Special Offers see all
More at Powell'sRecently Viewed clear list
Original Essays | September 17, 2013
1 comment
|
 
$13.50
Used Hardcover
Ships in 1 to 3 days
More copies of this ISBNReamdeby Neal Stephenson
Staff Pick
A fast-paced departure from Stephenson's established brand of technology-driven storytelling, this nail-biter dives headlong into the present-day global economy and propels the reader on a worldwide adventure, complete with international spies, jihadists, Russian mobsters, and Chinese hackers — all wrapped in the virtual reality of a fiendishly innovative massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Like a John Grisham or Dan Brown born of the Unix command line, Stephenson intrigues and thrills with his most accessible novel yet. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T'Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world.
But T'Rain's success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing Reamde, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe — and Richard is at ground zero. Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story — an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson. Review:"Stephenson (Anathem), the master of meandering, inconclusive plots, delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story, regardless of the many digressions and a host of characters. Zula Forthrast's unfortunate taste in boyfriends catapults her into a breakneck adventure spanning two continents and several increasingly dangerous criminal gangs. What looks like a chance to make a quick buck turns sour when the Russian mafia discover that Zula's conniving boyfriend, Peter, inadvertently handed their representative a virus-infected thumb drive that holds all of the mafia's encrypted data. Peter and Zula find themselves prisoners of the menacing and desperate Ivanov and dragged to Xiamen, China, in a last-ditch effort to confront the hackers responsible before Ivanov's bosses learn what has happened. Complications ensue when the gangsters raid an apartment belonging not to the rather hapless hackers but instead to the notorious terrorist Abdallah Jones and his well-armed compatriots, into whose hands Zula falls. The plot snowballs from there, toward a violent conclusion near the U.S.-Canadian border. Author tour." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review:"Stephenson has a once-in-a-generation gift: he makes complex ideas clear, and he makes them funny, heartbreaking, and thrilling." Time
Review:"Noir futurist Stephenson returns to cyberia with this fast-moving though sprawling techno-thriller...Who'll prevail? We don't know till the very end, thanks to Stephenson's knife-sharp skills as a storyteller. An intriguing yarn — most geeky, and full of staisfying mayhem." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
Review:"Stephenson's Reamde: perfectly executed, mammoth, ambitious technothriller...a triumph, all 980 pages of it." Cory Doctorow, boingboing.com
Synopsis:Neal Stephenson, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Anathem, returns to the terrain of his groundbreaking novels Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, and Cryptonomicon to deliver a high-intensity, high-stakes, action-packed adventure thriller in which a tech entrepreneur gets caught in the very real crossfire of his own online war game.
About the AuthorNeal Stephenson is the author of Anathem; the three-volume historical epic the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, The Confusion, and The System of the World); Cryptonomicon; The Diamond Age; Snow Crash, which was named one of Time magazine’s top one hundred all-time best English-language novels; and Zodiac. He lives in Seattle, Washington.
What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!Average customer rating based on 27 comments: 
View all 27 commentsProduct Details
Other books you might likeRelated SubjectsFeatured Titles » Bestsellers Featured Titles » Literature Featured Titles » Staff Favorites Fiction and Poetry » Literature » A to Z Fiction and Poetry » Popular Fiction » Contemporary Thrillers Fiction and Poetry » Science Fiction and Fantasy » A to Z Fiction and Poetry » Science Fiction and Fantasy » Sale Books
|
||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
Follow us on...
|
|||||||||||||
