist terrorist and bomb-maker extraordinaire (not to mention a graduate of Colorado School of Mines), whose bomb factory had occupied the apartment above the troll's lair before the place exploded in a fireball. That meeting was to be the beginning of a long, unpleasant association for Zula.
The tenuous fellowship shattered when Jones and his handful of surviving jihadis chose a new target, dragging a chain-laden Zula along as their hostage. In this way Zula became the touchstone for the other members, the sacred talisman they spread out to seek.
As the forces of Evil plotted their next great deeds; two shards of the fellowship of "Good Guys" regrouped to begin their search for Zula in Asia, collecting new members as they progressed. Csongor and Yuxia joined forces with none other than the troll himself, while Ivanov's head of security hooked up with the MI6 operative who had been monitoring Jones. On the home front, the three Forthrast brothers took up the search for their missing niece, using both the internet and the billions in Richard's T'Rain-swollen bank accounts. Their greatest problem was that Jones, Zula in tow, had apparently disappeared off the face of the Earth. There was, however, really only one place for them to go.
Now in his his early sixties, Zula's uncle Richard Forthrast had compiled a long and storied history (all lovingly chronicled in his excruciatingly detailed Wikipedia entry). That history could come back to haunt him... or to make his world whole once more.
If you're not a fan of Neal Stephenson (his novels include Cryptonomicon, Snow Crash, Anathem and Seveneves), then you should make a point of becoming one – and soon. Though Stephenson is usually relegated to the F/SF section of your local bookstore where it's almost impossible to find him among the VampRoms, Reamde is a significant departure from the rest of his work. There's not a thing that's speculative about this particular chunk of fiction; in the parlance of the "Law & Order" folks, it could've been ripped from the deadlines of today's newspapers. In fact, you might end up wondering who is Stephenson's mole inside DHS.
Perhaps Stephenson's only attribute that comes close to matching a marvelously inventive mind is his dry, wry wit – I lost count of the number of times I read some amusing, slightly snarky passage aloud to the Ms (though she can probably tell you...). No matter what he's doing with his sense of humor, though, Stephenson most assuredly manages to put the pedal to the metal, and keep it there, when it comes to action scenes. For an alleged SciFi writer who some say out-cyberpunks William Gibson, Stephenson certainly reads as though he's channeling the likes of Ludlum (without the italics) and Cussler. He's got the chops, like the way he builds suspense slowly from about the second page, breaking the tension at irregular intervals with injections of comic relief. Too, there are the many routes by which his characters wend their way to the ultimate showdown.
His plotting and his wit are not Stephenson's only skills. Whether the character of the moment is twenty-something Zula, the Eritrean refugee adopted by the Forthrasts as a child; or the Garriott-like Richard Forthrast, known to his family as "Dodge" because he slipped into Canada as a draft-age young man in the '60s; you are inside the character's skin. Read on and, for a moment, you'll know what it's like to be an expat Russian "security specialist," a 6'-5" Hungarian cybergenius, or a Chinese-English undercover agent keeping watch on MI6's version of Osama bin Laden. Stephenson makes them all come alive inside your head.
Lest you think this is an ordinary thriller in which the good guys have magical powers and the bad guys are nothing but cannon fodder - think James Bond here - Stephenson manages to make Reamde real. With the possible exception of a couple of visits from a feline deus ex machina (which might actually be a form of comic relief), Stephenson's narrative is as blunt and bloody as real life - and it's not just the bad guys who get bloody.
With Reamde, Stephenson's "Forthrast Saga," the author has created a fantasy trilogy for the 21st century, all packed into a single volume. More to the point, he's done a darned fine job of it.
Summary:
Plus: plot, characters, wit, characters, wit, plot, all in one book
Minus: It takes two weeks to read - wait: is that a bad thing?
What they're saying: Neal Stephenson's Reamde updates the fantasy trilogy to the 21st century, with terrorists in the role of Evil and everyday(ish) people on the side of Good.
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