Or how rich, impatient westerners who can't be bothered to build up their game characters' experience points from scratch buy pre-empowered avatars from Chinese teenagers camped out in vast wangbas (internet bars) filled with computers rented by the hour.
In any given chapter, you might learn how Richard designed the massively multiplayer T'Rain from the ground up as a money-laundering system in which real cash can be converted to virtual gold and back again. Like Stephenson's most critically acclaimed novel, Cryptonomicon, Reamde combines meticulous observation of the stranger socioeconomic effects wrought by technology with rousing fusillades of adventure. It's in T'rain that all the trouble starts, with a virus called Reamde. That's not all while the preceding description just about covers the real-world action in Reamde, portions of the book take place in an imaginary but immensely complex world called T'Rain, the creation of Richard Forthrast, wilderness guide turned pot smuggler turned online video game billionaire.
From there, the book's formidably energetic narrative fans out across the globe, encompassing Seattle's hi-tech enclave, a Missouri trailer park, Trinity College, Cambridge, a Chinese boomtown, Taiwan, the Philippines and parts of the South China Sea, before contracting back to the flinty territory where it began – only this time with even more guns.Īlong its trajectory, the novel acquires Russian gangsters, a Hungarian hacker, a Chinese video gamer, a British spy and, for its antagonist, a Welsh national of Caribbean descent leading a team of jihadis intent on committing acts of spectacular terrorism in the US. N eal Stephenson's new novel begins with a family reunion in the Idaho panhandle, near the Canadian border, during which the "reserved, even hardbitten" men of the extended Forthrast clan engage in shooting practice with an impressive assortment of firearms.
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