Reamde
Encyclopedia
Reamde is a speculative fiction
novel
by Neal Stephenson
, published in 2011. The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG
, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming
and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian Mafia
and Islamic terrorists.
niece, reconnect, and he decides to offer her a job at his gaming company fitting her unique education.
Richard, a former marijuana smuggler, is nearly a billionaire, having started a company that designed and now runs an MMORPG
called T'Rain, based on an economic system intentionally geared towards meeting both the needs of gold farmers
, particularly converting in-game currency into actual hard currency, and more conventional players. Richard is described as notable enough to merit a contentious Wikipedia
entry. He also owns a cat skiing
resort in British Columbia
.
Zula and her boyfriend, Peter, visit both the reunion and later Richard's resort, located near the US-Canadian border where Richard used to run drugs. Desperate for money, Peter sells a database of credit card numbers he stole to a shady contact while at the resort.
It turns out Peter's ultimate client is the Russian Mafia
, and the transaction resulted in a virus infecting the deal broker's laptop, which contains the only copy of the database. This virus, seemingly called Reamde, affects T'Rain players by encrypting any seemingly valuable files and extorting in-game gold in exchange for a key to decrypt those files. As a consequence of the in-game payment method, chaos has already been building in the virtual world around the region holding the ransom drop points.
Peter, Zula, and the middle man attempt to comply but take too long, and the Russian gangsters, with the assistance of their own IT support, manage to find them in Seattle. Having explained their predicament, Ivanov, the gangster, notes the middle man has compromised too much of the criminal organization's activities, murdering him in Peter's loft and taking Peter and Zula hostage. With information Zula obtains from her company, they travel to Xiamen, PRC
to track down those behind Reamde and kill them. Ivanov has been quietly siphoning common funds for risky profit schemes and is trying to save face before his associates punish him for his losses.
Upon arriving in China, Peter, Zula, Csongor, who is a Hungarian hacker offering the mafia IT support, and Sokolov, a former Spetsnaz
security consultant hired by Ivanov, search the city for Reamde's perpetrators, eventually locating their apartment. The Russian security team prepares to raid the gold farming team, composed of young Chinese men, only to be misdirected by Zula into a random apartment, which coincidentally happens to house Islamic terrorists preparing to bomb an international conference soon to take place in the city.
Ivanov murders Peter, and Abdallah Jones, a black Welshman who is the head of the cell and a highly wanted man by the UK's MI6
, murders Ivanov following a highly destructive battle within the building. The gold farmers flee the building as a booby trap initiates a controlled demolition. Jones proceeds to free and subsequently kidnap Zula himself.
This crucial turning point in the plot also introduces Olivia, an MI6 agent who located and was gathering intelligence on the elusive Jones in anticipation of assassinating him. The story separates into four main threads at this juncture: Zula and Jones as they flee from the scene; Olivia and Sokolov as both attempt to extract themselves from their illegal presence in China; Csongor, Marlon, the lead author of the Reamde virus scam, and Yuxia, a local Hakka woman caught up by chance as the Russian's guide and driver, as they attempt to rescue Zula; and Richard as he continues to deal with the fallout of Reamde.
Jones hijacks a taxi that takes him and Zula to a dock where some of Jones' network take them aboard a boat. Csongor comes close to killing Jones but fails, while Yuxia is taken captive for her part in the attempt. Jones' men sail to a poor port where he coerces Zula into helping hijack the private jet that first brought her and the Russians to China. The jet's pilots are pressed into service, flying everybody off-radar and into the snowy wilderness of Canada, where they are killed. Zula reveals her relation to Richard to keep herself alive, and Jones continues to drag her around as Canadian terrorist cells are called upon to join with him. Several civilians are murdered for their vehicles as more passably western cell members are brought in for what will ultimately be a major attack on Las Vegas
, once a border crossing can be affected. They aim for Richard's resort and use Zula as leverage to gain his assistance in crossing into the US.
Csongor and Marlon buy a boat and try to chase after Jones and rescue Yuxia. They make their move on the terrorist trawler after Jones and Zula have left but manage to save Yuxia and kill all of the terrorists on board. They then have to learn how to sail, running out of gasoline, until they find themselves in the Philippines
, making their way to a modern city where Marlon can begin to assemble his T'Rain crew to start picking up all of the Reamde extortion money and use it to assist the three of them as they try to figure out where to go next.
Sokolov, hoping to kill Jones and save Zula, tracks down Olivia after their brief encounter in the immediate aftermath of the apartment battle, chancing across her spy equipment and wallet, and offers her assistance in getting out of China. Through Zula, Jones knows where to find Sokolov, but Sokolov kills those sent to kill him and, as they've found Olivia's address, goes back to find her and kill her attackers as well. He lets Jones know he's still alive and warns him not to harm Zula. He and Olivia swim to Taiwanese territory, where they become intimate before she locates a nearby handler. The handler's promises to get them both out in exchange for intelligence on Jones fail to materialize as a hit squad attempts to kill Sokolov as he departs. He escapes, though Olivia thinks he's been killed. Olivia is tasked with further Jones-related work, heading first to the Philippines to meet the last main character to be introduced, Seamus Costello, a CIA operative responsible for Jones-related work solely in the Philippines. They find it unlikely he is there, and Olivia heads for the US as a secondary hypothesis on where Jones has gone. Olivia meets Richard to dissuade him from going to China to look for his niece as she now knows everybody is long gone.
Seamus remains in the Philippines, so when the T'Rain administrators pick up on Marlon's login to the game, he finds the trio in an internet cafe and helps bring the three of them, without homes and newly rich, to the US to gain new identities.
Richard is also dealing with the virus and trying to integrate a player-originated schism deviating from hard-coded good and evil character assignments to color-based alignments, the brightly colored graphical character palettes against more neutral earth-toned colors, corresponding roughly to stark versus nuanced points of view. A major force behind the realignment originates in the writings of the two principal authors of T'Rain's narrative, one a Cambridge don who writes highly regarded fantasy, the other a pulp author who churns out volumes of poorly regarded fantasy. To provide more balance to the so-called War of Realignment, a new narrative is derived to incorporate Reamde and make sure some of the extorted money ends up in the hands of the numerically weaker earth-toned side.
For various reasons, all of the characters begin to converge on the resort and its US-side counterpart where Richard's youngest brother Jake lives with a community of Christian isolationists and second amendment
fanatics. The terrorists find a location near the resort to camp and inform Richard, who is directing Reamde triage alone at the resort, of their hostage, forcing him to lead them into the US while a small team detonates a suicide bomb near the border as a distraction. Seamus brings the three new Americans to Idaho
on a hunch shared with Olivia, who has chanced upon Sokolov in the US and also brought him to Idaho.
After being used as bait, Zula manages to escape from a skeleton crew that was readying to kill her, gathering supplies from the resort before heading out to rescue her uncle. US terrorist cells also converge on the Idaho property, and protagonists and terrorists end up battling one another in a terrific gunfight around Jake's home, demolishing it. In the end, Richard kills Jones.
Richard's oldest brother John is killed during the firefight while others receive various levels of injury. Zula and Csongor, Olivia and Sokolov, and Seamus and Yuxia end up in relationships as the story closes at the next Forthrast family reunion.
, Val Nolan called Reamde "one of the smartest, fastest-moving, and most consistently enjoyable novels of the year". It is, Nolan went on, a "painstakingly-researched, deftly-plotted roller-coaster of gigabytes and gunplay, a pitch-perfect pastiche of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers and a comment on contemporary digitality and the ubiquity of online interconnectivity." Rowan Kaiser for the A.V. Club gives Reamde an A− rating saying: "The marriage of the thrilling and the nerdy is what makes Reamde work, and it offers a glimpse at a fascinating writer making a welcome transition back into a more accessible style." Kirkus Reviews
sums up Reamde as: "An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem." Cory Doctorow
writes in his Boing Boing
review: "Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself."
Speculative fiction
Speculative fiction is an umbrella term encompassing the more fantastical fiction genres, specifically science fiction, fantasy, horror, supernatural fiction, superhero fiction, utopian and dystopian fiction, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternate history in literature as well as...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
by Neal Stephenson
Neal Stephenson
Neal Town Stephenson is an American writer known for his works of speculative fiction.Difficult to categorize, his novels have been variously referred to as science fiction, historical fiction, cyberpunk, and postcyberpunk...
, published in 2011. The story, set in the present day, centers on the plight of a hostage and the ensuing efforts of family and new acquaintances, many of them associated with a fictional MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
, to rescue her as her various captors drag her about the globe. Topics covered range from online activities including gold farming
Gold farming
Gold farming is playing a massively multiplayer online game to acquire in-game currency which is then sold to other players. People in China and in other developing nations have held full-time employment as gold farmers....
and social networking to the criminal methods of the Russian Mafia
Russian Mafia
The Russian Mafia is a name applied to organized crime syndicates in Russia and Ukraine. The mafia in various countries take the name of the country, as for example the Ukrainian mafia....
and Islamic terrorists.
Plot summary
Reamde begins by introducing two central protagonists, members of the Forthrast family, attending an annual family reunion. Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, the middle-aged second son of three, and Zula Forthrast, his adopted EritreanEritrea
Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...
niece, reconnect, and he decides to offer her a job at his gaming company fitting her unique education.
Richard, a former marijuana smuggler, is nearly a billionaire, having started a company that designed and now runs an MMORPG
MMORPG
Massively multiplayer online role-playing game is a genre of role-playing video games in which a very large number of players interact with one another within a virtual game world....
called T'Rain, based on an economic system intentionally geared towards meeting both the needs of gold farmers
Gold farming
Gold farming is playing a massively multiplayer online game to acquire in-game currency which is then sold to other players. People in China and in other developing nations have held full-time employment as gold farmers....
, particularly converting in-game currency into actual hard currency, and more conventional players. Richard is described as notable enough to merit a contentious Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
entry. He also owns a cat skiing
Snowcat skiing
Snowcat skiing is off-trail, downhill skiing that is accessed by a snowcat, not a ski lift. Snowcat skiing is essentially about skiing in a natural—albeit highly selected -- environment without the effort or gear compromise required for hiking into these areas as in ski touring or ski mountaineering...
resort in British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
.
Zula and her boyfriend, Peter, visit both the reunion and later Richard's resort, located near the US-Canadian border where Richard used to run drugs. Desperate for money, Peter sells a database of credit card numbers he stole to a shady contact while at the resort.
It turns out Peter's ultimate client is the Russian Mafia
Russian Mafia
The Russian Mafia is a name applied to organized crime syndicates in Russia and Ukraine. The mafia in various countries take the name of the country, as for example the Ukrainian mafia....
, and the transaction resulted in a virus infecting the deal broker's laptop, which contains the only copy of the database. This virus, seemingly called Reamde, affects T'Rain players by encrypting any seemingly valuable files and extorting in-game gold in exchange for a key to decrypt those files. As a consequence of the in-game payment method, chaos has already been building in the virtual world around the region holding the ransom drop points.
Peter, Zula, and the middle man attempt to comply but take too long, and the Russian gangsters, with the assistance of their own IT support, manage to find them in Seattle. Having explained their predicament, Ivanov, the gangster, notes the middle man has compromised too much of the criminal organization's activities, murdering him in Peter's loft and taking Peter and Zula hostage. With information Zula obtains from her company, they travel to Xiamen, PRC
Xiamen
Xiamen , also known as Amoy , is a major city on the southeast coast of the People's Republic of China. It is administered as a sub-provincial city of Fujian province with an area of and population of 3.53 million...
to track down those behind Reamde and kill them. Ivanov has been quietly siphoning common funds for risky profit schemes and is trying to save face before his associates punish him for his losses.
Upon arriving in China, Peter, Zula, Csongor, who is a Hungarian hacker offering the mafia IT support, and Sokolov, a former Spetsnaz
Spetsnaz
Spetsnaz, Specnaz tr: Voyska specialnogo naznacheniya; ) is an umbrella term for any special forces in Russian, literally "force of special purpose"...
security consultant hired by Ivanov, search the city for Reamde's perpetrators, eventually locating their apartment. The Russian security team prepares to raid the gold farming team, composed of young Chinese men, only to be misdirected by Zula into a random apartment, which coincidentally happens to house Islamic terrorists preparing to bomb an international conference soon to take place in the city.
Ivanov murders Peter, and Abdallah Jones, a black Welshman who is the head of the cell and a highly wanted man by the UK's MI6
Secret Intelligence Service
The Secret Intelligence Service is responsible for supplying the British Government with foreign intelligence. Alongside the internal Security Service , the Government Communications Headquarters and the Defence Intelligence , it operates under the formal direction of the Joint Intelligence...
, murders Ivanov following a highly destructive battle within the building. The gold farmers flee the building as a booby trap initiates a controlled demolition. Jones proceeds to free and subsequently kidnap Zula himself.
This crucial turning point in the plot also introduces Olivia, an MI6 agent who located and was gathering intelligence on the elusive Jones in anticipation of assassinating him. The story separates into four main threads at this juncture: Zula and Jones as they flee from the scene; Olivia and Sokolov as both attempt to extract themselves from their illegal presence in China; Csongor, Marlon, the lead author of the Reamde virus scam, and Yuxia, a local Hakka woman caught up by chance as the Russian's guide and driver, as they attempt to rescue Zula; and Richard as he continues to deal with the fallout of Reamde.
Jones hijacks a taxi that takes him and Zula to a dock where some of Jones' network take them aboard a boat. Csongor comes close to killing Jones but fails, while Yuxia is taken captive for her part in the attempt. Jones' men sail to a poor port where he coerces Zula into helping hijack the private jet that first brought her and the Russians to China. The jet's pilots are pressed into service, flying everybody off-radar and into the snowy wilderness of Canada, where they are killed. Zula reveals her relation to Richard to keep herself alive, and Jones continues to drag her around as Canadian terrorist cells are called upon to join with him. Several civilians are murdered for their vehicles as more passably western cell members are brought in for what will ultimately be a major attack on Las Vegas
Las Vegas, Nevada
Las Vegas is the most populous city in the U.S. state of Nevada and is also the county seat of Clark County, Nevada. Las Vegas is an internationally renowned major resort city for gambling, shopping, and fine dining. The city bills itself as The Entertainment Capital of the World, and is famous...
, once a border crossing can be affected. They aim for Richard's resort and use Zula as leverage to gain his assistance in crossing into the US.
Csongor and Marlon buy a boat and try to chase after Jones and rescue Yuxia. They make their move on the terrorist trawler after Jones and Zula have left but manage to save Yuxia and kill all of the terrorists on board. They then have to learn how to sail, running out of gasoline, until they find themselves in the Philippines
Philippines
The Philippines , officially known as the Republic of the Philippines , is a country in Southeast Asia in the western Pacific Ocean. To its north across the Luzon Strait lies Taiwan. West across the South China Sea sits Vietnam...
, making their way to a modern city where Marlon can begin to assemble his T'Rain crew to start picking up all of the Reamde extortion money and use it to assist the three of them as they try to figure out where to go next.
Sokolov, hoping to kill Jones and save Zula, tracks down Olivia after their brief encounter in the immediate aftermath of the apartment battle, chancing across her spy equipment and wallet, and offers her assistance in getting out of China. Through Zula, Jones knows where to find Sokolov, but Sokolov kills those sent to kill him and, as they've found Olivia's address, goes back to find her and kill her attackers as well. He lets Jones know he's still alive and warns him not to harm Zula. He and Olivia swim to Taiwanese territory, where they become intimate before she locates a nearby handler. The handler's promises to get them both out in exchange for intelligence on Jones fail to materialize as a hit squad attempts to kill Sokolov as he departs. He escapes, though Olivia thinks he's been killed. Olivia is tasked with further Jones-related work, heading first to the Philippines to meet the last main character to be introduced, Seamus Costello, a CIA operative responsible for Jones-related work solely in the Philippines. They find it unlikely he is there, and Olivia heads for the US as a secondary hypothesis on where Jones has gone. Olivia meets Richard to dissuade him from going to China to look for his niece as she now knows everybody is long gone.
Seamus remains in the Philippines, so when the T'Rain administrators pick up on Marlon's login to the game, he finds the trio in an internet cafe and helps bring the three of them, without homes and newly rich, to the US to gain new identities.
Richard is also dealing with the virus and trying to integrate a player-originated schism deviating from hard-coded good and evil character assignments to color-based alignments, the brightly colored graphical character palettes against more neutral earth-toned colors, corresponding roughly to stark versus nuanced points of view. A major force behind the realignment originates in the writings of the two principal authors of T'Rain's narrative, one a Cambridge don who writes highly regarded fantasy, the other a pulp author who churns out volumes of poorly regarded fantasy. To provide more balance to the so-called War of Realignment, a new narrative is derived to incorporate Reamde and make sure some of the extorted money ends up in the hands of the numerically weaker earth-toned side.
For various reasons, all of the characters begin to converge on the resort and its US-side counterpart where Richard's youngest brother Jake lives with a community of Christian isolationists and second amendment
Second Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the United States Bill of Rights that protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights.In 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court issued two Second...
fanatics. The terrorists find a location near the resort to camp and inform Richard, who is directing Reamde triage alone at the resort, of their hostage, forcing him to lead them into the US while a small team detonates a suicide bomb near the border as a distraction. Seamus brings the three new Americans to Idaho
Idaho
Idaho is a state in the Rocky Mountain area of the United States. The state's largest city and capital is Boise. Residents are called "Idahoans". Idaho was admitted to the Union on July 3, 1890, as the 43rd state....
on a hunch shared with Olivia, who has chanced upon Sokolov in the US and also brought him to Idaho.
After being used as bait, Zula manages to escape from a skeleton crew that was readying to kill her, gathering supplies from the resort before heading out to rescue her uncle. US terrorist cells also converge on the Idaho property, and protagonists and terrorists end up battling one another in a terrific gunfight around Jake's home, demolishing it. In the end, Richard kills Jones.
Richard's oldest brother John is killed during the firefight while others receive various levels of injury. Zula and Csongor, Olivia and Sokolov, and Seamus and Yuxia end up in relationships as the story closes at the next Forthrast family reunion.
Characters
- Richard "Dodge" Forthrast, a former marijuana smuggler who launched and still oversees a successful gaming company and runs a cat skiing lodge near the border crossing of his old smuggling route.
- Zula Forthrast, an Eritrean adoptee educated in geology and programming who works for her uncle Richard's gaming company and was dating Peter before becoming a highly resourceful kidnapping victim twice over.
- Csongor Takács, a freelance Hungarian security consultant and sysadmin working for Ivanov.
- Abdallah Jones, a Welsh-born Moslem-convert terrorist affiliated with jihadists in Pakistan and elsewhere.
- Marlon, a Chinese hacker and leader of the group that creates the Reamde virus.
- Qian Yuxia, a Hakka guide and part time tea saleswoman during the off season.
- Olivia Halifax-Lin, a British citizen of Chinese descent and an MI6 operative tasked with finding Abdallah Jones in China.
- Sokolov, a former Russian military and Spetsnaz man who now acts as a security consultant operating out of Toronto, hired by Ivanov to find the Chinese virus writers. Highly trained in military arts, he ends up defending Zula and romantically involved with Olivia.
- Ivanov, a Russian mobster who may have started to go insane after several ministrokes and continuing high blood pressure, entering into several risky endeavors with Wallace, culminating in his desire to go out in a blaze trying to recover the funds in China, where he is shot by Abdallah Jones.
- Seamus Costello, a CIA operative based in the Philippines who is obsessed with neutralizing Abdallah Jones. Also an avid T'Rain player.
- John Forthrast, the eldest Forthrast brother who lost both legs in Vietnam and took parental responsibility for Zula after his sister Patricia died.
- Jacob Forthrast, the youngest Forthrast brother, a Christian isolationist who lives with his immediate family and like-minded neighbors in Idaho near Prohibition Crick, a former safe house on Richard's old drug smuggling route.
- Patricia Forthrast, Zula's original adoptive mother, killed by a lightning strike in Iowa while taking down laundry while Zula was still a young child.
- Peter Curtis, a computer security consultant and boyfriend of Zula until he involves her in his identity theft and sales, leading to their kidnapping and his later murder by Ivanov in Xiamen.
- Donald "D-squared" Cameron, a Cambridge don and author of highly regarded fantasy fiction contracted to provide a broad, consistent narrative of T'Rain.
- Devin "Skeletor" Skraelin, an absurdly prolific pulp fantasy author under long-term contract to fill in narrative details of T'Rain.
- Wallace, a Canadian-based Scottish money manager and criminal working for Ivanov and a T'Rain player whose computer and backup system are infected with Reamde. It is implied that he is murdered early on for his failure.
Reception
Writing in the Irish ExaminerIrish Examiner
The Irish Examiner, formerly The Cork Examiner and then The Examiner, is an Irish national daily newspaper which primarily circulates in the Munster region surrounding its base in Cork, though it is available throughout the country...
, Val Nolan called Reamde "one of the smartest, fastest-moving, and most consistently enjoyable novels of the year". It is, Nolan went on, a "painstakingly-researched, deftly-plotted roller-coaster of gigabytes and gunplay, a pitch-perfect pastiche of Robert Ludlum or Tom Clancy-style techno-thrillers and a comment on contemporary digitality and the ubiquity of online interconnectivity." Rowan Kaiser for the A.V. Club gives Reamde an A− rating saying: "The marriage of the thrilling and the nerdy is what makes Reamde work, and it offers a glimpse at a fascinating writer making a welcome transition back into a more accessible style." Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Kirkus Reviews is an American book review magazine founded in 1933 by Virginia Kirkus . Kirkus serves the book and literary trade sector, including libraries, publishers, literary and film agents, film and TV producers and booksellers. Kirkus Reviews is published on the first and 15th of each month...
sums up Reamde as: "An intriguing yarn—most geeky, and full of satisfying mayhem." Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...
writes in his Boing Boing
Boing Boing
Boing Boing is a publishing entity, first established as a magazine, later becoming a group blog.-History:...
review: "Stephenson's several exquisitely choreographed shoot-outs (including an epic, 100+ page climactic mini-war) are filled with technical gubbins about guns that convey the real and genuine enthusiasm of a hardcore gun-nut, with so much verve, so much moment, that I found myself itching to find a firing range and try some of this stuff out for myself."
External links
- Has Neal Stephenson become too accessible? Review in SalonSalon.comSalon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
by Andrew Leonard, 18 September 2011.