Reamde: A Novel Author: Neal Stephenson | Language: English | ISBN:
B004XVN0WW | Format: EPUB
Reamde: A Novel Description
“Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking, and thrilling.”
—Time
The #1 New York Times bestselling author of Anathem, Neal Stephenson is continually rocking the literary world with his brazen and brilliant fictional creations—whether he’s reimagining the past (The Baroque Cycle), inventing the future (Snow Crash), or both (Cryptonomicon). With Reamde, this visionary author whose mind-stretching fiction has been enthusiastically compared to the work of Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, and David Foster Wallace—not to mention William Gibson and Michael Crichton—once again blazes new ground with a high-stakes thriller that will enthrall his loyal audience, science and science fiction, and espionage fiction fans equally. The breathtaking tale of a wealthy tech entrepreneur caught in the very real crossfire of his own online fantasy war game, Reamde is a new high—and a new world—for the remarkable Neal Stephenson.
- File Size: 1638 KB
- Print Length: 1055 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0061977969
- Publisher: William Morrow; Reprint edition (September 20, 2011)
- Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
- Language: English
- ASIN: B004XVN0WW
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,169 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
As an avid Stephenson fan, I feel let down after finishing Reamde. It is not as if it is a bad novel. In fact I would rate it as one of the better thrillers I have read in the last couple of years. If you like tales of very strong men and somewhat strong women in which lots of guns go off, then you will like Reamde. In its ambition and the quality of its execution it easily matches up to the works of the masters of this genre such as Clancy or Forsyth.
Yet, the book lacks the special Stephenson touch. First, there is no overarching theme tying the novel together. Cryptonomicon was about the elusive nature of information and wealth, the Baroque Cycle was about the rise of science and capitalism in the West. Having these deeper questions in the background made the surface action in the novels more meaningful. This time it is just a bunch of Good Guys chasing a bunch of Bad Guys.
Second, the characters in Reamde lack both depth and idiosyncrasy. Despite the length of the novel, there is so much going on that we do not get to know the nuances of the characters' personalities. I don't think I am the only Stephenson fan missing the Cap'n Crunch episodes. Though they start off with nominally different backgrounds and interests, as the novel progresses the good guys/girls all converge into a uniform mould of toughness, self-reliance and an aptitude for violence. The bad guys, apart form the chief villain, seem to exist just to be killed. These cookie-cutter "jihadists" seem to have been dropped in from some B-grade action movie script, for Stephenson does not seem to have any wish to examine either the ideology of religious fundamentalists or their social backgrounds.
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