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)
on a totally unrelated note: is the idea for the blog more for "books I would recommend to others" or "books that I've read?"
ReplyDeleteThe latter would then be split into two categories of "books that I liked but wouldn't necessarily recommend to others" (especially things like criticism which can be to put it charitably difficult) and "books that I read that were interesting but not exactly enjoyable" (the example of the moment is the beckett novel I'm currently reading).
Well, for myself, I really write about "books that I've read" - I enjoy most of these (because I don't finish the ones that don't grab me!), but I like some more than others. Others here may have different apporoaches - which is all fine with me. I particularly enjoy getting new ideas of things to read and also some different impressions of what I have read.
ReplyDeleteI'm also interested in criticism, but feel I'm starting from so far behind that it's hard for me to get traction. So, for example, is it reasonable to start with Gibson, or should I be reading some other things first - and is there some intro to the criticism that could make me get more out of these? Altogether, I'm afraid I'm pretty low wattage on literary analysis - never had any course that emphasized it and I don't naturally think much about the structure of what I've read and how that contributes to the meaning I get from it. I'm a pretty naive reader, I guess.
I'm a little confused... Gibson is not a theorist; he writes bestselling science fiction novels. Do you mean Jameson?
ReplyDeleteSomebody like Jameson is going to be pretty impenetrable to somebody without a background in theory; I find it difficult going and I'm supposed to know about these things! I'll think about whether there's an "intro" to criticism that might be an interesting read; the problem is that most of my introduction to this stuff was in the form of seminar so I don't have an easy reference.
Really the two main barriers to accessing criticism are 1) vocabulary and 2) a working understanding of intellectual history from about the middle of the 18th century to the present day (what we would term Modernity). Other than that, the most important skill is being able to distinguish between something that is difficult and substantive and something that is difficult only to mask its lack of substance.
"the most important skill is being able to distinguish between something that is difficult and substantive and something that is difficult only to mask its lack of substance." amen!
ReplyDeletethis sounds really cool, I will definitely check it out - Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon first tho.
Colin, finally I have a moment to respond to your last comment. I didn't mean that Gibson was a theorist, but rather that I fear that without some knowledge of critical theory I may be missing a lot of what Gibson's "about". I mean, I seldom think that writers are trying to embody some theoretical view of the world, but rather that they're simply writing how things seem to be to them. Still, it can be hard for a casual reader (me) to get all that they're offering without having read and thought about the things that the writer is steeped in. So I'm wondering if reading some "criticism" is a shorthand way of absorbing some of that beforehand...?... But your description of the criticism makes it sound like it's a LONGHAND way of getting it!
ReplyDeleteNo, I wouldn't worry too much about finding Gibson accessible. He's aware of some critical discourse but mostly he just writes novels.
ReplyDeleteMarxists generally engage in what are called "symptomatic readings," where the critic is more interested in a demystification or an unveiling of the ideological underpinnings of the text, rather than a decoding of some missive that's present within it already. Hopefully that makes sense, I'm trying not to write an essay.
I guess another way of thinking about it is that critics generally treat writers sort of totally unconscious narrative construction machines. From a critical standpoint, I don't really care why an author does what he does or what he thinks about it. Saying what it means is my job, he just puts words on paper. An older school of criticism was more interested in this (what we now call the "intentional fallacy") but hasn't been popular in the last hundred years.
tl;dr: just read Gibson; if you find it intriguing that is a sign there are things you don't yet understand in which case you should read some criticism (I can suggest some quality work in the field haha)