I’m hoping that some day he’ll do a follow-up on Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. Lots of unanswered questions …
I’m just starting it, and I liked this passage/Easter egg:
The opening screen of T’Rain was a frank rip-off of what you saw when you booted up Google Earth. Richard felt no guilt about this, since he had heard that Google Earth, in turn, was based on an idea from some old science-fiction novel.
He is referring to his own creation - Snow Crash’s “Earth” right?
I am still in the middle of this book. I like Neal Stephenson in general, and his early stuff was amazing, but seriously, he is phoning it in in this one. You can’t build the whole freaking plot on coincidences.
It’s not enough basing the action on a computer virus that causes a deranged Russian mobster to go absolutely nuts and to start doing completely irrational stuff, but just by coincidence the virus writer lives right below a big Al Queda cell? That’s jumping the shark.
I really like Stephenson’s past works, but I’m a third of the way in and thinking of giving this one up. Its pretty terrible
Do you like checking your email? Or looking at google maps? Or using a Unix command line? Well how about reading descriptions of imaginary people reading their email or checking google maps or typing in a commandline.
And do you like World of Warcraft, but felt it wasn’t divorced from reality enough? Now you can read a fictional version of it. I like escapist fantasy, but hundreds of pages of the fictional development of a fictional universe is getting a little more abstract then I can make myself care about.
Isamu, yea, I got that too, and thought it was pretty amusing.
I’ll probably finish it in the hopes it gets more interesting, but its becoming kind of a chore.
I just finished. It doesn’t get better. Sigh. You really expect better from someone like Stephenson based on his previous works.
It’s not just the technical parts - whatever, that can be glossed over. But the series of ridiculous coincidences and fortuitous appearances of characters at JUST the right time to help out the others, the totally unbelievable transformation of a cold-blooded Russian murderer-for-hire into a warm-and-fuzzy humanitarian, the ability of people whose experience with warfare and weaponry is basically nil (or maybe through video games only) to wipe out a band of battle-hardened “jihadists”, and the final insult of the bigger-than-life, practically indestructible, main terrorist protagonist being killed off on the last page just as an afterthought…
As I said, Stephenson was phoning it in. The book will sell well because of his name and his previous books. But he is doing damage to his franchise.
Hmm, that sounds disappointing. If I want to read Halting State again I can do that. In fact I might get *Rule 34 *instead.
Actually I am just now re reading Crypto, and loved “the Diamond age”, but N.S. has recurring flaws which seems to mpop up in each of the works that I have read.
great stories - check
Convoluted but readable plots - check
Well written characters - check
but for christ’s sake, why do I have to read two and a half pages relating how a character likes to have his captain crunch?
A lot of his stuff seems to be heavily over written, bulked out and over detailed. Sure the character has OCD. fine. But two and a half pages describing his captain crunch ritual?
That is just the first example that springs to mind.
Other than that after the kilopage of story, it seems that he has very little skills ending the story. If you can take 2 1/2 pages to write about a captian crunch fixation, do you think you could take 10 pages to end a story. The plot issues seem to continue right up to the last few pages, and then get magically sewn up.
Still, I will probably get and read Reamde…
I need to pick up this book. I just have not been able to make too much headway through Quicksilver. I actually went to the bookstore (actual bricks and mortar store) to buy this book about 10 days ago. I ended up getting Ready Player One instead, which is a fantastic book BTW.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve been wondering about this one. Could anyone who’s finished it tell us, with no spoilers, whether there’s a proper ending or if once again it seems like Stephenson ran out of time/paper/laptop battery power and had to wrap things up within a couple of pages of the story’s climax?
OK, I just finished Reamde. The title is a play on *Readme *that is established in the book, so it is not exactly a typo.
It does have a traditional ending. I think that Stephenson is trying to rein in some of the more Stephenson-y elements. There were no multi-page descriptions of eating Captain Crunch, but it is deeply involved in the geek lifestyle.
I should say MOST of the plot threads are wound up. Noticeably,
the business about the Brights versus the Earthtones goes absolutely no-where and has no impact on the plot. That whole business could have been excised, the book would have been 100 pages shorter, and nothing would have been lost.
There were a number of literal Checkov’s Guns that appear early and are important late.
This book, like Cryptonomicon, is not really speculative fiction. It is a lot closer to a Clive Cussler techno-thriller. Like Cryptonomicon, I suppose there is one fantastic element. *Cryptonomicon *has the possibly immortal priest, and *Reamde *has a
“cougar” that is actually a Wendigo or some other Native American spirit. It certainly doesn’t behave at all like a real animal.
I enjoyed it. It pulled me in and right along. My favorite Stephenson is probably Snow Crash, but I liked *Anathem *and Cryptonomicon. The *Cryptonomicon *non-ending really bothered me, so I liked the ending in Reamde. Your mileage may vary.
I haven’t read Reamde yet, though I likely will, but I gotta say, I can’t believe you guys didn’t like the Captain Crunch bit in Cryptonomicon! That was classic!
There’s just one person in the thread that criticized the Cap’n Crunch passage, that I can see.
The Cap’n Crunch passage is considered to be quintessential Stephenson by most people I’ve seen commenting about him. If you don’t like that passage, you don’t like Stephenson, is what they say.
Well, I was counting two, but OK, the second one was possibly only referring to the first one and not actually agreeing. Good point.
If the second one is me, this is the point that I was trying to make. It seems to me that in *REAMDE *Stephenson is trying to reduce that quintessential Stephensonness, possibly to appeal to a wider range of readers.
By the way, another contrast between *Cryptonomicon *and REAMDE. In the former, the good guys were money launderers and supported terrorists. In the latter, while the good guys still seem to do a lot of money laundering, they now combat terrorists.
I liked it well enough, but it was lightweight. With his other books I always enjoyed the plot convolutions, but I always felt that the book was about something greater, some issue the author was wrestling with. This book lacked that, and so seemed sorta empty to me.
Yea, I think more digressions would’ve made it better, especially during the first third before the action starts, which is pretty boring. I could’ve used more reflections on cereal and fewer on the plate tectonics of T’rain.
FWIW, I’m about two thirds through and it does get better, albeit in a kind of generic techno-thriller way. I actually like the basic idea behind the book (its a traditional techno-thriller, but due to the transnational nature of MMORPGs, and the real-world value some people put on virtual goods, the heroes are forced to spend part of their time fighting it out in a video game). But the execution is kinda meh.
Its kinda like he’s showing how the world of Snow Crash (or at least the virtual part of that world) has started to come true.
I found this to be an odd criticism of a book that contained not one, but two 100-page descriptions of running gun battles. The book was far more of a straightforward thriller than any of his other work, IMO.
I liked Reamde a lot, but it definitely slots in below most of his other work, to me.
All the “good” stuff was completely underdeveloped by Stephenson in this book. The T’Rain was there, but it was mostly used as a method to communicate, and felt like a bolt-on to a standard thriller kind of book. And as I mentioned before, even as a techno-thriller it was substandard, because the series of coincidences and incredible character transformations require you to suspend disbelief just a bit too much.
I hadn’t reached the actiony bits yet when I wrote that. As I said in my later post, it gets better, though the actiony bits are kinda generic (though the length of the first one is pretty epic).
I haven’t really been bothered by the coincidences, which didn’t strike me as that bad, but the plot really hinges on a couple kinda nonsensical decisions by the characters. Especially:
-The Russian mobster needs to decrypt his files quickly or his fellow mobsters will kill him. In order to do this he can a) pay the Chinese hackers 75$ or b) charter a jet, fill it with mercenaries and kidnapped American hackers in a desperate attempt to find the chinese hackers and hope he’s able to capture them alive without alerting the Chinese authorities so that they can decrypt the files for him.
-Jones grabs Zula from the apartment building for no real reason. Then bothers to carry her on the ship, then on the plane leaving China. There isn’t really reason for this (until he finds out about her uncle, but that doesn’t happen until they reach Canada), and having to haul around a prisoner just makes his life more difficult.
-Zula decides to stay with Jones when he leaves China because its her “only way out of the country”. But if he let her go, she could just walk to the US embassy, explain she was kidnapped and have the US authorities get her out.
-Everyone that meets Zula, even for five minutes, immediately becomes willing to spend huge amounts of time risking their lives to save her.
-There isn’t really any reason for Soklov’s (sp?) hatred of Jones. He blames Jones for the death of his men, but it wasn’t really Jones’s fault as the Russians burst into his apartment with weapons drawn. Indeed, it was Zula’s fault more then anyones, but because of Zula’s magic powers mentioned above, Soklov instead spends his energies trying to kill Jones and save Zula.
Its not like Stephenson’s other books were hyper-realistic either, but the whole plot of this one seemed to rest on characters deciding to do things that made life difficult for the main character for no other reason then to drive the story.
I wonder if the whole thing isn’t a sort of big joke:
The “everyone she meets must either kidnap or rescue Zula” bit struck me as, well, sorta like the plot to a computer game … perhaps the notion is that while the computer game in the novel increasingly imitates “real life”, the real life in the novel increasingly imitates a computer game, and of course the two become commingled in various ways.
This would explain the otherwise-inexplicable silly decisions made - they are pointers to the artificiality of the real life setting.