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Go Play Your VG

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Reamde
by Neal Stephenson
1056 pp

I had a creative writing professor who once gave our class a fascinating assignment. Her idea was that we had to compose a story that would contain everything in it: every aspect of the world, no matter how niggling or inconsequential, would have to be factored in somehow. Neal Stephenson takes this joke to its ultimate extreme in his stunningly brilliant, massively entertaining 1056 page novel Reamde.

Reamde was probably not the best title for Stephenson's novel. In Robert Louis Stevenson's era Reamde might have been called Fight to the Finish! or alternately, Fighttothefinish.org because of the hundred page action sequence that concludes the work. Regardless of what you call it, the novel is of the tech adventure variety, and not in the sense you're probably thinking. There's a point where Stephenson's protagonist, multimillionaire Richard Forthrast, who is kind of a parody of Steve Jobs/ glowing tribute to the best Silicon Valley has to offer, realizes that his virtual self in the MMORPG of T'Rain is essentially doing the exactly same thing his physical self is doing, at the exact same moment - entirely by accident.

We realize that it is no accident. Many of the appalling coincidences (terrorists living one floor below hackers!) on which the international abduction story of Reamde hinges are not actually coincidences. We might be forced to puzzle out some of the thornier moments ourselves if we were not so used to having Stephenson explain them at length. In order to introduce a minor jihadist who dies by shotgun shell to the head mere pages later, Stephenson unfurls a 1000 word description of his life experience before this moment. He has taken the absurd writing cliche of "show don't tell" and flipped it so far upside down it becomes exciting again.

At times Stephenson's discursiveness borders on what it must have been like to shepherd Rain Man to and fro. This is no more evident than in the lengthy sequences where characters in Reamde play the online roleplaying game T'Rain. (It's heartening to know the graphics are evidently superior to anything World of Warcraft has ever produced.)

The innovation perpetrated by Forthrast's version of the familiar world is that he has utilized real life geological science in order to maintain the verisimilitude of reality. In other words, when you dig beneath the wintry mountains and open fields of the T'Rain simulation, you actually encounter ore and various mineral deposits in varieties like you might see on Earth. The backstory of the world implies that a rogue asteroid composed of alien matter struck Earth and such deposits lurk within our home planet, whereas the moon is a part of Earth that broke off in the collision. It's a masterful moment when Neal breaks off to think of how weird it is, for part of them to be in us, and part of us to be out there. It's also breezed by like a traffic light.

Richard Forthrast's niece Zula Forthrast is actually the protagonist of Reamde. She is the adoptive scion to a troubled Iowa family. Zula is abducted by the Russian mafia because of her hipster boyfriend Peter selling credit card numbers, and then subsequently by an Islamic jihadist named Abdullah Jones in a manner so haphazard that it's clear the switch is something of a joke about how we believe all terrorism is indistinguishable, when it is not. The Islamist who abducts her is an educated British man commanding a group of warriors he can barely comprehend.

Zula finds out 90 percent of what she knows about the villain and her predicament from Wikipedia, and the accuracy of the information tends to vary. Stephenson gets many of his jollies mocking the database's inadequacies; he does not subscribe to the maxim, "Beware of making the best the enemy of the good." In his view (and many others) a technology that is just short of being perfect is worthless; the same is true of ideology, in fact, all ideology.

Stephenson's technological and political views are easily extrapolated to the world of literature. He prominently features two writers in his novel, both of which never leave their homes and barely even serve a function in the plot other than to allow Stephenson humor at their expense. There is Devin "Skeletor" Skaerlin, the kind of mass-market fantasy writer that Stephenson both abhors and harbors a grudging admiration for because of the man's prolific abilities.

The second is Stephenson's Oxford-educated parody of Tolkien named Don Donald, or D-squared. Stephenson incorporates D-squared - an expert in many languages who revises the world of T'Rain, mostly by removing the apostrophes that Skaerlin added to the world's backstory. There are many jokes about how seriously such people take themselves, which is also possibly Neal's tongue-in-cheek way of apologizing for his more pedantic moments.

It is not simply the writing style of these men that Richard Forthrast does not understand. He is a businessman, an entrepreneur, and it entails a completely different sort of creativity. He cannot conceive of what even makes them tick, allows them to spend time in their own respective fantasy worlds, the ones he is paying them to create. He does play T'Rain at length, but only because he must to run his business, and then again when he has to use the virtual world to track down lost Zula. There's a moment where he returns to the game and finds his character simply sleeping and eating as he waits for him, and nurses a pang of guilt. He has stumbled on a great truth - that everything that thinks for itself is alive, as well as a great many things that cannot think for themselves. He is ashamed to be their god.

The fact that Stephenson understands this feeling explains what he does to his own characters. Almost all receive happy endings to their abduction stories, a great many find both love and happiness as a result of their alienating behavior. Connecting with people, even when you are known or worshipped by many, is still a problem for Stephenson, and he does want us all to get along. This sentimentality and weakness in his writing is potentially the only thing that saves Reamde from the cold esoteric fact-telling that it stumbles into at times.

Part of the great fun of Reamde comes because no other human being could have written it. Whenever I see a work of art that pretends technology doesn't exist, I inwardly groan. For Stephenson, the relationship between man and machine is the fundamental one, and there are not many writers willing to write fictional narratives that can't happen unless every character has both a constant connection to the net and a healthy disgust of actual people. Sure, William Gass might have conceived of some of the ideas, but he would not be sufficiently tech-savvy to elucidate them the way Stephenson can. It can even be said of most of the man's books that they are so astoundingly original that nothing like them will ever be produced again.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about the BBC's Sherlock.

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