Reamde by Neal Stephenson

In my head, this book is very much lumped together with the recent Greg Bear book, Vitals, that I read. Both are by authors that I have previously enjoyed. (Well, my reading relationship with Stephenson started out a little rocky, but it's gotten better of late.) They are both authors whose previous works have thrown off ideas like candy, been provocative and engaging. And they both turned in books in this round of reading that are mere technothrillers. Well-written technothrillers, but I want more.

I know they can write books of ideas and so I am disappointed. There's an additional caveat to this one, though. Both are well written. Reamde is always easy to read and interesting. However. And it's a big however.

Greg Bear pulls off his technothriller in about 300 pages. Reamde takes over 1000 pages to do much the same thing. With very few ideas to enrich this, it's more or less 900 pages of a chase around the world. That's probably about 600 pages too many, and that's being generous.

This is frustrating, because Stephenson is an entertaining writer. It wasn't that there was ever a section that was itself bad. It was just the collective weight, as I slogged on and on, that started to wear me down. I started to wonder why all this detail was even in here, and that's another issue.

Oh my god, there is a lot of detail in this book. Well-written detail. It's not turgid, it's not just lists of things in the environment. He's not making rookie mistakes. They're pretty much mastercraft mistakes. That doesn't make them excusable.

In some of the combat/hiking scenes, or actually, in any combat scene, I was suddenly very sure that Stephenson had been out there, acting out each piece of movement, to make he got it exactly right and could duplicate it, blow by blow, muscle movement by muscle movement, on the page. In combat scenes, the level of detail jumps to a point where I start to glaze over. Perfectly outlining every heartbeat of a battle is not good writing. It becomes realism at the cost of story.

I would have much preferred fewer but well-chosen and placed details to make those scenes really crackle.  The frustrating thing is that they're not terrible. It's interesting, the first few times. But then you look up, and realize you're only 300 pages into the book, the other 600 pages are still to come, and you start to feel fatigued. Do we need this level of detail for every moment? Is extreme realism really that interesting? (Hint: Often, no, it isn't.)

I realize I haven't even said what this book is about. That's because it's a daunting task. It's about this game designer, who designed the greatest MMORPG ever built, and built into it real-world economics that encourage gold-farming. His niece gets involved when her boyfriend makes a stupid deal with the Russian mafia, and gives them a USB stick infected with ransomware aimed at players of the MMORPG. The Russians wing the niece and her boyfriend, along with another hacker, off to China, where the Russian leader is intent on murdering all the hackers responsible for the virus. Did I mention there is a British secret agent watching the same building in China? Maybe it's too soon.

At any rate. In the process of trying to track down the hackers, the Russians stumble on a black Welsh jihadist making bombs. (I am seriously about to give up on this synopsis.)

Oh, for goodness sake. Okay. The upshot is, a lot of people get involved, well above a dozen, and through meticulous detail they all converge on a little piece of land in northern Idaho (I think it's Idaho. My geography is wretched, and I was tuning out on the details) where the jihadists are trying to cross the border into the United States. Near the cabins of some seriously serious gun nuts.

It's a crazy plot. The problem is that it's mostly fun, but the fun gets undercut by how hard it is to get there. Too much detail. This crazy book probably still needed to be long, but could have been 600 pages instead of 1000. Stephenson is too good a writer to be boring. Instead, he wears his readers down by attrition, until you roll over and surrender, and when you finish the book, you're not exhilarated. You're exhausted.

Vitals by Greg Bear

In this one, Greg Bear has kind of abandoned the ideas for the thrill of the chase. It's much more technothriller than science fiction, although I suppose the science is enough out there it could sort of qualify. But it's the speed at which everything happens, the plot racing by too fast for there to be real consideration of the ideas, that I find a pity. I know he can do better, and I'd much prefer a novel of ideas.

But that's bemoaning the fact that the book isn't the book I thought it would be, and that's a little unfair. Although, I would say, not unjustified, given that I've read so many Bear books over the years, and this seems a marked deviation. It's one of my first delves into his recent canon, and if this is the way it's going, I'm a bit disappointed.

On the other hand, if you're just looking for a good technothriller, this is not at all bad.

And it's not that there aren't ideas, they're just considered at such a breakneck pace, that it's like a doppler effect - fading out as it rushes by, so you only catch every other word.

This is about the search for eternal life, which two twin scientists become fixated it on as possible through blocking bacteria and mitochondria from winding out bodies down. But they discover (as one is killed), that they may have been beaten to that particular secret by decades, by a scientist in Stalinist Russia, who is still around and may be controlling the world.

Because longevity also gives you mind control? That seems to be the theory, but there is no time to dwell on it because people are trying to kill our protagonists! At any rate, the secrets rulers of the world have both longevity and mind control, and yet Hal, the remaining twin scientist, remains alive for a startlingly long time, possibly because he's been messing around with his own bacteria.

He races through the landscape, accompanied by his brother's beautiful wife, who is only too happy to sleep with him. He encounters an anti-Semitic historian, who, despite his Holocaust-denial, may know something about the mind controllers. He finds another historians. They find a film director whose lover was brainwashed at length by the bad guys. They are strafed! They go to New York! They find a secret lair with weirdness inside!

I'm not going to go into any more plot. But this book was, while fine, and entertaining as I read it, as thin as onionskin. It's plot as an excuse for incident, breakneck speed for the sake of tension, and not much underneath. I preferred the Darwin books he wrote, even if they were maybe drifting a bit this way by the end. At least there was time to sit, catch your breath, and talk about what the hell was going on.

I did find myself impatient that the main character didn't know who "Koba" was - who doesn't know that?!  Then I remember that I only know that because I played a roleplaying game set in Cold War Berlin, and it came up there and maybe I was being a bit unreasonable. And then I felt pleased with myself, for no particular reason.