Neal Stephenson (Image via Wikipedia)
Neal Stephenson is known for writing big books about big ideas. In Cryptonomicon, he tackled code breaking and data privacy; the three-volume Baroque Cycle explored the birth of modern economic systems.
So when the first chapters of his new novel, REAMDE, introduced a geeky protagonist (tech entrepreneur Richard Forthrast), a virtual world (T'Rain, his online role playing game), and an emerging tech trend (working online games for profit, not pleasure), I thought I had the plot all figured out.
"Ah," I said. "This one's about gold farming."
Then things started blowing up.
In REAMDE, Neal Stephenson puts aside big ideas and philosophical discourses in favor of action, adventure, and lots of shooting. It's a thriller, fast-paced and exciting, and it's as much fun to read as anything he's written.
Of course, it's still a Stephenson book, and characteristically epic. When Chinese hackers write a virus targeting T'Rain —it's called "REAMDE," a misspelling of "README"— it affects a huge cast of characters, including Russian Mafia thugs, a British secret agent, an Eritrean orphan, American survivalists, and one extremely dangerous Welsh jihadist.
REAMDE is also characteristically lengthy; at over 1,000 pages, it's Stephenson's longest book yet. But the plot moves so quickly and smoothly that I read it in a fraction of the time it took to complete his last novel, the slightly shorter (but much heavier) Anathem.
I recently spoke to Neal Stephenson about the inspiration for REAMDE, what he thinks about online games, and his plans for a next novel. The following excerpts from that conversation are edited for length and clarity.
Neal Stephenson: The idea had been kicking around in my head for a number of years, inspired by stories about teenage hackers in places like the Philippines inventing viruses. For most of us, they're just annoyances. But I got to thinking about what would happen if such a virus caused serious problems for a powerful person who decided they wanted to get even. So that was the idea that got it started, and then the various plot elements fell into place over the course of a few years as it was rattling around in the back of my mind.
A lot of your books have a big idea --you're exploring cryptography, or nanotechnology, or quantum mechanics. But REAMDE seems to skip that, and focus on adventure.
I think that's absolutely correct and it was a somewhat conscious decision. I would say I went about as far as one could go in the direction of writing the big idea novel with Anathem. I'm very pleased with how Anathem came out, I'm glad I wrote it, but I don't necessarily want every book I write to be that way from now on. So when I was thinking about what to do next, I thought a nice little change in pace would be to delve into just plot, an aspect of the writer's art that I happen to enjoy, and wanted to have some fun with.
When friends ask me about the book, I've been describing it as like a spy thriller.
Yeah. I can remember when I was a kid, I used to read the classic thrillers by people like Alistair MacLean, which I found highly enjoyable. In addition to just being good thriller adventure stories, they frequently had interesting characters in them, which made them more interesting on a literary level.
Why start the conflict in an online role playing game? Do you play games like World of Warcraft?
I hesitate to say I'm much of a gamer, because every time I go online and try to go up against the average ten year old boy, I get my butt kicked so hard that it becomes clear I can't lay any claim to that title. But I certainly do my share of game playing, and I've been aware of the gold farming phenomenon for a number of years. I always thought it was kind of an interesting feature of that universe, and in this case it happened to dovetail quite naturally with the plot.
T'Rain takes the idea of gold farming even further --everyone who plays contributes to a complex economy, and can easily convert their labor into real money. Do you think online role playing games are headed in that direction, that they'll be designed for commerce?
Well, it's undoubtedly happening right now on an informal level all over the place. A huge amount of money is changing hands, and the thing that prevents it from coming out into the open and working the way it's depicted in the novel is a number of legal and regulatory hang ups. These are things that I was able to just sort of dispense with as a novelist, and pretend that they didn't exist --the people who actually run companies like this obviously don't have that ability. So I think the question of could this really happen is strictly a matter of is it going to be legalized.
People who play online role playing games are often painted in a negative light, like they're alone in a dark basement for years at a time. But the characters in your novel are very healthy gamers. Was that a conscious decision, to say it is not some freaky thing?
I'm just trying to reflect the reality of what I see in the world of gaming. Sure there are the pathological cases, people who have an out of control addiction. But these games are also quite widespread among people who do not fit that stereotype at all. It's something that they do as a form of entertainment. Instead of going to a movie or reading a book they'll just sit down for a couple of hours and do a quest in Warcraft.
In Snow Crash, you wrote about the Metaverse, a virtual reality city where people meet and socialize. Do you think that could be born out of something like World of Warcraft? That when we do meet and talk in cyberspace, it will be within the context of a game?
That was the thing I totally missed in Snow Crash. When I was thinking up the Metaverse, I was trying to figure out the market mechanism that would make all of this stuff affordable. Snow Crash was written when 3D imaging graphics hardware was outrageously expensive, only for a few research labs. I figured that if it were ever going to become as cheap as TV, then there would have to be a market for 3D graphics as big as the market for TV. So the Metaverse in Snow Crash is kind of like TV.
What I didn't anticipate, what actually came along to drive down the cost of 3D graphics hardware, was games. And so the virtual reality that we all talked about and that we all imagined 20 years ago didn't happen in the way that we predicted. It happened instead in the form of video games. And so what we have now is Warcraft guilds, instead of people going to bars on the street in Snow Crash.
So games motivated the market, but what about society? Do people need the excuse of a game to step into a virtual reality?
Yeah. It's just inherently more interesting to enter into an art directed alternate world, where you can go on adventures and get into fights and engage with the world that way, than it is to enter a world where all you can do is kind of stand around and chat.
In the past you've experimented with different ways of writing your books --like writing The Baroque Cycle by hand. How did you write REAMDE?
This one I wrote on a laptop. The Baroque Cycle and Anathem I did write long hand, and then typed it in. And in this case I just happened to be moving around a lot, and it was less convenient for me to sit up my little nest with the paper and the pen and the ink and all that, and more easy to just bang it out on a laptop.
Are you still using Emacs?
I use Scrivener.
Are you thinking about your next project yet?
Yeah, a deal is already being made for more of a big hard science-fiction novel. Typically my novels seem to come out about every three or four years, so I doubt that this would be an exception to that rule.
You've done some magazine work, do you ever think about writing a nonfiction book?
I do think of it. It tends to be more work for less money, and there's tiresome requirements such as that you have to tell truth and preferably be able to prove that you're telling the truth. There is actually a project underway to publish a compilation of my shorter mostly nonfiction pieces, that's going to be coming out from Harper Collins next year.
