"Reamde", by Neal Stephenson

[mangosteen]

So, I just finished reading all 1,004 pages of "Reamde" by Neal Stephenson.


SPOILERS AHEAD. This got a little ranty.

I wonder how many people will try "tasking" someone, just to see if it works. Hint: It does, but if you're ham-handed about it, it's the quickest path to resentment.

Oh, the guns. Did I mention guns? There were a *lot* of guns in this book. Also, guns. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, especially because they are actually used for what I consider their primary purpose, and they're considered Just Another Tool in a book with a relatively high body count.

The middle 400 pages of the book were like a 5 year old playing with toy cars and planes going "and then THEY went over THERE! *car noises* And.... and then THOSE OTHER PEOPLE went... over THERE! *plane noises*" Four. Hundred. Pages.

I get the whole "single action, multiple characters view it differently" thing... I just wished he marked them with something like "Yeah, I'm about to churn out the 2-3 other POV reaction shots, skip ahead 28 pages."

The word "adit" has been relentlessly added to my vocabulary.

He has gone from "physically incapable of writing an ending" to "knocking one out before dinner and pasting it on the end, after his publisher reminds him that it might be a good idea."

I'm guessing that this was his attempt at a crossover novel to get out of the science/speculative fiction genre. He's making a lot of assumptions about attention spans.


With "Reamde", Stephenson has dropped off of my "buy sight unseen" list.

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

trivia: he's already made forays out of the sf genre - he (co-)wrote two books in the 90's that can only be described as technothrillers. (not counting "zodiac", which is somewhere between scifi and technothriller)

and yes, quite a lot of guns, there. and somehow i suspect that the character of peter was designed to snark about a number of stephenson fanboys.

[perspicuity.livejournal.com]

perhaps a used copy :)

guns you say?

#

[bluepapercup]

As Stephenson rants go, this one was shockingly mild. I was expecting you to excoriate him!

[dreamsewing.livejournal.com]

Hunh, that sounds more like a Michael Bay film,was there by any chance a female chracter who was only defined by her arse? Guess I'll take this one of of the Books for pir list.

[mangosteen]

To be completely fair, the characters were entirely fleshed-out and believable, and the main female characters were actually three-dimensional.

The gun porn got a bit much, though.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

I read the first three pages and decided I didn't want to read about guns, so I quit.

One of my theater professors taught us a neat rule: if there's a weapon hanging on the wall in the first act, you can bet it will be used to kill someone by the end of the play.

[jicama]

Ah yes, Chekov's Gun.

[dsrtao]

So... I liked it. In fact, I think of it as Stephenson switching his writing focus to establishing what he can do to keep me turning pages compulsively. As a technothriller, it's one of the best of the last two decades.

As SF? Ha, no.

Incidentally, Stephenson dropped off "Buy sight unseen" after the first book of the Baroque Cycle. I quite liked Anathem, though.

[jicama]

^ this.

Posted without reading journal entry..

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Oh, bother, now I'll have to catch up..

[wotw]

The middle 400 pages of the book were like a 5 year old
playing with toy cars and planes going "and then THEY went over
THERE! *car noises* And.... and then THOSE OTHER PEOPLE went...
over THERE! *plane noises*" Four. Hundred. Pages.

Ha! I haven't read the book (nor could anything on this earth
have ever induced me to do so, before or after reading your
review) but I totally believe this sums up 400 pages of what
I missed in a single brilliant metaphor. This made my day.

[jeffpaulsen.livejournal.com]

re: the gun thing - it seemed noteworthy to me that there were no gun mistakes. Not super common in a book of this genre & length. The actual number & type of guns involved didn't seem remarkable by the standards of the genre, nor remarkable by local norms.

re: crossover - Stephenson has done this Clancy-esque techno-thriller thing before, with an uncle of his co-authoring. The books were originally published under the name Stephen Bury - "Cobweb" and "Interface" are the titles. They're now printed with his name on them.

re: a possible other motivating factor - this book is the opposite of his last book. Anathem was a mindbending hulk of an SF novel with Things To Say. REAMDE is a straightforward adventure story.

It also reminds me, structurally, of the 2nd book of his Baroque Cycle, where Shaftoe has a bewildering picaresque story arc - complication replacing complication, driving the players around the map in more or less constant peril.

REAMDE a hundred pages of setup, followed by 900 pages of the reader being shot out of a cannon.

[blackanvil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it left me kinda flat too, I've got a copy about half-way read by the bathtub, but just haven't wanted to pick it up again.

It is similar to his earlier techno-thrillers, but lacks any sort of "hook" for me to want to read it. I have no sympathy for any of the characters, and really don't care if they live, die, or whatever. I find the actions taken by the characters to be reasonable, but non-compelling -- why should I care about them in the first place. I imagine my distaste for any and all MMORPGs is the root cause of this -- this book reads like listening to cow-orkers talk about World of Warcraft raids: boring.

I read in a review that this is being promoted as "Neal Stephenson's most accessible work," in such a way that I believe that was one of the goals -- a mass-market appeal page turner not requiring any real mental activity to understand and follow, using popular memes to tie into a general audience.

In other words, not me. Assuming he turns from this well-lit, well-traveled path and gets into some interesting diversions again, I'll probably buy and enjoy his work. If he succeeds in his efforts to become rich and boring, well, there are other authors, and I still have his other work.

I've seen other authors do the same -- turn from the highly speculative side of SF to near-future or present-day technothriller type stories (Bruce Sterling, I'm looking at you), and even understand the motive. Sterling, in a speech at an SF con I attended years ago, stated that he was focusing on the near future super-hard SF because it was getting increasingly hard to imagine what it would be like, let alone a realistic prediction of what might happen out in the stars, or only a couple of hundred years from now.

Still, disappointed in Reamde, and I am not recommending it to the SF fan.

[zahraa]

I'm trying to figure out whether to knock Stephenson off my "read sight unseen" list or not. I started reading Children of the Sky (which seems very light by comparison!), and I am noticing that the action is much harder to follow. Stephenson's multiple PoV thing really was appealing to me. But overall, not such a hot book. zyxwvut decided not to waste his time.

I wish it were easy to borrow books like this from the library in e-book format. That would save a lot of trouble.