Synopses & Reviews
From the extraordinary Neal Stephenson comes an epic adventure that spans entire worlds, both real and virtual.
The black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, former draft dodger and successful marijuana smuggler Richard Forthrast amassed a small fortune over the years — and then increased it a thousandfold when he created T'Rain. A massive, multibillion-dollar, multiplayer online role-playing game, T'Rain now has millions of obsessed fans from the U.S. to China. But a small group of ingenious Asian hackers has just unleashed Reamde — a virus that encrypts all of a player's electronic files and holds them for ransom — which has unwittingly triggered a war that's creating chaos not only in the virtual universe but in the real one as well. Its repercussions will be felt all around the globe — setting in motion a devastating series of events involving Russian mobsters, computer geeks, secret agents, and Islamic terrorists — with Forthrast standing at ground zero and his loved ones caught in the crossfire.
Review
"Reamde is an entertainment, an enormous, giddily complex one. There's no telling what Stephenson might be planning for his next novel, but now's the time to dive into a first-rate intellectual thriller without fear of being overwhelmed by its virtuosity." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Reamde is...one big, carefully choreographed, jet-set square-dance of mayhem." Bloomberg News
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"It's hard to sum up a 1,000 page tome in a short review, so if you don't feel like reading this rather long one, I'll boil it down to three words: I loved it." Tor.com
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"Expertly crafted and often gorgeously written." Boston Globe
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"Sometimes when you're reading Neal Stephenson, he doesn't just seem like one of the best novelists writing in English right now; he seems like the only one." Lev Grossman, Time magazine
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"Reamde combines meticulous observation of the stranger socioeconomic effects wrought by technology with rousing fusillades of adventure." The Guardian
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"In less masterful hands, this pile-up of implausible coincidences, madcap romance, technological mayhem and nail-biting suspense might have been a train wreck, but Stephenson pulls it off. Reamde has one of the most satisfyingly over-the-top endings of anything I've read in years. " Washington Post Book World
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"There's an intellectual pill buried deep in Mr. Stephenson's narrative candy, one powerful enough that he deserves to be classified as a major national and international resource." Wall Street Journal
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"Stephenson...delivers a sprawling thriller that shows him in complete control of his story." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Even at a thousand pages, Reamde is sprightly enough to jump between 9 or 10 plot threads without getting tangled up in itself, and, refreshingly, it does so without employing the annoying modern thriller trend of rat-a-tat sprays of two-page chapters." Stranger magazine
Synopsis
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 hes 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.
About the Author
Neal 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.