Reamde by Neal Stephenson

So Stephenson's latest. It's another beast of a book but one with more personal ambitions I think. Gone are the world changing themes of almost every other of his 'alternate' world books such as Quicksilver and Anathem and instead a focus on a group of disparate individuals thrown together by accident.
There's been a lot of comment on the fact that 'gold' features in the plot and it's about 'gold farming'. I'd say these comments are both lazy and inaccurate conclusions of what Stephenson is getting at. It's kind of like saying Crime and Punishment is about a flat where a mother and daughter live. Both factually correct but entirely missing the point of the story, the messages and the splendour of the tale.

I'd propose that in the same vein to Stephenson's other works he is actually interested in the grand themes of the day - it's just that for the first time his story is entirely contemporary - and hence the themes he's looking at are entirely up to date. I'd deflect the comment that gold farming is old news. It is. Which is exactly how Stephenson portrays it in the book - something everyone knows about and has gotten to grips with. I think it's more instructive of the reviewer's general ignorance of the impact of these activities on the wider world that leads them to focus on it rather than the real issues the story grapples with.

What are the issues? Well I don't want to spill the beans for risk of spoiling the story but I'm comfortable saying that he's looking at diaspora in the modern era - not simply movement of people but of value, power, ideas and their progenitors as well as the concept of reality being what we (as in the different peoples around us) make it.

As always he loves finding difference and then bringing out the similarities. He loves drawing a broad canvas and then showing us that the first glimpse was misleading and filled with our own prejudices not his images. Yet the story is about a small number of people whose lives interact and unfortunately (for me) crosses the border into the highly unlikely. I think the implausibility of some of what happens is harder to swallow because the novel is so current in its themes - it's easier to glide over contrivances when the landscape is more distant from the one we see when we look out the window.

Is it sci fi? Yes - in the grandest most triumphant sense. It grapples with the big issues and articulates problems, developments and ideas you won't find discussed outside of academia in an accessible and frequently invisible way. It's sci fi Margaret Atwood would love to write (except she'd call it speculative fiction). It's something to be proud of and it deserves your time.

So we come to the end with the acknowledgement that Reamde is about big issues but it's told with a focus on the people in a way his other books have never done. An interesting development for an author who thrives on making complex arguments compelling tales.