Review: Reamde by Neal Stephenson

Reamde represents the first time that I have been disappointed with a Neal Stephenson book.

Before I get into it, I’ll start by saying that Stephenson is my favourite author. Snow Crash became one of my favourite books as soon as I read it, and remains a novel that I feel like reading once every couple years. His essay “In the Beginning…was the Command Line” (which has now been published as a book), influenced my own personal computing habits, and encouraged me to learn Linux. Even though current technology has made the essay obsolete, the ideas contained within it still inform my views on computers.

The common thread that runs through my love of Stephenson’s work is his presentation of new ideas. He likes to spit out long infodumps on nerdy details that connect tangentially to the plot (Sumerian history and mythology in Snow Crash, the mathematics of encryption in Cryptonomicon) and every time he does, I eat it up. I basically feel like I’m learning something, and as deluded as I may be for thinking that I can get an education by reading fiction, it’s very satisfying for me.

At first, Reamde gave me what I wanted: it takes the familiar MMORPG concept and adds some neat ideas. There’s also some geeky humour about the placement of apostrophes in the nomenclature of the game’s fantasy setting.

The problems start about a quarter of the way in, when the book turns into an action thriller. Aside from a couple of scenes where some characters meet up and communicate in the online game world, the cool ideas that got me hooked at the beginning are mostly abandoned. The plot revolves around a terrorist plot, and the secret and not-so-secret agents who try to stop the terrorists. In other words, it’s like a really long season of 24 (not my favourite show in the world).

When the action ramped up, I assumed that it was just a small scene that would bridge into the second part of the novel. Instead, the action pretty much continues for the rest of the way. It’s like the climax starts a quarter of the way in, and encompasses three-quarters of the book.

I don’t mind action, and Stephenson writes it well, but it really feels like a slog when the book is a thousand pages long. Each chapter takes place in one day and are titled as such (e.g. Day 1, Day 15). The “Day 4” chapter lasts for 200+ pages on its own (about 20-25% of the total length). It took me almost a week to get through it and I eventually started thinking to myself, “These characters are still in pretty much the same situation that I was reading about three days ago!”

Let me contrast this with the way Stephenson treated action in his earlier work. This sentence ends a chapter in Snow Crash:

After that—after Hiro gets onto his motorcycle, and the New South Africans get into their all-terrain pickups, and The Enforcers get into their slick black Enforcer mobiles, and they all go screaming out onto the highway—after that it’s just a chase scene.

To me, this is a very clever way to jump forward in time. The narrator is breaking the fourth wall and telling the audience, “We all know what a chase scene is, so let’s not dwell on it.” Now, imagine replacing this line with 200+ pages of actually describing all the things that happen in the chase scene and you have Reamde.

To sum up, I still did enjoy Stephenson’s writing style and humour, but it went on way too long. Too much action and plot, not enough ideas. I’ve pretty much read all of his books more than once, but I don’t see myself coming back to Reamde anytime soon.