Neal Stephenson - Reamde

In Stephenson's oeuvre, Reamde, despite its 1056 pages, is light reading. This is not necessarily a bad thing. The man is a master of plot construction, not in terms of technical complexity but rather in terms of sheer engagement: he gets those pages turned. The novel's most striking feature is its action sequences, in which Stephenson shows off his impressive gunfight-choreography chops.

The novel's cyberpunk elements center around the computer game T'Rain (the fictional successor to the online hegemony of World of Warcraft), whose most salient characteristic its elaborate economy, based on a virtual-gold standard whose integrity is ensured by an elaborate geological simulation which determines the location of deposits of ore within the game world. The game is designed to exploit, rather than be exploited by, the existence of "gold-farmers," or kids in China who perform repetitive in-game actions (or grinding) in order to harvest virtual items and currency that they can then sell to rich Westerners - a real phenomenon in games like WoW. Stephenson's picture of how this all works is really quite ingenious, and somehow constitutes both a more sophisticated version and elaborate parody of early cyberpunk depictions of the function of virtual spaces in the global economy, like Stephenson's own depiction of the "Metaverse" in Snow Crash.

A series of elaborate coincidences embroil the creator of this game, the draft-dodging black sheep of a gun-toting Idaho clan, and his adopted Eritrean refugee niece in a globe-trotting hostage plot involving Islamic terrorists and Russian organized crime; all of which is much too complicated to even begin to explain here. Suffice to say that the entire thing is incredibly entertaining, and the characters are extremely well-written: I thought that the terrorist Abdullah Jones, a suave Black American convert, was a particularly intriguing figure.

In Reamde, Stephenson dials down the whole "novel of ideas" business and writes a fairly straightforward thriller that delivers exactly what it promises and in fine style. The Stephensonian themes are all here, but muted and lighthearted in a way that I think is actually a very good artistic move, especially following the somewhat more ponderous (but very good) Anathem. If nothing else, the book makes me wistful for a world in which the rest of the bestseller list was even a fraction of Reamde's quality.

I would recommend the book, but read the essential Stephenson first: Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon.

Stephenson's Novels

• The Big U (1984)
• Zodiac (1988)
• Snow Crash (1992)
• Interface (1994) 
• The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (1995)
• The Cobweb (1996) 
• Cryptonomicon (1999)
• The Baroque Cycle
• Quicksilver (2003), volume I
• The Confusion (2004), volume II
• The System of the World (2004), volume III
• Anathem (2008)
• The Mongoliad (2010–2012)
• Reamde + Colin's review (2011)

China Mieville - The City & The City

Mieville has always had a thing for patchwork cities. I first encountered the author years ago with the strange and wonderful Perdido Street Station, which I highly recommend. That novel was a masterpiece of imagination, set in a politically fractured steampunk metropolis. Its two sequels were entertaining but lackluster, and Mievelle fell off of my radar.

The City & The City, which shared the 2010 Hugo with Bacigalupi's vastly inferior The Windup Girl, is a detective novel set in the absurd divided city of Beszel and Ul Qoma, located somewhere in a post-Soviet Eastern Europe. I don't want to say too much about the nature of the relationship between the two cities, as the gradual unfolding of this relationship in the early part of the novel produces a somewhat maddening sense of disorientation that I found to be fairly masterful on the part of Mieville. For this same reason, I would recommend that one avoid reading too much about the book before diving into it.

The setting itself is something of a literary-theoretical thought experiment taken to an absurd extreme; this is self-conscious, as Foucault and Baudrillard are referenced by a character in the text (although I think the conceit is more due to Deleuze). Which is to say: this book is ambitious, in a way that (especially with the noir trappings) reminds me of nothing more than Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, to which this book is clearly indebted. And Mieville, somehow, pulls it off, producing a novel that's both a technical masterpiece and lot of fun.

edit: As a sidenote, you can understand the thematic structure of this novel in terms of Greimas' semiotic square, which is a bit like a two-dimensional dialectic and a really powerful analytic tool in general.

When the Thrill is Gone

Walter Mosley writes vivid mysteries and crime stories, usually set in LA, but sometimes elsewhere, as this one, which is set in New York City. Many of the stories have a noir feel and all feature very sharp urban dialog that's a pleasure to read. The subtext of all the stories is race relations, embodied in the action, rather than described. This one, in the Leonard McGill series, was not my favorite (I have most enjoyed the books featuring Easy Rawlins or Fearless Jones) but still had wonderful moments of human interaction. Any Mosley is a pleasure!

Dorothy Sayers!

Recently read two excellent mysteries by Dorothy Sayers, Wrong Body and Unnatural Death. I enjoyed the first, but thought the second was really great. I appreciate the wit (and silliness) of Lord Peter Wimsey (whom the prominent critic Edmund Wilson described as "...a dreadful stock English nobleman of the casual and debonair kind, with the embarrassing name of Lord Peter Wimsey"). Oh well.

Sayers (Wikipedia says she preferred the pronunciation "Sares" to "Say-ers") led a very interesting life, with accomplishments in many fields. Her mysteries, usually featuring Wimsey or the smart and independent Harriet Vane, are clever and urbane, with interesting plots, often featuring specialty information on subjects such as medical practice, or "change ringing" ("...the art of ringing a set of tuned bells in a series of mathematical patterns called "changes". It differs from many other forms of campanology in that no attempt is made to produce a conventional melody" - thanks Wikipedia!), or advertising (Sayers worked, very successfully, for many years at an advertising firm that later became Ogilvy and Mather).

Sayers was precocious and learned - her father, chaplain at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, began teaching her Latin at age 6, and she studied modern languages and medieval literature at Oxford, eventually becoming one of the first women to receive a degree there. Sayers considered her best work to be the well-regarded translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. Edmund Wilson, HA!

The Otterbury Incident

This delightful and entertaining story is written by Cecil Day Lewis, who held the Chair of Poetry at Oxford University and was Poet Laureate of England from 1968 until his death in 1972. (His son is the actor Daniel Day Lewis). This was his only children's book; it's been out of print for some time (I had a used copy sent from England. Interested? I'll loan it to you!) and came to my attention via Hayao Miyazaki's List of 50 Recommended Books for Children, which is now available via an Amazon List. It's a believable "mystery", with much whimsy and humor. Wonderful!

William Gibson's Count Zero

Count Zero, although at times confusing, is another Gibson masterpiece. The world he envisions is Tolstoyan in its richness, fullness, and complexity. He is strikingly creative and his vision of the near (although technologically distant) future is dark, grimy, and dangerous without being oppressingly alarmist. Gibson's characters ring true and his literary grasp is impressive, and far improved from Neuromancer - he convincingly weaves together multiple narratives to reveal a complex and fascinating picture of cyberspace and its potential. In this work, Bobby, aka Count Zero, is an aspiring cyber cowboy (or "hotdogger") who gets swept up in the veiled machinations of an incomprehensibly wealthy entity named Virek. ("Entity" because Virek's body is a pool of molecules in an enormous vat, and he "lives" in the matrix.) The story follows Virek's attempts to locate the maker of mysteriously haunting collage boxes through various hitmen and an art collector. The book's themes, largely introduced in Neuromancer, include AI, systems theory, the synthesis of man and machine, and the spatial nature of cyberspace. The religious potential of the matrix is also fruitfully explored. A real page-turner and a must-read!

Gibson's 3 Trilogies:

The Sprawl Trilogy:

• Neuromancer
• Count Zero
• Mona Lisa Overdrive

The Bridge Trilogy:

• Virtual Light
• Idoru
• All Tomorrow's Parties

The Bigend Books:

• Pattern Recognition
• Spook Country
• Zero History