Neal Stephenson is something of a literary chameleon – his oeuvre includes Snow Crash, the cyberpunk classic with which he made his name, the sprawling historical trilogy of the Baroque Cycle, the massively popular geek thriller Cryptonomicon and most recently a book to put the ‘science’ back in to ‘science fiction’, the massive Anathem. The sheer size of this volume is all that Reamde has in common with its predecessor – because this is Stephenson back in contemporary techno-thriller territory – and once again he’s got an audience of geeks firmly in his sights.

It’s a brave thing to give a book a title that no-one can pronounce. In this case, ‘reamde’ is the name of a computer virus which is designed to entice people to click on it (‘reamde’ being a deliberate mis-spelling of ‘readme’), and which when activated encrypts all the user’s files and literally holds them to ransom. The interesting bit is that the computer users targeted are players of T’Rain, a next-generation MMORPG which will be deeply familiar to anyone who’s ever played World of Warcraft. Victims of the virus have to venture to a particular part of the game world in order to pay the ransom, which has all kinds of unintended consequences, both in the game and in the real world.

Lest you be worried that this is all massively unappealing to now-WoW nuts, be reassured that most of the action takes place in the real, not the virtual, world. Richard Forthrast, ex-draft dodger and dope-smuggler, was the man who invented T’Rain. His niece, Zula, becomes entangled in a dangerous adventure when a man who her computer hacker boyfriend was working for becomes a victim of the Reamde virus, with consequences which his Russian Mafia boss is less than happy about. This takes Zula, Peter and the Russians to China in search of the hacker who created the virus, at which point lots more techno-thriller elements are blended in to the mix: an Islamic terrorist (of Welsh extraction, bizarrely), ex-Russian Special Forces ‘security consultants’, a Hungarian hacker, an MI6 agent and a CIA special forces operative amongst them. It all leads inexorably back to the US-Canadian border country where Forthrast’s family still live and where Richard first made his mark smuggling drugs across the border. The Islamic terrorists want to perpetrate a massive atrocity against the US, and everyone else wants to stop them and rescue Zula.

Reamde is on many levels an enjoyable and compelling thriller, acquiring a real page-turning quality once it hits its stride. The T’Rain elements are intriguing and where Stephenson showcases most of his talent for imagination and extrapolating the near future from current trends, though they may deter non-geeks from having a go. The biggest problem with the book, which contributes to its sheer size, is this: Stephenson feels like he has been channelling the late Stieg Larsson – readers may recognise a persistent cataloguing of daily minutiae, who had what for lunch, what size screen a particular laptop has, and especially lots of information about guns. This can become somewhat tedious, and in a book of over 1,000 pages, it’s hard to suppress the feeling that perhaps a bit less of it could have produced a more focused tome. That notwithstanding, this is an enjoyable techno-thriller with a twist, though it doesn’t feel like Stephenson at his absolute brain-stimulating best.

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