While there, he runs into his Eritrean-born adoptive niece, Zula, and offers her a job helping to synthesize the game’s insanely complicated tectonic software with its insanely complicated medieval backstory. While the book weighs in at a wrist-spraining thousand-plus pages, long-time Stephenson fans may be surprised to see that he’s traded in his usual Novel of Ideas for a Ripping Good Yarn, and the transition is not entirely smooth.Īs our story begins, Richard Forthrast - the middle-aged millionaire co-founder of T’Rain, an enormously popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) - is reluctantly attending a Forthrast family reunion. Still, I dutifully pre-order each new release and clear my schedule for a week, as I just did with his latest, Reamde. In fact, I have to admit that I bogged down halfway through his last tome, Anathem, and never finished it, though I have every intention of trying again. I’m beginning to doubt that Neal Stephenson will ever produce anything matching the brilliance of his masterpiece, Cryptonomicon ( The Baroque Cycle was certainly larger in terms of volume and ambition, but not in excellence). Spoiler Alert: This review includes some minor spoilers, because there really is no way to summarize a thousand-page book without giving something away.

Neal Stephenson (William Morrow, 2011, 1056 pp.

Neal stephenson reamde review