Pigeonholing Neal Stephenson might take as long as one of his recent novels. Starting with 1999’s Cryptonomicon, his most recent seven novels have averaged about 900 pages each. And we’re not talking large type versions.
His debut effort, the sophomoric The Big U (1984), satirized American higher education. He imagined a large private university, completely self-contained within a Pentagon-like single building. Next, in Zodiac, he turned his attention to polluters and the the activists who hound them. He first caught my attention with Snow Crash, his third novel. While on the surface a work of speculative future fiction, he used the careening plot as a framework for his wildly divergent interests and fertile (almost fecund) imagination. Two scenes still bubble up in my consciousness with some regularity. In one, a group of what we would now call hipsters start showing up at local coffee houses and other bastions of liberal educated folk, carrying rifles and other long guns quite openly under knee length overcoats, primarily as an ironic commentary on the value of the first amendment. The other, a riff on the first, dealt with a James Dean-like outlaw, who rode around on a motorcycle equipped with a personal sized nuclear bomb, primarily so no one would even think about messing with him.
“Snow Crash” referred to a catastrophic computer glitch which traveled by the then (1992) very little known Internet. Stephenson, along with William Gibson, was alarmingly prescient in his descriptions of virtual reality, online commerce, threats to privacy, and the ascent of the NRA.
His next effort, Diamond Age, presaged the rise of Chinese mega cities and their economic dominion over the world, the development of 3-D printing, and the proliferation of nanotechnology.
These two books got him labeled “science fiction”, when his real forte is simply story telling. Cyptonomicon was a venture back to our time. He blends WW II efforts to hide from the Germans knowledge that the Allies had cracked the Enigma code, with present day development of a data haven, safe from government scrutiny. A sunken Nazi submarine in the Celebes Sea of the Philippines links the two. Stephenson effortlessly leaps back and forth across the oceans with the same ease as he sifts from 1942 to 1999.
His next three novels constitute The Baroque Cycle, which covers events in Europe and the Levant in the 17th century. By this time, he has perfected his cinematic style. By this, I mean that he writes with the intent to completely replace the sensations you might get from a feature length action adventure movie. Imagine what it would take to replicate in prose just one scene from, say, The Princess Bride. Oh, maybe the one where Mandy Patinkin keeps repeatedly slicing and dicing while saying, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.” Every move up and down the steps, every thrust and parry, the look and feel and swoosh of the outfits the combatants wore, the tearing of the tapestries, the swinging from the chandeliers, and on and on for, oh, say 80 or 90 pages.
There is one scene in which a protagonist devises and then executes an escape from a London prison, involving sliding along a wire shot from a tower. This action, covering about 2 hours, takes Stephenson about 250 pages to cover. And the entire episode is enthralling, literally can’t put it down stuff.
Which brings us to Reamde. Stephenson is at the top of his game here, displaying all of his narrative skill, his polymath interests, his global perspectives, his deep-dish thinking, and his desire to make a novel every bit as enveloping as any Speilberg hero-drama, like Jaws or Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Here’s what he weaves together in this unforgettable tale: three strong female leads; a collection of Russian bad guys, chivalrous and cold-blooded; Xiamen, a teeming Chinese city of 2,000,000, near Taiwan; a fully realised online multi-player game called T’Rain, with its own internal economy and endlessly unrolling backstory; a deadly African-Welsh Islamic terrorist and his entourage; multiple Pacific Northwest locales (Stephenson has called Seattle home for the past three decades), including Idaho survivalists, a B.C. cat skiing lodge, the gentrifying Seattle Georgetown area, and multiple routes among them, China, and the Philippines.
The story kicks off with Richard Forthrast, a former draft dodger who fled to Canada, where he took up drug smuggling and later built that ski lodge. Along the way, he somehow parlayed his street smarts into T’Rain. Over in Xiamen, a gang of Chinese players, bored with simply grinding out in-game gold and selling it (for real dollars) to more time-pressed western players, have branched out into using the in-game communication function to distribute a virus which holds a user’s computer and data hostage until he pays up $73 in game. This somehow runs afoul of the Russian mobsters, who set off in a private jet for revenge. Forthrast’s niece, Zula (an Eritrean escaped to Iowa by way of Sudan), is held hostage in these events. Over in Xiamen, a Chinese tea seller, Yuxia gets swept up in the affair, which hinges on a hundred plus page set scene covering about 40 minutes in “real” time. The Russian mobsters, the Chinese hackers, the terrorist, and a British MI6 agent, sort of a female James Bond all converge on a brief, but intense series of killings, explosions, and car chases. From there, they separate, globe trot, and try to simply stay alive, only to all converge once again in the final set-piece, a battle on the border, somewhere between Forthrast’s lodge, and his brother’s place in that Idaho Panhandle survivalist compound.
1,045 pages never went so fast for me. Here are some of the things I learned along the way: what it’s like to travel inside a private jet; how to calculate Great Circle aviation routes; the internal economics of online multi-player gaming; the various ways to implement a “safety” in handguns of rifles; how to rig a suicide bomber vest; the difficuty of blending in when Western in the orient; what it’s really like in Wal-Mart; and how to highjack a Chinese junk using only a rowboat and a stun grenade.
Stephenson may well be the “thinking man’s Stephen King”. The same logorrhea, the same commitment to story, the same willingness to consider extra-natural sources of plot development. I can’t wait for his next book, Seveneves, billed at 880 pages and due May 19th. To fill the time, I can tackle Anathem, which weighs in at 935. Then I would be a Neil Stephenson completist.