There’s this rumor going around that Neal Stephenson is a science fiction writer. Well, you couldn’t tell it from his latest book, REAMDE. The book has a lot in common with the two novels that Stephenson wrote with his uncle, Cobweb and Interface (my review). Like those two books, this book is a thriller with some interesting cultural and science related topics. It still has the trademark Stephenson digressions, but more about the history of the characters than esoteric scientific/historical concepts. So, let’s see what REAMDE is about.

Richard Forthrast isn’t the black sheep of the family, but that’s only because his younger brother is living off the grid in Idaho in a manner that is closer to the Unabomber then most people would like to admit. After a colorful younger years (which included draft dodging and hunting guide and marijuana farmer), Forthrast invested in a ski lodge with a friend and then ended up creating the multiplayer online game, T’Rain, that unseated World of Warcraft. The basis of the game is an amazing land generation system created by a autistic savant(Pluto)* and a storyline that was created by two fantasy writers. As our book starts, there are two important things going on in T’Rain. The first is a huge war (called the War of Realignment or WOR) between two sides in the game that are demarcated by the color schemes of their costumes. The second is a virus that spreads through an Outlook plugin to the game called REAMDE that encrypts the user’s hard drive and offers the decryption key in exchange for money.

*The character of Pluto (and the whole T’Rain game in fact) reminded me a lot of Andrew Loeb from Cryptonomicon with the attention to detail and the fantasy online game. I wonder how much Stephenson looked at that throwaway couple of pages in Cryptonomicon when he was writing REAMDE.

Richard’s adopted niece Zula has just broken up with her boyfriend (due to his idiotic criminal behavior) when the REAMDE virus causes the Zula to be kidnapped by a Russian mafioso (who might be skimming money from his bosses). This leads to a trip to China where the Russian attempt to find the REAMDE virus writer leads to an accidental meeting with one of the world’s most wanted terrorist.  This propels the group on an epic adventure across Asia, Southern Canada and the Northern US as Richard leads an effort to find Zula and Zula tries to escape. The book goes into a great deal of detail about guns, family and MMORPGs (Stephenson lists a ballistics editor who helped him make sure he got the weaponry information correct).

Overall, it’s a great thriller that has a small cast of characters (less than 20) and Stephenson makes great use of them all. None of the characters are one dimensional throw away characters, they all have multiple sides and clear goals. The plot is fairly simple and straight forward with a few temporal tricks (having a character show up unexpectedly and then backtracking to show how they got there). The characters are the real key here. Stephenson’s real strength is not his ideas, it’s his characters. You can tell that he loves them all and makes sure to convey that to the reader. The descriptions of both the real places and the MMORPG are wonderful and add a lot of texture to the novel. Highly recommended, but remember it’s not science fiction